This article is the final installment of the Phenomenology of Laughter series. To wrap things up, I’ll offer several short essays on different emotions—laughter, anger, sadness—and bring the project to a close.
0. A Brief Summary
Across my work on boredom, solitude, and laughter, my core claim has been simple: Emotions do not exist as objective things. They arise as bodily responses to how we perceive a situation. Even an abstract emotion like boredom can be explained as a misalignment between world, narrative, and body. If that is true, then laughter, sadness, and anger should follow the same structure.
That idea became the starting point of this entire project. This question also matters in the age of AI. Humans can no longer compete with machines in calculation or pattern recognition. But work that depends on the body, meaning, and emotional transmission will only grow in value.
So I began asking myself:
- What actually makes something boring?
- Why do creators become lonely?
- Why do some experiences feel alive while others feel empty?
This series is, in many ways, my attempt to answer those questions.
1. Thoughts on Laughter — Why Do We Laugh Less as We Age?
Why do we laugh so much less as we get older? There was a time in our youth when we would burst into laughter just from brushing sleeves with a friend. Today, that kind of pure, effortless laughter feels incredibly rare. The standard explanations usually point to the weight of maturity—arguing that as we age, we censor ourselves more, or that our growing responsibilities leave less room for joy. While these points aren’t necessarily wrong, they don’t quite capture the full picture.
If we look at how laughter actually works, it happens when a familiar narrative suddenly twists, revealing a vivid new layer of meaning while our everyday world remains stable enough to absorb the shock.
The problem with adults is that we have simply seen too much. Most situations we encounter are already pre-labeled as ordinary, leaving very few moments that feel genuinely new. This is precisely why adults turn to drinking, smoking, or obsessing over romance; without these strong external stimulants, it becomes incredibly difficult to shift our perception from the inside out.
Consider what happens when someone slips and falls. Children will immediately burst into laughter. Adults, on the other hand, instantly start calculating hospital bills, shattered phone screens, and insurance claims. It is the exact same event, but viewed through different perceptual frames.
This same rigid pattern shows up in how we cook. People rarely explore flavors through their own raw senses anymore; instead, they immediately search Google or GPT for the best, most optimized recipe. While this is efficient, it removes the joy of discovery, personal memory, and subjective meaning.
As adults, we grow far too used to treating everything around us as a mere tool to reach a goal. When our world is reduced to this kind of functional logic, our space for quiet contemplation shrinks. If you only focus on the efficiency of a tool, you lose the ability to perceive the mystery and vivid presence of the object itself. Naturally, the space for surprise—and with it, laughter—completely evaporates.
This is also why a prank that once felt hilarious now just feels annoying. In highly competitive societies, even people in their twenties are laughing less. When the world feels fragile and insecure, the last thing you want is for someone to shake it up.
Interestingly, this explains why older, working-class men can still laugh so loudly over a cheap bottle of soju. It is because they have very little left to lose. When you aren’t carrying a heavy burden of things to protect, the mental force needed to shift your perception becomes incredibly small. With light shoulders, almost anything can feel fresh and new—and that newness easily translates into laughter.
Ultimately, adults lose their laughter because their minds are too crowded. There is no empty space left for surprise. Everything we touch feels heavy, loaded with obligation, and stripped of novelty. The harder we struggle for stability and survival, the more difficult it becomes to step back, view reality through a different lens, and capture those fleeting moments of new meaning.
(1) Field Observation: Running a Pub
While running my pub, I noticed something consistent. Adults laugh most at old stories. Because the past threatens no one. But when conversation shifts to: money, status, politics, current success. Laughter quickly turns into tension. The present is too heavy. Even casual boasting feels like an attack.
(2) So How Can Adults Laugh Again?
How, then, can an adult reclaim the capacity to laugh? The solution lies in engineering aentry into a closed micro-world where time and space operate on a different frequency. When an individual engages in isolated, non-utilitarian acts—such as
- level up a game character
- fix tools alone in a storage room
- taste unfamiliar food
- travel abroad
The everyday world loosens its grip. For a moment, you return to childhood perception. That is the real logic behind selling experiences or selling space. The question is simple: How effectively can you disconnect someone from their everyday world? For example, On dates, staying too long in one place lets reality creep back in. People who are good at dating instinctively change locations. They reset the world. They shift time.
You can do the same even at home: dim lighting, headphones, vinyl records, focused tasks. These small mise-en-scène elements separate you from daily space. And when the ordinary world trembles, even slightly, even adults can laugh again.
2. The Difference Between a Smile and Laughter
Scholars who study laughter often treat the smile as superior to laughter. Because A smile is an act of agency. Within this mainstream framework, a smile is romanticized as a supreme act of individual agency—a conscious, stoic decision to remain proactively resilient in the face of hardship. However, this is not always the case.
