Tragedies are really interesting to me in how their effects are extremely surprising. Why would anyone enjoy feeling sad? Why would anyone enjoy hearing about others becoming powerless victims of their circumstances? Why do tragedies evoke some significant feeling, rather than just fear and negativity?

Given that some of my favorite stories tend to be tragedies, I find myself thinking about these questions a lot.

There hasn't been a nice common-sense explanation to this that I could find [1]. So I'm going to take a shot in the dark to come up with an approximated working theory on it. My confidence in it is not strong at all, so take it with a grain of salt, but I'm ok with it as a working theory.

I think most people have had some meaningful experiences that made them feel completely tranquil. This might from appreciation of nature, encounter with beauty, deep connection with others, dance, religious ceremonies, or many other sources. One common feature of these experiences is that they make you temporarily forget yourself and your concerns, and focus either beauty or connection to others. My hypothesis is that the complete forgetting of concern is one of the reasons that these experiences feel so pleasurable.

One nearly-universal feature of good tragedy is that tragic heroes gets harshly punished through little or no fault of their own. If I have to take a guess on it, tragedy is appealing precisely because the outsized nature of the punishment tells us that it is futile to worry. At the conclusion of a tragedy there's a message conveyed that “no matter how hard you try or how much you worry, you could still be brought to ruin”, and the dramatic presentation convinces us for a moment that “there's no point of being worried about anything, whatever is bound to happen will just happen”.

Usually, near the end of a tragedy, we also feel empathy for the tragic hero, and feel that we share a moment of meaningful reflection with the author of the tragedy [2]. These serve as further ways to for us to forget about ourselves for a time.

And so for a moment we simultaneously let go of all of our concerns and establish meaningful connections with others, creating a pleasurable experience that's often associated with tragedies.

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[1] Nietzsche and Hegel's explanation on Tragedy doesn't really feel common sense to me, mainly in that I think the topic can be approached in a much more layman way.

[2] In antiquity there may have also been group songs and dance. And in stage productions, there are also fellow audiences to share a moment of connection with.

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Categorized under: #psychology #speculation

For different cravings, biology seem to operate on different models.

In the replenishment model, a craving that's satisfied won't come up again unless it's been a while since it's last fulfilled. An example here would be drinking water.

In the dependence model, a craving that's satisfied will cause the next craving to come up sooner or stronger. Addictive illicit drugs are the most obvious example here.

What mechanisms determine whether a craving fall into one or the other? This is something I'm kind of curious about. When mistaking these models, it's easy to think video game causes addiction to violence, or that social media doesn't cause dependence.

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Categorized under: #psychology #speculation

My roommate recently got a kitten called Kiko, and I've been playing with him a lot recently.

When talking about Kiko with a friend over chat recently, I kind of realized something that playing with the cat made obvious.

Play and learning are really extremely similar, with the only difference being play benefits survival (historically speaking) while learning (in most cases) benefits community or social standing.

How to apply this to life? I'm actually not sure yet. But it's fun to realize that two distinct – even often-considered-opposite things, are really in fact really similar.

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Categorized under: #psychology #speculation