Business
There are two ways to show a feeling you don't have. In surface acting you fake the outward signs, the face, voice and posture, so you fool others but not yourself. In deep acting you work on the feeling itself until it is real, which makes faking easy by making it unnecessary.
A feeling works like a messenger that instantly reports the gap between what we see and what we expected to see. Because of that, every emotion reveals the secret hopes and fears we brought to the moment, the part of ourselves we put into seeing others.
Every situation carries unwritten rules about what we ought to feel, not just what we ought to show. When our real feeling doesn't match, we notice the gap and use our thoughts, our bodies and our expressions to close it.
Emotional labor falls unevenly. Women are expected to hide and manage their feelings more than men in both social and work settings, so they do a larger share of this unrecognized work, and social class shapes it too.
In private life, people trade acts of emotional effort, like summoning gladness for a friend or swallowing anger, according to rules both sides understand. We bow to each other not just from the waist but from the heart, and that shared effort is part of what holds relationships together.
When emotional effort moves into paid work, the employer decides the feeling rules and trains workers in techniques that serve its commercial goals. The worker's inner life becomes part of the product being sold, much as a factory hand's arm once became part of the machine.
Emotional labor doesn't always mean being pleasant. Some jobs require being nicer than natural to raise the customer's status and sell more, while others require being nastier than natural, holding back empathy to shrink someone's standing so they will comply, as when collecting a debt.
Roughly a third of American men and half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. Yet this work is rarely recognized as work, so its cost to the people doing it goes largely unnoticed.
Just as a factory worker can become cut off from what he makes, a worker paid for feelings can become cut off from her own smile and even from what she truly feels. The distance protects her from stress, but it is a real hazard, because feelings are how we connect to other people.
Deep acting means lying to yourself while knowing you are lying, and finding out you have fooled yourself is more unsettling than finding out you have fooled others. Over time, people who keep reshaping their own feelings can come to distrust feeling as a guide to what is true.