(1) When Smiling Is Not Polite
In many cultures, smiling is not automatically positive. In Korea and Japan, depending on the situation, a smile can mean:
- “You’re being disrespectful.”
- “Why are you acting so lightly?”
- “Are you looking down on me?”
In Korea, a Confucian hierarchical culture and a democratic culture emphasizing equality coexist within a 30-year generational gap. In the past, age was a badge of rank. Older people rarely smiled first, while younger people would offer a faint smile and bow their heads. It was considered polite to softly avoid direct eye contact. However, a democratic society rejects hierarchy, and its virtue lies in mutual submission. Therefore, while older people today do offer a light smile and a nod, they still don’t do it ‘first.’ They are waiting for the younger generation to take the lead.
In Eastern Europe and Russia, a neutral face signals sincerity and honest labor. There’s even a proverb:
“Laughter without reason is a sign of foolishness.” (Смех без причины — признак дурачины)
Here in Georgia, service workers rarely smile at customers. The merchant at the fishing tackle shop is wearing a serious expression ‘without a smile’ to show that he respects me. Western cultures emphasize individual expression. Eastern and Slavic cultures emphasize relational positioning and social harmony. Same face. Totally different interpretation.
(2) Laughter vs. Smile: A Structural Difference
It is noteworthy that the interpretation of a smile differs between Western cultures and Eastern/Slavic cultures. This suggests that explanations based solely on existential choice or evolutionary satisfaction are insufficient. Rather, The defining characteristic of a smile is ‘Intentionality toward the object’. According to our discussion, laughter is an unconscious, momentary physical reaction that doesn’t necessarily require a subject for interpretation; for example, children often laugh alone even when parents aren’t watching. However, a smile is not such a reflex. Deliberately lifting the corners of the mouth and baring one’s teeth is an intentional act with clear directionality. In other words, there is an intention toward an object.
In other words, a smile signifies acceptance of the object, and its interpretation depends entirely on the context. In an egalitarian and democratic society, smiling at strangers signifies mutual respect. Since no one dominates another, ‘mutual submission’ becomes a virtue. In fact, in aristocratic European societies before the rise of mass society, a smile was considered vulgar. Plato’s stern and negative stance toward smiling serves as evidence.
On the other hand, in societies with rigid hierarchies—where weakness is despised and strength is envied—smiling first is a declaration of submission. Thus, before even assessing who stands above whom in the hierarchy, smiling at a stranger is seen as a self-deprecating act, making one appear insincere or unserious. In such cultures, treating a stranger with gravity rather than a smile is a sign of respect. Of course, once the hierarchy is clearly established through repeated interaction, the subordinate may offer a faint smile to the superior, who then accepts it with an air of composure.
(3) Why Sellers Smile and Buyers Usually Don’t
A store is a space where hierarchies exist between owner and employee, and buyer and seller. Since the one providing the money holds the power, it is inherently undemocratic. Of course, there are exceptions—such as luxury brands that overwhelm buyers with authority, or popular spots where customers must awkwardly smile and submit to the ‘authority of scarcity.’ However, in general, the seller is expected to smile at the buyer.
Therefore, to make employees smile at customers, the source of authority must originate from the customer.When employees fall into ‘excessive socializing’ and start establishing their own internal hierarchies (like senior/junior or older/younger brother roles), their smiles begin to turn inward. To them, a customer becomes a threat to that internal order.
You may have experienced entering a shop that seemed cheerful a moment ago, only to have the staff’s faces harden the second you walked in. As an owner, if this happens, you must dismantle that social clique. I was always puzzled by the owner across the street who allowed office romances and physical affection, and frequently held team-building events. Human perception and emotional energy are finite. If employees satisfy their desire for social status and validation within their internal clique, they will treat customers as external noise that disturbs their peace. To make them smile outwardly, the owner must dismantle the internal matrix and ensure that their social validation originates strictly from the customer’s satisfaction.
3. The Relationship Between Tears and Laughter
Have you ever laughed so hard that you started crying? That’s common. Yet, the exact inverse occurs with equal frequency: an individual weeps in deep despair, only to suddenly, unpredictably burst into a fit of laughter.
When I was in middle school, I attended my uncle’s funeral. He had survived a traffic accident but suffered for years afterward. The room was heavy with grief. People cried for hours. That place symbolized a person’s complete severance. People were expressing that sense of loss through their bodies. At some point, exhausted, I slipped into a corner and started reading a wuxia novel. I don’t remember which scene did it. But once I laughed, I couldn’t stop. My cousins kept telling me to shut up. I tried. I failed. They dragged me outside the room—and I was still laughing.
