I almost never find time to watch movies, except on airplanes. As life comes to a pause on flights, I finally have an excuse to sit back and watch something. On a recent flight, I was happy to find Inside Out 2 on the entertainment system. As in the first part, the movie is about personified emotions that influence the behavior of the main character, and about the challenges that arise when trying to suppress them. The personification shows very nicely that a thought is at the start of every emotion. For example, anger does not arise directly out of a situation, but only after the mind has realized what is going on and judged in a split second that anger is the right response. In a second round of self-awareness, the mind may decide whether it wants to feel anger, but the anger itself already reveals a lot of the beliefs of the mind and is thus valuable side information about oneself. The emotion is just the messenger and one should not kill the messenger.

San Francisco downtown as the plane takes off to a pause full of emotions