What is your Favorite Emotion?

[Edwardo Piet]

By the way -- I rate enthuisasm higher than excitement because it's like excitement that is necessarily expressed and it's very passionate. Excitement can be felt within internally in combination with anxiety and a failure to be expressed or let out passionately. Excitement can be kept inside or expressed outwardly and I much prefer the latter, and I call it enthusiasm.

It's another reason I rate cheerful happiness above mere happiness. Happiness is more fun when it shows on the outside. Sure, you can be cheerful without actually being genuinely happy. But IMO that is only seeming cheerful, not being cheerful -- because cheerfulness is both an emotion and expression.

The great thing about cheerfulness is it is both an outward expression of happiness AND it's a feeling.

I'd rate cheerfulness as one of my absolute favorites. When you're genuinely cheerful you both seem and feel cheerful. Whereas it's possible to feel happy without seeming it or seem happy without feeling it: Cheerfulness sends to be congruent and necessarily authentic.

I think cheerfulness is authentic happiness. Whether it's expressed enthusiastically and energetically or quietly and introvertedly. Anyone who is happy can be cheerful, even in a shy and quiet way.

So I think cheerfulness can be expressed quietly or loudly. Intensely or midly. Confidently or shly. I think cheerfulness is simply: Authentic happiness. So second to love, I would say cheerfulness is my favorite emotion.

In a funny way I think cheerfulness and love are very similar -- I just think often when people love they feel very cheerful but that is only half of love. Half is a lot but it's still only half. The other half I think is compassion. I think it's like the two sides of the same coin -- compassion for suffering on the one side of the coin, sympathetic joy for the happiness of others-- as opposed to envy, jealousy, or schadenfreude -- on the other side of the coin.

So add joy + authenticity and you get cheerfulness. Add cheerfulness to compassion and you get love.

Of course this almost certainly still grossly oversimplifies the supreme beautiful complexity that is the emotion of love, in it's many forms -- for a start when it comes to romantic love, there's a lot more to it -- it also implies a lot of trust, affection, attraction and other positive feelings of being genuinely and enjoyably in love -- but it's a start and it's how I feel right now as I express my love of emotion and expressing emotion, right now