Managing one's emotional state is a critical skill for anything -- making marriages work, raising kids successfully, closing an important deal, delivering a eul

Managing one's emotional state is a critical skill for anything -- making marriages work, raising kids successfully, closing an important deal, delivering a eulogy for someone you care about, and doing your job. But, like all critical skills, it will vary from person to person and everyone is at a different point along the path to mastering it -- some of us with inherent personality/biochemical/social/physical differences or challenging circumstances that make it harder to modulate emotional reactions. If a person is good enough at lots of other areas, they can often compensate for a lack of skill in modulating emotional state. Not always and not in every circumstances, but yes, in lots of ways they can, just as those who are really good at managing emotional state, but who perhaps lack another skill, like technical competence, might be able to compensate for that particular lack of skill too. In this sense, I am not sure what good it does to draw attention specifically to emotional state as a skill in question. I worry that doing so might create further cases where people who face challenges with mental health or well-being have that fact unfairly used against them. I can only imagine if a bureaucracy began to codify "modulating emotional state" as a "skill" and made you evaluate how your peers handle emotions in a 360 review or something. It's particularly troubling that the post decries negative emotions, and uses charged language like "wallowing in negative emotions" to depict what is presumably someone who is "not managing" their emotional state well. This screams unfair negative stigma to those who happen to struggle with, say, depression, or have marginalized disorders like, say, misophonia. We shouldn't forget that complaining about unsatisfactory circumstances is one of the best and healthiest things a human can do in order to get help they might need to have their circumstances changed. We have to be careful that this stuff is not codified into business double-speak for "shut up and stop whining about things you don't like." This whole post seems like a very dangerous road to go down to me.