[Edited to be less outraged]
Your emotions need to respond mildly to ordinary occurrences and more strongly to extraordinary occurrences; that's one way to tell how well connected to the reality of things you are.
Why? Why should I respond mildly to ordinary occurrences? If I think an action (say, murder) is reprehensible, I will (or should) respond strongly to it no matter how common it is. If something is physically painful to me, I will respond strongly to someone who attempts to do it to me, no matter how ordinary it is. I don't see why this shouldn't also be true of emotional pain or discomfort.
I'm not sure what twist of thinking would allow you to classify murder as ordinary; There's a rather marked difference between common and ordinary. Similarly, assault is not ordinary. One person socially approaching another is ordinary. Emotional discomfort is ordinary. (not sure about emotional pain. But if you get into emotional pain just from being approached, yeah, you've got a problem.)
Though as a point of descriptive curiosity, the level of our emotional responses do actually seem to normalize against what we perceive is common. We need to take measures to counteract that in cases where what is common is not ordinary.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.