A woman, tired from standing all day at her job, is stepping onto a train somewhere in Europe in the evening, bustling by her are other people who are heading home from work. Someone bumps into her shoulder rushing by and knocks a bag she’s carrying out of her hand causing things to fall everywhere. The person doesn’t say sorry or even knowledge what just happened, and instead darts to the other side of the train to take the last open spot she was heading towards.

“Hey!” she says towards the man, but he ignores her as he walks on and sits down. He doesn’t even as much as glance back. She looks around hoping for looks of sympathy, but everyone has their eyes glued to the phone and nobody bothers to help her pick up the things that had fallen out of her bag. For a moment she considers going to confront the man as she puts the things back in her bag, but as she does so she thinks “What’s the point? People are just disappointing, he wouldn’t even care that he treated a fellow human in this way.” The train starts moving, it’s cold mechanical functions through the metal and steel around her. She reaches up to the handrail and looks out the window at the people walking by and she is left feeling empty inside, and feeling like she lives in an empty world.

Then to her surprise, for a brief moment, she sees a child walking carrying a big stuffed animal of a pink flamingo outside the window. Instantly her mood changes at seeing this, because the flamingo reminds her of one that she had as a little girl which looked identical, and seeing it brought her back to an earlier time in her life when she felt happy and the world was innocent. In fleeting passing of the train she noticed a bright smile across the child’s face, and suddenly the world felt like there was good in it again.

In the story above I illustrate how things that happen to us can influence the way we feel about the world, and how good and bad events can change our outlook. Whenever the woman was mistreated by the other passenger, she started to see the world as empty and meaningless, but the image of a stuffed flamingo reminded her of a different world feeling that gave her hope. The concept of a “world feeling” is something distinct from the general sensation of life that a person may experience at any given moment or a mood. Rather, it is a feeling about the nature of the world and our place in it, and our place in it as informed by our beliefs about the main principles that are at the core of life and existence.

Depending on your beliefs you feel very differently about the world thus connect to people with similar outlooks more easily. Beliefs influence moment my moment perceptions about everything around us. It informs out interpretations, emotions, and subconscious reactions to what happens to us. Beliefs create what can be called a worldview, which is a model we use to evaluate and interpret life and the world.

Take for example the world feeling a tribal people would have a few thousand years ago. In their world, they have no concept of science as we do today, no thoughts of how the stock market is doing, bank account balances, or anything we know of in the modern world. Instead, their world feelings are informed by a completely different set of assumptions about the world. When they saw the mighty thunderhead of an approaching storm, it is rain being sent by the gods, and it is viewed as a spiritual event manifested in physical existence, something we modernist can scarcely comprehend. To them, rain coming isn’t just something sent from the a god metaphorically, but it is a direct presence of something this god placed in their reality. While everyone today is aware of the popular tribal belief of the gods sending rain, I don’t think many of us truly comprehend the significance of how it felt to the people back then or in tribes that still hold these beliefs today.

Inversely, since the dawn of the scientific revolution and development of post-modern thought, there has emerged a very different world feeling that is nihilistic or sees no intrinsic meaning in the world. The popular conception of the scientific worldview is that which postulates the notion that God doesn’t exist, and that everything can be explained away using the scientific method and reduced to matter and laws of the universe. I won’t get into my thoughts on the viability of this worldview in this post, but suffice it to say that compared to the tribal person the world feeling is very different. To the scientific reductionist, the rain storm is not the manifestation of a god, it is simply vapor traveling through the air creating condensation. The cloud, no matter how beautiful it may be, is of no different value than a person. And said another way, a person is no more valuable than a cloud.

I think that your average person in the modern world doesn’t have much of an understanding of worldviews that go too far beyond this. In general, most people don’t ever think about the subject all that deeply. But there are a plethora of different worldviews and world feelings that exist and are very influential. One of these would be the concept of romanticism.

Romanticism was and is a metaphysical movement that was primarily a reaction to scientific materialism. I call it a metaphysical movement as an attempt to get at the heart of what it truly represents, but it also does take the form of literature, art, religion, nationalism, architecture, music and film, some of which had good and negative effects depending on the context. But for the sake of this post I will focus on high level understanding of as it relates to the world feeling.

The world feeling of romanticism is one which looks at the world around us and sees within it meaning while also being informed by the rationalism of modernity. Different from the tribesman who sees the thundercloud as a pure burst of divine manifestation, and from the reductionist that views life as meaningless matter interacting with other matter, the romantic infuses the meaning that the tribesman sees with the world as our rational mind knows it and integrates it into a holistic worldview. Within it is strong emotion, a sense of meaning and a depth to life. It creates a world feeling of life being a type of art that we are involved in through participation, full of both joy and sorrow.

With romanticism, it could be said that the fusion of rationalism and spirituality is what forms a different and unique world feeling. This I realize is an oversimplification, but hopefully it is also a helpful model for understanding how it reflects a certain sensation.

World feelings are much more wide ranging and varies than this, and so broad that they can never truly be all categorized. Also, the unique nature of our own souls influences our world feeling and colors it differently for everyone.

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Your own world feeling matters greatly, and depending on what you believe, it will completely change the experience you have on this earth. Everything you experience is informed by it, from sensation we have when seeing a thundercloud to way we feel when traveling on a train. It’s also important when it comes to evaluating broader cultural trends, because when we realize that everyone is shaped by a certain world feeling, we can better assess the motivations behind certain events and opinions we see discussed around us. It also will shape who you are and the type of person you become.

We should all ask ourselves what our world feeling is, and whether or not it conforms to the beliefs we profess. Sometimes there may be a contradiction between our world feeling and our beliefs, and anytime we find such a contradiction, it can be a gateway towards valuable introspection.