What’s the difference between, “It feels like…” and “I feel…”?
A lot, it turns out.
“It feels like…” is one of those phrases that bothered me for years until I finally figured out why. The following may seem like nitpicking semantics, but stay with me and I’ll demonstrate how important this is.
Never before in the history of humankind have feelings been as important as they are today. This trend began in the Renaissance when the individual rose out of collectivism, and deepened in the early 20th century with the advent of psychology.
As with most human change, we overcorrect. You can now observe the importance of individual feelings over fact, and this is why philosophers call our current phrase the “Post-truth era.” Truth itself is endangered by what I call the indulgence of “extreme subjectivism.”
All of this is packed into a phrase that begins, “It feels like…”
When feelings productively transitioned from something to repress to something to explore, our defense systems cleverly hijacked the evolution–they always do. Ideas, opinions and perspectives are debatable, but no one can tell you how you feel, or so it’s thought.
Because feelings are seen as valid and unquestionable of and to themselves, the human defense system saw an opportunity to utilize its old friend, absolute truth. It thinks, “If I just couch this opinion or judgment as a feeling, no one can challenge it and I can manipulate reality!”
That’s when the phrase, “It feels like…” was born.
“It feels like something is off here.”
“It feels like this employee isn’t working out.”
“It feels like you have a judgment about me.”
What is “it”? When the context provides no antecedent for “it,” stop everything and get curious about what’s going on. It’s not you or me, obviously. Is it the situation? The situation has no feelings.
If you mean, “It [the situation] looks to me like…” then say so. That claims a perspective rather than hiding from the responsibility for your observation and the scrutiny that might bring.
“It” obscures the subject of the sentence and deflects that scrutiny. It’s no longer your observation, or feeling, but rather you’re reporting on what the situation somehow says about itself; therefore, you can’t be held accountable for distorting reality, your trigger reaction, or any other way of you being off in any way.
In the most noble usage of this dubious phrase, people talk about an intuition, but it’s still inaccurate to say the situation is intuiting something although to the more thinned out intuitive self “it can feel that way.”
The reason this phrase is so powerfully manipulative is because the invocation of feelings lends the appearance of vulnerability without having to embody any. Women are more likely to use this phrase because their defense systems have successfully trained many men not to question their feelings, but the upset that such women exhibit when those feelings are questioned against with facts is proof of the manipulation. Thoughts and feelings both can be distorted and must be open to exploration.
The slightly improved version of “It feels like…” is the still suspicious, “I feel like…”
“I feel like…” takes ownership with a clear subject, but then muddles the opportunity to share a vulnerable emotion with the dubious “like” which functions as a transition from reporting a feeling to very often a veiled judgment. This is especially obvious and aggressive when “I feel like” is followed by “you.”
“I feel like you’re not listening.”
“I feel like this isn’t working.”
“I feel like you want me to control me.”
None of these are expressions of feelings whatsoever, but they appear to us as less arguable because they are reported as such. Clever, right?
The phrase “I feel like you…” is especially problematic because it’s a clear judgment framed as if it’s the subject’s actual inarguable experience, when the experience itself is important to share. For example:
“I’m feeling really sad because I really need you to listen to what I’m saying.”
This stays on your side of relating, whereas, “I feel like you’re not listening” is entirely on the other’s side and pushes them further away.
People who value feelings will often use these constructions in order to support a self image that matches those values without embodying emotional maturity. Every time they use it, they can tell themselves they’re expressing their feelings, when in reality, they’re not.
This is a “cake and eat it too” dynamic where our defense systems get to vent judgments or the most superficial feelings without ever having to be vulnerable or risk being called on their distortions of reality.
In other cases, you see people who don’t value feelings use this construction. Comedian and podcast host, Adam Carolla is one such person. For him, it feels like – just kidding – I observe him use his astute intuition quite often, but his values don’t accept the power of it. “It feels like…” is sometimes the best way people can allow themselves to have intuition. This is understandable in a society that doesn’t accept intuition as a valid method of perception, but it still leads to messy communication and faux vulnerability.
I use my intuition quite often and consciously use phrases like “It looks to me like,” or directly say, “My intuition tells me…” which include much more responsibility and doubtability than “It feels like…” which implies a direct experience that isn’t actually happening and an objective truth that is anything but.
“It feels like” is often a combination of a thought, intuition, and a feeling. These should be disambiguated for clear communication.
For example: “It feels like you never listen to me.” There would obviously be a feeling about that: hurt, anger, disappointment, etc. but that isn’t expressed in the statement. The word “never” is likely untrue, so this is a venting of a judgment that comes from a trigger.
So this phrase combines: “I am hurt because I don’t feel listened to,” and “I don’t get the sense you’re listening to me and this has been a common experience for me.”
One of the easy-to-miss principles of The Clear and Open Code of Conduct is, “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”
True vulnerability and sharing what you feel reaches people and makes It likely for them to listen and care about their impact on you. Judging someone for not giving you or being what you want does the opposite. I’ve known this for a long time, and I still fall into the trap so I’m not preaching here. It’s something we all usually need to work on.
The words are easy to pick on, but more important is the feeling. Vulnerability is about letting someone into your experience rather than picking on them on their side. It’s possible to say, “It feels like…” and be vulnerable, but it usually doesn’t happen because it’s our defense systems that are attracted to the deflective words.
The good news is that “It feels like…” doesn’t work. It’s a non-relational way of speaking and being that inevitably dead-ends. But how long does that take? What concerns me in our society is how we’re replacing already weak critical thinking with superficial feeling instead of doing both critical thinking and deep emotion.
Deep emotion is an important part of reality, just like critical thinking is, but in our post-truth era, both of these matter less and less. Increasingly, exclamations like Whataboutisms are mistaken for arguments and indulgent, superficial expressions of feeling are mistaken for vulnerable emotion. That’s what the dystopian world in the Mike Judge classic, Idiocracy, looked like.
Want to be part of the solution? For one, you can eliminate “It feels like…” from your vocabulary. And when you hear someone else say it, just ask them what “it” is with a sincere desire to get to know them.
This article was brought to you by “meta,” the ability to step outside something and look back at it carefully. It’s what we’re working on in “Zen and the Art of Meta” right now, which is free for all Clear and Open Members. If you’d like to mitigate the decline of civilization or at least evolve yourself while it’s happening, I invite you to join us.