My interpretation of what Inside Out says about sadness is different from how people usually describe it:
Throughout the movie, characters constantly inadvertently signal to Riley that they don’t care about her. Her dad is preoccupied with his startup and sends her to bed without supper on a flimsy pretext. Her mom is preoccupied with the moving process and has to be reminded to kiss Riley good night. Her teacher calls on her in a way that ends with Riley being humiliated in front of the entire class. Her old friends have replaced her, and no one at her new school invites her to eat lunch with them.
Riley starts to worry that no one cares about her. To use an evolutionary just-so story, having everyone in your tribe see you as unimportant and disposable is probably pretty bad for your inclusive genetic fitness, especially if you are a child. If that was the case you’d want to do something about it, maybe something as drastic as running away to join another tribe. But before taking such a drastic action you’d want to test to see if your worries were well-founded.
At the end of the movie, Riley performs a dramatic display of sadness in front of her parents, and they respond with compassion and change their behavior to be more attentive to Riley’s needs. Riley is able to stop worrying that no one cares about her and go back to normal.
But if we imagine an alternate scenario where Riley’s parents responded to that display of sadness with anger and punished her for trying to run away, in that scenario her worries would be confirmed and she could be confident that a drastic change was needed.
So in this reading the purpose of sadness is as a performance for other people, to attempt to gain information about the state of your relationships and/or make a bid for other people to devote more of their attention or resources to you. It’s bad to never perform sadness because then you can never get that clarity. You’re stuck having a vague worry that something isn’t right, and having to choose either to act like nothing is wrong or to take a drastic action based on a worry that might not be well-founded.
As I said, I haven’t seen anyone else describe the movie this way. This interpretation also doesn’t really answer every question about sadness—people often feel sad even when there isn’t another person around to perform to. But at least to me it makes sense of the movie.
Yep, thanks for pointing this out; it often comes up in the class itself if people ask something like “What happens if people don’t care if you start crying?” but it’s hard to comprehensively address all these sorts of points without making each section two or three times longer.
My interpretation of what Inside Out says about sadness is different from how people usually describe it:
Throughout the movie, characters constantly inadvertently signal to Riley that they don’t care about her. Her dad is preoccupied with his startup and sends her to bed without supper on a flimsy pretext. Her mom is preoccupied with the moving process and has to be reminded to kiss Riley good night. Her teacher calls on her in a way that ends with Riley being humiliated in front of the entire class. Her old friends have replaced her, and no one at her new school invites her to eat lunch with them.
Riley starts to worry that no one cares about her. To use an evolutionary just-so story, having everyone in your tribe see you as unimportant and disposable is probably pretty bad for your inclusive genetic fitness, especially if you are a child. If that was the case you’d want to do something about it, maybe something as drastic as running away to join another tribe. But before taking such a drastic action you’d want to test to see if your worries were well-founded.
At the end of the movie, Riley performs a dramatic display of sadness in front of her parents, and they respond with compassion and change their behavior to be more attentive to Riley’s needs. Riley is able to stop worrying that no one cares about her and go back to normal.
But if we imagine an alternate scenario where Riley’s parents responded to that display of sadness with anger and punished her for trying to run away, in that scenario her worries would be confirmed and she could be confident that a drastic change was needed.
So in this reading the purpose of sadness is as a performance for other people, to attempt to gain information about the state of your relationships and/or make a bid for other people to devote more of their attention or resources to you. It’s bad to never perform sadness because then you can never get that clarity. You’re stuck having a vague worry that something isn’t right, and having to choose either to act like nothing is wrong or to take a drastic action based on a worry that might not be well-founded.
As I said, I haven’t seen anyone else describe the movie this way. This interpretation also doesn’t really answer every question about sadness—people often feel sad even when there isn’t another person around to perform to. But at least to me it makes sense of the movie.
Yep, thanks for pointing this out; it often comes up in the class itself if people ask something like “What happens if people don’t care if you start crying?” but it’s hard to comprehensively address all these sorts of points without making each section two or three times longer.