CONCEPT
Feeling Rules
The socially shared norms that govern not merely the expression of emotion but the experience of emotion itself — and the mechanism through which the AI discourse enforces enthusiasm while pathologizing grief.
Feeling rules are the unwritten norms that specify which emotions are appropriate in which situations, how intensely they should be felt, how long they should last, and how they should be expressed. Hochschild identified these rules as the emotional infrastructure of social life — as consequential as the physical infrastructure of roads and hospitals, because they determine which feelings can be acknowledged and which must be suppressed, concealed, or transformed into something more acceptable. The AI transition has crystallized a distinctive set of feeling rules — enthusiasm, measured optimism, individual agency, gratitude, and forward orientation — that together foreclose the compound ambivalence most honest witnesses actually experience. The rules are enforced not through formal sanctions but through the subtler mechanisms of career advancement, collegial approval, and the quiet marginalization of those who feel the wrong things.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Feeling rules operate at a deeper level than behavioral norms. A behavioral norm prescribes what to do; a feeling rule