!!!

Is it possible to be too excited? I mean, what would that even look like? Someone jumping up and down? Someone crying tears of joy? Someone clutching their heart and invoking their savior? Doesn’t that simply look like extreme happiness?

Of course, you don’t really see anything extreme in our society. We’re pretty polarizing in our words: we say “awesome,” “insane,” and “horrific” to describe one weekend. But not in our actions. We downplay, diminish, and downsize what we’re really doing. “Oh yeah. I went skydiving this weekend for a bachelor party. We had a great time. Met Heidi Klum on the way back home. It was cool, I guess.”

IT WAS COOL, I GUESS? NO! IF THERE WAS ANY TIME TO USE “AWESOME” IT WOULD PROBABLY BE NOW. 

What is that reaction? Why do we have such a culture of apathy? Why is it cool to be as nonchalant as possible? Is it because we think excitement is dorky? Do we think people will like us better if we don’t reveal our true emotions?

Because I don’t follow that logic. In fact, my favorite people in the world are exploding with passion and excitement. My favorite people in the world are bursting at the seams. They talk for hours about their favorite subjects; their eyes light up when you talk to them; they shiver with excitement when you ask them how their day went.

So, why would we hide that part of ourselves if it feels so good to be excited?

I think somewhere along the way we realized that if we didn’t reveal our emotions, we could prove to other people that we weren’t vulnerable. And that’s somewhat attractive to us. In a world where we are repeatedly faced with the possibility of apocalypse and destruction, it’s simply exhausting to be scared all the time. Actually, it’s tiring to be anything at all. It’s easier to become desensitized when we all have to be Chicken Little everyday. So, we drained ourselves and then we replaced all of our feelings with emojis because they were easily digestible. Then we started to type “LOL” when we’re not even laughing. So, to express an emotion that we actually feel is incredibly rare.

But my advice is to feel as much as possible, especially excitement. I can understand why people are afraid to be vulnerable and I can understand why it is easy to gloss over emotions, but I can’t understand why people would choose to live a quieter life because of it.