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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, July 21-27, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: polymathwannabe 21 July 2014 01:15PM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 23 July 2014 08:32:38AM 1 point [-]

I think that secret happiness is a real thing. Some people take pleasure in complaining, enjoy being passively aggressive about something, etc., but of course they would publicly deny it.

On the other hand, I agree that in some situations, unhappiness may be adaptive. Evolution does not care about our values.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 23 July 2014 02:43:58PM 1 point [-]

There are other categories of secret happiness-- enjoying low status or otherwise deprecated pleasures and schadenfreude about high status people. Either of those could have social support, but sometimes they don't.