Steven LaChance Blog

Stop for a moment.

How are you feeling right now? Not what is happening around you. Not what you have been reacting to all day. Just the feeling itself. Are you sad and not entirely sure why? Anxious? Unsettled? Tired in a way sleep does not seem to fix?

For this moment, strip away the “because.” Not because of the news. Not because of a conversation. Not because of something you read or remembered. The “because” can wait. It will matter later. Right now, sit only with the feeling as it exists, without explanation or justification.

Just notice it. Name it quietly, if you can. Let it be there without trying to solve it yet.

What if I told you that the feeling you are sitting with right now is not only yours? That it moves between us. That it spreads quietly, without words, and settles across families, communities, and entire cultures at the same time?

That is what I want to talk about here.

Collective emotion is not an idea or a belief system. It is not something you opt into. It is a shared physiological and psychological response to sustained conditions.

When large groups of people are exposed to the same pressures over time uncertainty, threat, loss, instability the nervous system adapts. Not individually, but in parallel. Bodies brace. Attention narrows. Emotional thresholds lower. This happens regardless of background, values, or personal history.

That is what separates collective emotion from personal feeling. It does not begin in your private life. It begins in the environment. It is shaped by repetition, saturation, and duration. The longer the exposure, the more normal the response feels.

Collective emotion moves through populations the way weather moves through regions. You do not experience it all at once. You feel it as a shift. A tightening. A low level restlessness that shows up in ordinary moments. Shorter patience. Heavier mornings. A sense of being on edge without a clear reason why. It does not announce itself. It does not ask permission. It simply becomes the background state.

And because it is shared, it often goes unnamed. When everyone feels it, no one questions it. The unease becomes “just how things are now.” People assume something must be wrong with them personally, even as millions are experiencing some version of the same thing at the same time.

This is what gives collective emotion its power. It bypasses conscious thought. It enters through the body first. By the time the mind asks what is wrong, the feeling is already there, waiting for an explanation.

That is where the “because” enters.

We are not very good at sitting with unnamed feelings. Sooner or later, we reach for a reason. A label. A story that explains what is happening inside us. That instinct is deeply human. It gives shape to discomfort. It makes emotion feel manageable.

But this is also where things begin to fracture.

You can place two people in the same room, under the same conditions, breathing the same emotional air, and they may be feeling something remarkably similar. The tension. The unease. The heaviness. Yet the moment they reach for a “because,” the experience splits. One decides the feeling means threat. Another decides it means injustice. Another decides it means loss. The emotion is shared. The explanation is not.

This is also where collective emotion becomes useful to forces that benefit from division.

When a shared emotional state goes unnamed, it becomes easy to redirect. The feeling is real. The unease is real. But once people begin assigning different “becauses” to the same underlying emotion, attention shifts away from the source and toward one another. The tension stops pointing outward. It turns sideways.

People begin arguing over explanations instead of recognizing the shared condition beneath them. Each person becomes convinced their story explains the feeling correctly, while others must be blind, misled, or dangerous. The original emotion remains unresolved, but it now wears a thousand competing faces.

This is how collective emotion gets weaponized without anyone feeling manipulated. No one has to invent the feeling. It already exists. All that is required is encouragement to label it quickly and differently. Once that happens, shared emotional ground disappears, replaced by conflict between people who are often responding to the same internal signal.

From the inside, this feels like clarity.
From the outside, it looks like fracture.

Over time, these stories settle in. We stop experiencing the emotion itself and start living inside the explanation attached to it. We organize ourselves around it. We carry it into conversations, into relationships, into our sense of who we are in the world. Because the feeling underneath was real, the story feels justified, even when it is incomplete.

This is not a flaw in human thinking. It is how we survive. Making meaning helps us regain stability when the world feels uncertain. But meaning made too quickly can harden. Shared unease becomes division. Vigilance becomes identity. And what began as collective emotional weather quietly reshapes personal lives.

This is where awareness matters.

Not to deny what you feel. Not to dismiss the reality of the world. But to pause long enough to ask whether the story you are carrying truly belongs to you. Whether it is helping you live more honestly, more gently, more awake. Or whether it was simply the first explanation that fit when you were trying to make sense of something you were never meant to carry alone.

And then there is choice.

Not the loud kind. Not the kind that demands action or allegiance. The quieter one that happens internally. The moment you realize that while you did not choose the emotional climate you are living under, you do have a say in what you let take root.

Choice does not mean rejecting what you feel. It means deciding how tightly you hold it. Whether you allow a borrowed narrative to define your days, or whether you acknowledge the feeling, understand its source, and choose not to build your identity around it.

You can recognize collective emotion without letting it colonize your inner life. You can stay informed without staying inflamed. You can care deeply without carrying everything as your own.

Some emotions are meant to pass through, not settle in.

Choice, in this sense, is not about control. It is about stewardship. Tending your inner space with the same care you would give to your home. Deciding what you invite in, what you sit with for a while, and what you gently set back down.

That may be the most humane response available to us right now.