One must evaluate emotions carefully. Following them blindly will get you or someone else hurt and in trouble, since your emotions don’t tell you the truth. Emotions only tell you what something subjectively means to you, which means they’re based upon your preconceptions, whether those preconceptions are right or wrong. For example, depressed or suicidal people may feel like their life is over or might as well be over. Yet, there can still be many reasons why it is not. A person who instantly acted on their emotion to kill themselves would be robbing themselves of their life based on a fleeting emotion. Another example is that a person can feel like an answer is correct on a test. Yet, when the test is corrected, they will notice that their answer is incorrect.
Emotions are material of a person and their ideas. They don’t have exterior presence or truth; they’re merely the coursings of your own preconceptions and supposed truths. For example, almost everyone has seen someone rage in anger while they themselves were quite calm. One wouldn’t assume that because a person feels anger they should feel anger, too. We appropriately associate the emotional troubles with that person personally, because that is where the emotions are coming from. Entire peoples and cultures have different “feels” to them. That’s because those people are separate from other peoples and cultures. Their preconceptions are different, so they have different emotions at different times. One can remember the raging of the Nazis and Hitler, particularly in regards to Jews. Yet, most people outside the Nazis and Hitler don’t share the same poison for the Jews. It’s clear emotions are localized evaluations and not universal truths.
Although emotions can be meaningful and tell us about ourselves, they aren’t set in stone and don’t necessarily tell us the truth. People routinely go to doctors, take drugs, and plan their days in order to encourage certain emotions. Changing emotions can range from trying to stop feeling sad by thinking of better things, suppressing our anger, to stopping joy because there was a recent tragedy. Emotions routinely shift and change, with little to no permanence at times. This is how, in a sense, they’re “frivolous.” They don’t represent permanent states that follow you throughout your life, and they don’t necessarily make your life better or effectively guide you. Only the use of reason gives you an effective guide for your life. Emotions are temporary and range of the moment. They only have legs when properly guided by reason, which gives them purpose and meaning.