I get that you are more signaling than actually asking, but this is the kind of thing I'd rather we spoke more straightforwardly about.
Usually people rationalize their emotions as evaluations of reality: for example, no doubt you have asked someone sometime in your life "why" they were sad or angry. Emotions' main purpose is, arguably, to summarize our judgments of reality in a way that leads to appropriate action. So "validity" of an emotion, in the sense of its correspondence to reality, is a real and important thing.
What I think you are getting at is that, regardless of the quality of the evaluation of reality they represent, emotions exist and are real experiences; and that is true. But at the same time, there are many circumstances where the right reaction to an emotion is to say "geez, it's unreasonable for me to feel this way and I should adjust". For example, if my wife and I are having an argument and I feel that I should kill myself because no one will ever love me, well, that's an emotion that exists and needs to be handled in some way, but it's a grossly inaccurate evaluation of the situation.
To return to the quote: many people are angry every day. Often the "reasons" for this anger are totally unreasonable: e.g. somebody gets aggressive when driving because they wanted to be in front of someone else, or somebody throws a hissy fit because they lost an election. Sometimes they are totally reasonable, like when your country elects a President despite or because of his statements that disregard your humanity. Drawing the distinction between those cases is valuable.
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Poorly. But sometimes when your emotion makes someone else uncomfortable, they'll try to apply the concept anyhow...
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I see -- we're applying the First Law of Israeli Mechanics: "If force didn't work, your hammer's not big enough."
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Usually people rationalize their emotions as evaluations of reality: for example, no doubt you have asked someone sometime in your life "why" they were sad or angry. Emotions' main purpose is, arguably, to summarize our judgments of reality in a way that leads to appropriate action. So "validity" of an emotion, in the sense of its correspondence to reality, is a real and important thing.
What I think you are getting at is that, regardless of the quality of the evaluation of reality they represent, emotions exist and are real experiences; and that is true. But at the same time, there are many circumstances where the right reaction to an emotion is to say "geez, it's unreasonable for me to feel this way and I should adjust". For example, if my wife and I are having an argument and I feel that I should kill myself because no one will ever love me, well, that's an emotion that exists and needs to be handled in some way, but it's a grossly inaccurate evaluation of the situation.
To return to the quote: many people are angry every day. Often the "reasons" for this anger are totally unreasonable: e.g. somebody gets aggressive when driving because they wanted to be in front of someone else, or somebody throws a hissy fit because they lost an election. Sometimes they are totally reasonable, like when your country elects a President despite or because of his statements that disregard your humanity. Drawing the distinction between those cases is valuable.