You are at a dinner and something is said that lands wrong. Not dramatically wrong. Just wrong. A comment that contained an assumption you did not agree with, or a joke that was funny to everyone else and cost something in you that you cannot name, or a silence at a moment when you had something to say and did not say it because the reading you did of the room in the half-second before you spoke suggested that what you had to say was not quite what the room wanted. And you did not say it. You made a different face, or you laughed, or you redirected the conversation in a direction that was easier, or you simply stayed quiet and let the moment pass. By the time you have left the dinner you have forgotten this happened. It has been absorbed into the texture of the evening, one of hundreds of small calibrations that the nervous system ran so efficiently that they left no trace in conscious memory. You think of the dinner as pleasant. You probably were pleasant. The cost was real and it registered nowhere.
Arlie Hochschild named the phenomenon in 1983, in her landmark study of flight attendants and bill collectors, The Managed Heart. Emotional labor, as Hochschild defined it, is the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. It is work in the economic sense: it requires effort, it produces something of value for someone else, and it depletes the person performing it. Hochschild found that sustained emotional labor produces three recognizable outcomes: emotional exhaustion, a growing difficulty accessing genuine feeling she described as a kind of numbness; surface acting, the performance of an emotional state with no corresponding internal reality; and estrangement, a growing sense of distance from the self that had been performing. Hochschild was describing airline workers. She was describing anyone who grew up in a room that required them to perform easiness as a condition of connection.
The cultural system that rewards this performance is extraordinarily efficient. The person who is easy to be around receives consistent, warm, unambiguous positive feedback for being easy. People seek them out. They are described as warm, thoughtful, someone who makes every room better. They are the person others want at the dinner table, on the team, in the relationship. The feedback loop is real and the warmth in it is genuine. The tragedy is not that the positive feedback is false. The tragedy is that the positive feedback is for the performance, not for the self that is performing. And the self that is performing, if it has been performing long enough, has begun to lose access to the self underneath the performance.
James Gross’s research on emotion regulation provides the physiological account. Gross distinguishes between antecedent-focused strategies, which modify the situation or the appraisal before the emotional response is generated, and response-focused strategies, which modify the experience or expression after the response has already begun. Expressive suppression, the strategy most characteristic of people who have learned to make themselves easy, is response-focused. Gross’s research finds that expressive suppression produces a striking asymmetry: it reduces the visibility of the emotional expression while leaving the physiological response largely intact. The person suppressing is not having less of the emotion. They are having the same emotion while simultaneously managing its expression, which requires the additional deployment of cognitive and physiological resources. The body is doing two things at once: feeling, and managing the feeling. Both have a cost. The combined cost is the particular exhaustion that many chronically easy people recognize but cannot explain.
What the strategy optimally prevents is the moment of genuine visibility. Not visibility in the sense of being seen by others, because the easy person is often very visible, very present, very attended to. Visibility in the sense of being seen in the actual state, which includes the states that are not easy, not accommodating, not pleasant to be around. The moment when the something that was said at the dinner actually lands in the expression. When the comment that cost something registers in the face before the face has had a chance to manage itself. These moments of unmanaged visibility are precisely what the loop is designed to prevent. And their prevention, accumulated across years and decades, produces the rarely named loneliness of the person who is surrounded by people who like them and cannot be fully known by any of them.
There is a distinction worth making between the easiness that comes from actual wellbeing and the easiness that comes from the loop. The person who is actually easy to be around because they are actually well, who has access to their own interior and has made a real choice about how to be in the social world, exists. Their easiness is available because there is nothing being managed underneath it. The person running the loop can tell the difference. The difference is in the quality of the tiredness at the end of the evening. The difference is in whether the genuine preference is available when someone asks what you want. The difference is in whether the question of who you actually are, underneath the easiness, has a ready answer or produces, briefly, a blankness. The blankness is the working model’s response to a question it was not designed to handle.