> We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds.

The trick is that there are times when getting shot at is the norm, not the exception, so "healing wounds" or however you might want to call it is not the best decision to take (not even from an utilitarian point of view).

Ok, so now that I know that I suck at metaphors and to put it more directly, all I want to say it's that maybe the last 50-80 years of relative prosperity that the West has experienced were an exception, not the norm, the same as Pax Augusta around the times of the early Roman Empire and Seneca was also an exception of sorts. So, as a guy who grew up in a post-Communist European country in the '90s, with inflation averaging 100% each year for over a decade, and who has seen his parents go from respectable middle class to subsistence agriculture in the same timeframe (and my story is not at all singular in that part of Europe), you cannot just magically hope that things will get better. In most of the cases they go from bad to worse, and in that case you really have to adapt to the new conditions (like making jokes when being shot at), because it doesn't get any better than that.

Thanks for that perspective. You're probably right, this relative prosperity is more of an exception.

I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as to make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less important.

> I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as to make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less important.

Something is always going to go relatively wrong, so being able to deal with it seems like a good idea.

I think the appropriate metaphor here is a callus, they can be handy when someone rubs you the wrong way.

I believe the main point was to isolate your emotional state from impacts, and not to "be happy about bad things."

You have to maintain your well-being in the long term by being friend to good people and, well, not being shot, but in the short-term reinforcing positive thinking might just save you from a worse situation.

I had a similar thought recently, that it is a good thing to accept my emotional reactions, but that I did not have to embrace them.

(further explanation would involve rambling about the reaction being part of who I am but the embracing making it a bigger part of who I am)

No one is saying "Be happy when bad things happen to you". Rather, let it roll off you, like water on the back of a duck.

I for one find serious injuries much easier to cope with when I crack jokes about them. If you're around me when I've hurt myself, I'm not grinning and laughing awkwardly for your benefit.

Everyone is different, but for me it's crack jokes, mock myself, and wear a stupid grin OR let the fear bubbling in my stomach take control. Maybe you feel I should "be human" and "give in", but when I'm half an hour from the nearest ER and on my own, screw that.

It's interesting, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi specifically calls out this idea of listening to your "natural emotional reactions to our circumstances" in his book Flow.