Quotes from Paul Bloom

Picking a fight with the biggest guy in the room might look like a useful way to assess how tough I am, but if this is why I'm doing it, then I'm not tough at all—I'm painfully insecure. Similarly, choosing to mountain-climb in the service of mettle-testing might reflect your self-doubt, not your courage and taste for adventure.

The willful suffering we see in religion—fasting, sacrifice, even self-mutilation—might well reflect a more general feature of what we see as virtuous. It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain. This is why savvy charities sponsor walkathons and marathons, not group massages and beach parties.

wouldn't it be a positive experience for me if these things come to pass and a negative one if they don't? Well, yes: part of what it means to want something is that you are pleased when it happens. But this isn't an argument for hedonism, because it doesn't show that the pleasure is the goal itself, as opposed to a by-product.

the most common pleasures involve experiences that don't really exist, as when we read novels, go to movies, play video games, and daydream. They are pleasures of the imagination. This is how we spend most of our time—Netflix without the chill.

Pain can be good. The picture we presented earlier, of a scale from 0 to 10, is wrong. Perhaps other creatures work this way, with pain and pleasure on a single continuum. But for people, something can be both a 0 and a 10. Negative experiences and positive experiences—pain and pleasure—are not opposites; thinking of them like low temperatures and high temperatures is a mistake.

What something has evolved for and what something actually does are two separate things. Once we come to possess a capacity, we can use it for unintended purposes

Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence, and compassion, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy.

How is this possible? The answer lies in the human capacity to interpret and respond to experiences. We can be made to feel happy, sad, angry, ashamed, or amused by events in the world, but we can also be made to feel happy, sad, angry, ashamed, or amused by our responses to events in the world.

One study found that nursing students who were especially prone to empathy spent less time providing care to patients and more time seeking out help from other hospital personnel, presumably because of how aversive they found it to deal with people who were suffering.

anger is usually a response to perceived injustice, and so angry experiences are often negative ones.

There is no contradiction here. Money does make you happy; it's the trying to make money that makes you sad. The trick is to get money in the course of other, meaningful, pursuits—or, if you can manage it, to be born into wealth.)

Further, spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases.

Empathy is limited as well in that it focuses on specific individuals. Its spotlight nature renders it innumerate and myopic: It doesn't resonate properly to the effects of our actions on groups of people, and it is insensitive to statistical data and estimated costs and benefits.

Part of the answer is that Sandy Hook was a single event. The murders in Chicago are more of a steady background noise. We're constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses.

We are not built to be happy. Evolution doesn't want us to be in constant bliss any more than it wants us to be pain-free. Pain is information about what's wrong and an inducement to make things better. Sadness and loneliness and shame play similar roles.

But for us mortals, empathy really is a spotlight. It's a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.

This perverse moral mathematics is part of the reason why governments and individuals care more about a little girl stuck in a well than about events that will affect millions or billions. It is why outrage at the suffering of a few individuals can lead to actions, such as going to war, that have terrible consequences for many more.

A creature that could savor positive experiences indefinitely might stop striving, and hence be at a disadvantage relative to those who are less prone to stand pat. Some degree of unsettledness, anxiety, and ambition may be baked into the human condition. And much of this is connected to status—where you stand relative to others. I'm happy with my car, but then my neighbor gets a nicer one and my happiness goes away.

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn't just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

If you absorb the suffering of others, then you're less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain.

Cleaning the bathroom for thirty minutes is unpleasant, but wouldn't it be worse to spend a half hour cleaning a Sisyphean bathroom, one that stayed dirty no matter how much you scrubbed it?

Helgeson and Fritz speculate that the gender difference here explains women's greater propensity to anxiety and depression, a conclusion that meshes with the proposal by Barbara Oakley, who, drawing on work on "pathological altruism," notes, "It's surprising how many diseases and syndromes commonly seen in women seem to be related to women's generally stronger empathy for and focus on others." The

Perhaps more important, religion provides our species' longest and deepest struggle to make sense of suffering, including suffering that is unchosen.

Consider the effects of money. When it comes to experienced happiness, more money makes you happier. This makes sense. Money can buy you positive experiences and can make your life better in all sorts of ways. More to the point, being poor makes everything worse—as the authors put it, "Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone.