Top Five Overrated Emotions

My top five overrated emotions, not in order. What are yours? Leave a comment.

5. Hope. Sometimes useful and good, but often sets up unrealistic expectations and ends up making people feel bad. Promoted by some forms of popular culture as being always healthy and always virtuous.

4. Resentment. If something bad happened, or if someone did something bad to you, does the situation get better by figuratively banging your head against the wall for months or years? Frequently glorified by popular culture as being the satisfying and cool response to other people's bad actions. 

3. Disillusionment. This could be called, 'false realism'. It's an inevitable overreaction to an inaccurate view of the world; the flip side of the same duality. Better not to have the false view in the first place, and better not to be obsessed with labeling things 'good' and 'bad'. Celebrated in novels and short stories.

2. Honor-pride. I don't know how to name this. It's the kind of pride that's been celebrated in American culture whereby people engage in extreme overreactions to the smallest slight. It's similar to being thin-skinned, but its practitioners think of it as a kind of vigilante enforcement of dignity, a kind of hostile individualism. It pops up in multiple cultural contexts and isn't confined to one class or group. 

1. Anger. The clouder of good judgment. The destroyer of one's self and others. The cause of one bad event after another. A temporary mental illness. Enough said. Sometimes celebrated by popular culture as a healthy form of self-expression.