To me, it still feels Wrong to not feel bad when bad things are happening. Especially when bad things are happening to the people you know and interact with.

I suspect that the reason why it feels Wrong is because I would assume that if someone you know was in a really bad situation, and they saw you not feeling bad about it, they would assume that you don't care about them. I was assuming that "feeling bad when bad things happen to someone" is part of the definition of what it means to care about someone. And I'm naturally reluctant to choose to not care.

oops, I just realized... if the rule is "only have emotions about situations that were within my immediate control", and you know that the other person will feel upset if they don't see you feeling bad about their situation, then that counts as something that's within your immediate control... though something about this seems like it doesn't quite fit... it feels like I'm interpreting the rule to mean something other than what was intended...

Also, I'll admit that I have almost no idea how many people believe "if you aren't sad about my bad situation then that means you don't care about me", and how many people don't believe this. I'm still not sure if I believe this, but I think I'm leaning towards "no".

but if you happen to have the "gift" of "sadness asymbolia", then you can go ahead and show sadness about other people's bad situations, and not experience the negative affect of this sadness. And of course it also has all those other benefits that Will mentioned.

"fear asymbolia" also seems like it would be extremely helpful.

Something also feels Wrong about enjoying sadness. If you happen to enjoy sadness, then you need to be really careful not to deliberately cause harmful things to happen to yourself or others, just for the sake of experiencing the sadness.

and yet somehow "nonjudgemental acceptance" doesn't feel wrong... these mindfulness techniques seem like an entirely good idea.