Emotions are intrinsically good and bad

[Transcended Dimensions]

The idea that you've mattered would make you feel a positive emotion and it can only be that positive emotion which brings your life good values.  But the idea (thought) alone that you mattered would not bring your life any real good values as long as that thought did not make you feel a positive emotion.

Word salad abounds.

I think your comment is word salad.  Perhaps I need to make myself more clear then.  There are moments where thoughts cannot make you feel positive emotions such as if you struggled with depression.  Having a positive thought sometimes cannot make you feel any positive emotion.  So, that is where I was getting at here.

Jerking off gives me a "positive emotion," as it feels good.  It does not, however, add any lasting value to my life.  That's because the only long-running positive emotion is that of satisfaction, which depends on one's world view, a sense of achievement, a sense of self-respect, a sense of functionality in family, and so on.

If you want to argue that satisfaction is required in order to evaluate one's life as good, I'd agree.  If you want to argue that all pleasurable emotions represent good, and all unpleasurable emotions represent bad, then you have a poor understanding of how the human animal functions.

You say that satisfaction is a positive emotion which you are implying to be the rational value judgments themselves.  I don't think that is true.  I don't think rational value judgments themselves can be any positive or negative emotion in our lives.  This means that something other than a mindset alone is required to make our lives good and it would be the real positive emotions themselves.  Without these real emotions, then we could only have intentions, make decisions, have certain mindsets and attitudes, but there would be no real emotion there.  Most people just want things to exist and believing they exist doesn't make that happen. 

This life is an unfortunate one where we can't always have what we want.  We want to personally define our own values and we somehow believe these to be real values when they never were.  It can, sadly, only be our real and fleeting positive emotions that can make our lives something more than just a matter of empty words of good value, joy, and beauty going through our minds.  There are moments where we can't feel positive emotions and no thought of our lives being something lovely and good can make us feel positive emotions such as during our worst miserable moments.  But then there are moments where we do feel them to make our lives truly good. 

A life of empty words versus a life of real good values makes all the difference in the world since there is a big difference between words and the actual mental states.  For example, if you were blind, then believing you could see colors would not allow you to see colors.  In that same sense, believing that you can see the good values in your life without your positive emotions would be no different than a blind person believing he can see colors when he can't.  

But a blind person recovering from his blindness and being able to see would be a whole new world for him just as how recovering from our miserable moments and actually seeing the good values in our lives would also be a whole new world.  But there are many people who believe they can see the truth when they can't.  They are like blind people who believe they can see when they can't.  You might say that I am one of these people, but I don't think so.  I think it is instead humanity who can't.  This is just going to have to be an agree to disagree scenario.