Don't Tell Me Your Feelings

(WSJ illustration)

Writer Caitlin Macy laments the current tendency to reveal emotions about "everything that comes your way": [bold added]

in the last decade a giant lovefest has taken over our day-to-day interactions so thoroughly that to abstain from appending heart emojis to everything that comes your way leaves you feeling sidelined and defensively out of tune. Remember “Mean Girls”—the movie, yes, but also the phenomenon? Nowadays the average teenage selfie post is met with reactions that run the gamut from “Luuuuuv!” to “Beauty!” to heart emojis to “Worship!”

...Now [college] applications all insist that you “tell us about your passion.” As with teenage Instagram posts, the pressure to be passionate encourages the applicant to flaunt and exaggerate, to make grandiose claims—to remain, in other words, a hyperbolic adolescent rather than taking a step toward becoming an adult capable of seeing one’s own life in a broader context.

Companies, too, as we are continually reminded, are passionate—about client service, retirement portfolios, lawn care. Never mind that what’s actually wanted is competence. And when you think about it, a corporation bragging about its passion for the service it’s providing suggests unstable—maybe even unhinged—leadership: Passion by its very nature is short-lived. It flames, and then, presumably, the fire in the loins for supply-chain optimization goes out.

Passion is over-admired as inspiration; it "flames," then goes out, and little is actually accomplished. When a person is truly passionate about something, she would be more successful channeling those feelings into a course of action, then using that passion to keep her going through the inevitable low points.

Go ahead and indiscriminately "like" or "heart" everything you see on social media if you must. Just remember that things which are given away are not highly valued.