There is no mistaking what’s happening in that moment when you hit the surface of the water.
All the abstractions go away when you jump in. Everything that you’ve learned about the physics of water, and all the measurements you’ve taken of the temperature of the water, and the depth to the bottom, leave your mind.
The idea of swimming is replaced by the pure experience of it, surrounding you completely.
The water is not 58 degrees. It feels cold. The water is not 15.3 feet deep. You see the surface far above you, and you realize that if you don’t reach the air soon enough, something in you will be forced to surrender. It could the end of you. The water holds you, weightless, even as it terrifies you.
You are completely immersed.
You are powerless to resist the experience, and yet, you are empowered by it.
It is this kind of power, soft, enveloping, fluid, complete, that we seek when we pursue emotional immersion research.
In an age when our identities are being constricted into precise and completely off-target data parameters, we leap enthusiastically into the stream of something else, something purely human and profoundly unmeasurable.
Our emotions will never be numbers. They can be shared, but never calculated.
So, we come together, face to face. We close our eyes, and remember. We struggle with the ambiguities of words, because the the truth of our emotions is held in that ambiguity.
An Emotional Immersion Manifesto
There is no other way to understand this experience other than to get in over our heads. Emotion is immersion. Immersion is emotion.
We cannot become fully involved in an experience without having an emotional reaction. It’s impossible to understand an emotional experience without having been immersed in it yourself.
Immersion isn’t something that can be understood just by watching it happen to someone else. To know what it’s like, we have to leap in ourselves.
Everyone here shares this — the researcher, the consumer, the client. We participate, and a strange view opens between us, as the boundaries that separate us waver. It’s something that we never expected, but something we have always known.
We will bring this experience back with us as a gift to those we serve.
As we plunge in over our heads, we realize that this isn’t better than what we do in our everyday lives. It’s not that one place is right, and the other wrong, but it is undeniably a different world beneath the waves that people watch from above. This is where we go when something different is what we need.
There is a place for hard data. It isn’t here.
Eventually, we will return to the servers, the formulas, the temples of machine learning, but not yet. When we do return, we will return transformed.
Our eyes will have seen the subtle veil that separates measurement of emotion from emotion itself, and having grasped this distinction, we will never mistake the simulation for reality again.
We are out of our depth, yet we will not turn back to the surface.
“Tell me more,” we say, and listen for a response.