What actually occurred in was a collision between two irreconcilable worlds. The rigid, ritualized world of mourning crashed into the absurd, heroic world of martial arts fiction. Two meaning-systems overlapped for a moment, and that collision detonated as laughter.
This experience shows something important: Tears and laughter can flip into each other because both are rooted in bodily reactions to meaning. Neuroscience explains this with hormones and nervous regulation. That’s not wrong—but it’s not enough. Phenomenologically, the structure is clearer.
(1) Meaning Gained vs. Meaning Lost
In our framework, Laughter happens when the everyday world stays intact, but is briefly reinterpreted through a new layer of meaning. Tears happen when access to the world itself collapses, when the meanings that sustained life fall away. Therefore, we can establish a definitive equation: laughter signifies the sudden expansion of meaning, whereas tears represent the severance of meaning. Both expressions, fundamentally, are involuntary bodily responses to how human navigates shifts in existential meaning.
(2) Why Confucius Saw Sorrow as Fundamental
Confucius believed that sadness is the most basic human emotion. From this angle, Confucius starts to make sense. The world changes whether we want it to or not. People leave. Objects decay. Roles dissolve. What once felt significant becomes routine—or disappears entirely. If you simply sit and observe long enough, sorrow appears naturally. We cry because sorrow reveals something basic: We are thrown into the world, and we are always slipping out of it at the same time. That tension never stops. So we try to reconnect. We try to rebuild meaning. That effort is what we usually call “living with purpose.” And that purpose becomes For Better tomorrow.
(3) Kafka, Boredom, and the Loss of World
In the Kafka boredom series, we saw this clearly. To reconnect with the world, a person must:
- possess usable skills (Amerika)
- gain trust from society (The Castle)
- understand the meaning of the procedures they perform (The Trial)
Without that, sorrow does not transform. It hardens into boredom. As we distance ourselves from the world, we lose the meaning of life and enter a state of boredom, which manifests as sadness. This is why most people trapped in ennui also suffer from depression. That was the core of the Kafka analysis. (See: Amerika, The Trial, The Castle — Practical Analysis for Content Creators)
(4) Why Laughter Explodes in Extreme Sadness
This structure also explains a strange paradox: When meaning is already collapsing, even a tiny new meaning can trigger explosive laughter.
At the funeral, the world of sorrow was already saturated. There was nowhere left for meaning to fall. So when even one foreign narrative entered— the wuxia story— it produced an extreme perceptual shock. The contrast was unbearable. And the body reacted. In conclusion, to prevent a person consumed by sadness from drifting too far from the world, the body responds to even the slightest perceptual shift—like reading a martial arts novel—with a burst of laughter. This is an attempt to pull our perception back to the mundane and elevate our emotions to a state of equilibrium.
Conversely, being ‘too funny’ is also a departure from ordinary interpretation. In such cases, emotions can become overly exhilarated, and the situation may spiral into irrationality. That is when the body uses the involuntary response of tears to return our perception to everyday reality. This is why laughter and sadness intersect depending on the context. The key is that this entire process occurs unconsciously. This proves the validity of Merleau-Ponty’s argument that the body, rather than consciousness, is the primary agent that discovers meaning.
(5) Why We Seek Tragic Stories
This also explains something else: Why do we consume tragic novels and sad songs when life is already difficult? When I finished A Farewell to Arms, I felt that quiet realization: “Despite everything, life continues.” Tragedy forces us to experience, indirectly, what it feels like when a world collapses. And that makes our ordinary life visible again. Not as boring routine, but as something fragile and precious. We suddenly realize: The meaningless hours we are killing might be the final moments of someone else’s life. That realization does not paralyze us. It gives us energy. It gives renewed attachment to existence and ordinary life.
Many literary and art critics mistakenly believe that catharsis is a tangible concept. Consequently, they treat it as a device that can be intentionally inserted into a work of literature. However, according to our theory, catharsis is not a physical reality but merely a ‘phenomenon’ of perceptual shift. The reason we experience catharsis in tragedy is that it makes us realize that our own life—which may seem tedious and meaningless—is actually a day that someone else desperately longed to live. The more skilled the writer is at immersing us in the protagonist’s journey, the more their impending tragedy at the end transforms into a profound laughter for us—not a chuckle of mockery, but a expansion of meaning that returns us to the world. It is the laughter of existential liberation, realizing that our tedious daily life is actually the miracle someone else desperately prayed for.
4. The Difference Between the Sacred and the Comic
In a previous article, we defined Japanese wabi-sabi as a Zen-Buddhist way of sensing impermanence and continuity through what is old and worn. A crucial point emerges here: both laughter and the sacred involve perceiving everyday life differently, yet the mechanism behind each is distinct.
