I think you vastly underestimate people's capacity for self-delusion (or, more charitably, their capacity to modulate their own emotions). Otherwise, how would you ever feel better about any negative event that you can't change? If I'm upset because someone yelled at me at work, I might go for a run or watch a movie to forget about it. O…
I think you vastly underestimate people's capacity for self-delusion (or, more charitably, their capacity to modulate their own emotions). Otherwise, how would you ever feel better about any negative event that you can't change? If I'm upset because someone yelled at me at work, I might go for a run or watch a movie to forget about it. Or, just wait for the negative feelings to fade away. Those remedies aren't rendered useless by intrusive thoughts that "this doesn't count, I'm just doing it to feel better."
The relevant feature isn't merely that a person knows that they are "doing this to feel better." It's more specifically that they know they are going out of their way to surround themselves with people who are exceptionally poor on some dimension they feel bad about themselves being poor about, which perversely risks increasing the salience of their low status.
Each of these are quite different:
- Watching a movie or other distraction: often reduces salience of what you are concerned about
- Going for a run or some other positive action: an action that may improve your status you can feel good about
- Moving to an even lower status group so that you are less relatively poor: risks making your poor status even more salient (you worried you were poor/fat/stupid and now you've confirmed by deliberately moving to surround yourself with poorer/fatter/stupider people)
I think you vastly underestimate people's capacity for self-delusion (or, more charitably, their capacity to modulate their own emotions). Otherwise, how would you ever feel better about any negative event that you can't change? If I'm upset because someone yelled at me at work, I might go for a run or watch a movie to forget about it. Or, just wait for the negative feelings to fade away. Those remedies aren't rendered useless by intrusive thoughts that "this doesn't count, I'm just doing it to feel better."
The relevant feature isn't merely that a person knows that they are "doing this to feel better." It's more specifically that they know they are going out of their way to surround themselves with people who are exceptionally poor on some dimension they feel bad about themselves being poor about, which perversely risks increasing the salience of their low status.
Each of these are quite different:
- Watching a movie or other distraction: often reduces salience of what you are concerned about
- Going for a run or some other positive action: an action that may improve your status you can feel good about
- Moving to an even lower status group so that you are less relatively poor: risks making your poor status even more salient (you worried you were poor/fat/stupid and now you've confirmed by deliberately moving to surround yourself with poorer/fatter/stupider people)