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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Joy is fleeting, fear is forever.

Manufacturing joy is easy, yes. Tie a counter to a semi-random process that's semi-controlled by a human and they experience joy when the counter goes up. The so called slot machine. THis is how HackerNews karma, Facebook notifications, your email inbox, and other addictive activities are designed.

You experience momentary joy.

But fear, fear is forever. How many fears have you been dragging on since childhood that never seem to go away no matter how irrational they are? Could've been from a single event like watching a scary movie about a clown, or a case of near-drowning, or ... well there's a lot of common phobias. The list can go on forever.

You always need to make a new slot machine. You rarely need to make a new fear.

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When I was growing up, there was a definite fear of Mutually Assured Destruction, which disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union.

On a more local scale, in the 80s in Australia there was a huge fear of European Wasps - you could even buy little plastic protectors for your drink cans to prevent them crawling inside.

On a personal scale, when I was young I was scared of being different, now I don't really care whether I'm different or not.

Fear is not forever. We shed fears left, right, and center. Yes, if someone is putting energy into maintaining a fear, it will sustain, but it's just not true that once we fear something, we always will.

That's a pretty weird definition for joy. I can certainly conceive of some fleeting pleasure from a feeling of winning a game or somesuch, but this is no deeper than the pleasure I get from a refreshing drink on a hot day or a fun social interaction. But this doesn't admit of transcendent emotional, spiritual, or aesthetic experiences.

I think that's a fair point, but would argue that it's likely not true for a sizable amount of the population (e.g. my childhood fears have mostly left me). But further, there are lots of services which actually sell getting past your fears, perhaps they are just not selling well enough yet to overcome the amount of fear being produced continuously? Mainly, just questioning how much it is "forever" fear vs. a constant influx of new fear.

Maybe it's not a matter of introducing new fears but of reinforcing old ones and reminding you of them.

Everyone's afraid of random unexpected death that's out of their control right? Well most of us on some level at least.

So media spends a lot of time reminding us that we could die any moment. Terrorists, natural disasters, wars, car crashes, shootings, all these things that have a low chance of happening to you in particular but that nonetheless happen every day and could happen to you.

Or take social exclusion. We all fear being cast out of society. So media keeps reminding us of all these things the cool people are doing that wr arent. Potentially things we can pay to do.

>but would argue that it's likely not true for a sizable amount of the population

I'm afraid you are incorrect. This is neuropsychology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/your-money/why-people-reme...

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