(1) Laughter vs. the Sacred
Laughter occurs when the structure of the everyday world remains intact, but its meaning undergoes a brief twist, allowing the observer to see the same reality from a new angle. In this process, the practical framework of daily life survives; it is only the internal interpretation that shifts.
The sacred, however, manifests through an entirely different dynamic. It appears when the structure of everyday life itself collapses or is transcended. Within this experience, small objects expand in significance, darkness turns luminous, time decelerates, and space feels as if it is moving toward the observer. This is not a mere reinterpretation of reality; it is a total replacement of the world.
In other words, holiness refers to an experience where an individual transcends the mundane world to unite with the Absolute Other or the cosmic order. This differs from laughter, which serves as a tool to temporarily step away from everyday life to explore new meanings before returning to the established status quo. The core of the sacred lies in this absolute transcendence—a departure from ordinary reality to enter a new, spiritual dimension.
[Photo: Olomouc, Czech Republic, Source: Myself]
Eight years ago, I experienced this in the Cathedral of St. Wenceslas in Olomouc, Czech Republic. I had no money. No job. No direction. Snow was piled high on the streets, making a wet crunch under my shoes. The wind cut through my coat. I was hungry. Inside the cathedral, it was dark and almost empty. Only a few people were scattered in silence. I sat down. Then a thin beam of light passed through the stained glass. The entire space brightened. The face of the Virgin Mary— stretched into strange proportions, painted in deep red and blue— did not look realistic. It looked like something from a dream. In that moment, I felt as if I had stepped into another world. The contrast between darkness and light. The slow flicker of candles. The worn Latin inscriptions on stone. Everything whispered: There is a world beyond the everyday.
This was nothing like the lively weekend masses filled with familiar faces and routine rituals. Had a ceremony begun right then, I might have returned to Catholicism on the spot. Sometimes I wonder if religious fanaticism is born from intense, repeated, and prolonged versions of this very sensation.
(2) Love as World-Replacement
Emotion operates as a biological survival mechanism. When an individual cannot maintain ordinary life, the body experiences sorrow. When that individual momentarily steps outside a functional routine, the body experiences laughter. The sacred, however, is not an emotion; it is an ontological shift. It changes the structure of the world itself. Within everyday human experience, the closest equivalent to this phenomenon is love.
When people fall in love, the other person ceases to be a mere individual and becomes a gateway to another world. In this state, walking together or breathing near them alters the perceived color and temperature of reality. Different human relationships generate distinct forms of this sacredness. A parent provides solidity to the world, a lover provides fullness, and a child provides a sense of infinite possibility. Each of these dynamics transforms ordinary humans into sacred beings—not within a intellectual framework, but within human perception itself. And through this sacred experience, we are reborn as elevated beings.
So, we reach the conclusion that to preserve love in its sacred sense, one should avoid sharing everyday life as much as possible. Only when a partner is perceived as an Absolute Other can we experience the sacred by submitting to that order. This proves that the common proverb advising against sharing every secret with your partner holds true. Whether it is between parent and child or husband and wife, love becomes more precious when there is a proper sense of order, etiquette, and distance. Otherwise, the partner’s existence is rapidly absorbed into the realm of the mundane, becoming either a functional tool or losing its sanctity and becoming trite.
5. Conclusion
I would like to conclude this entire series. All emotions—such as boredom, sanctity, sadness, laughter, and joy—are perceptual acts designed to overcome the terror of meaningless phenomena and reinterpret them into something relevant to ourselves.
Why is the act of imposing meaning and order on the world through subjective perception so crucial to human beings? It is because, physically, humans are incredibly frail compared to other animals—creatures unable to self-sustain in the wild. Therefore, the body, cast into the center of the world, carries the weight of death. If one cannot accomplish anything alone, one must meaningfully utilize whatever is within reach, and this breeds an obsession with “meaning.” Humans seek to understand the universe through perception, attempting to translate contingency and misfortune into necessity and order. In other words, perception is the manifestation of the survival instinct.
Thus, the practical lesson of this ‘Phenomenology of Emotion for Creators’ series is this: Those who can masterfully shift their perception can find a profound abundance of meaning in any situation. Because the masses are deeply immersed in everyday life and always rushing toward the Mainstream, they fail to interpret phenomena from different perspectives. As a result, they often feel a hollowness, wondering, ‘Is this all there is to life?’ At this juncture, the creator is the one who provides an alternative interpretation of phenomena. They must prove to the public that the world can be viewed more enrichingly. Therefore, a creator must endure the solitude of remaining on the periphery of the world and pursue awakening through painful experiences. No matter how tedious, ridiculous, or anxious daily life may be, the creator’s mission is to provide an interpretation that suggests some deeper meaning exists.
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