WHERE EMOTIONS ARE CONSIDERED A MISTAKE

I’m going onto the beach others

BLURB
In this society, no one forbids people from feeling.
It's just that emotions are no longer considered necessary.
Every inner state can be measured, smoothed, and adjusted. Sadness is limited to acceptable limits. Pain is considered a superfluous reaction. Hesitation is considered the optimal mistake. Anything that doesn't serve effective decision-making is gradually eliminated—not by violence, but by absolute rationality.
People still love, still lose, still experience everyday events. But everything happens faster, more concisely, more cleanly. No one lingers too long in an emotion. No one is encouraged to hold onto pain when it no longer has any use.
In that world, the protagonist doesn't try to fight the system.
He doesn't want to change society.
Nor does he believe he can.
He only realized one small—and very dangerous—thing:
When emotions are flattened to a safe level, people no longer truly act. They just operate.
He began to hold back unnecessary reactions.
Grieving longer than recommended.
Hurting when he should have accepted it.
Not optimizing losses that should have been “processed.”
It wasn’t rebellion.
Just a quiet effort to avoid complete numbness.
Along the way, he realized he wasn’t alone. Scattered throughout this society were people like him—not forming a movement, not calling each other by name, not sharing beliefs. They recognized each other only through very subtle signs: how someone was silent longer than usual, how a pain didn’t disappear on schedule, how an emotion remained even without a rational reason to exist.
Where Emotions Are Seen as Fault is a soft, humane, and poignant sci-fi story about preserving the capacity for pain as the last remaining cognitive function of humanity. The story doesn't ask "how to change the world," but rather a smaller, deeper question:
When everything else becomes rational,
is it wrong to still have emotions?
And if pain still exists,
is that enough to prove we are still human?

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