 Good morning, John. It's a pretty well-known phenomenon that negative events affect us more than positive ones. This kind of sucks, obviously. Why can't I, like, sit in bed and just, like, over and over again all night long? I just can't stop thinking about that time a girl said I was cute. But maybe it's helpful to, like, think about why this is. First, though, it's helpful for me to know that it's normal, that everybody does it, almost, and that there's nothing wrong with me for feeling this way, which is nice. Now, it's tempting to go back to some kind of evolutionary answer. Like, why would it be good for early humans to wait negative experiences more heavily? And, yeah, this does make some sense. Like, if I go and I attack a moose and I win, then that's, like, great. I got some moose meat. But eventually, you gotta go get more moose meat. But it only takes one time for the moose to kill you for you to be dead forever. And that extends to more than just physical threats. For a prehistoric human getting ostracized from your social group, from your tribe, like, not fitting in could be a kind of death sentence. Trying to survive without the support of a tribe would probably be a short and brutal existence. Which is maybe why we spend so much time worrying what other people think about us. I'm not saying it's bad that we care about what other people think about us. For the most part, on average, though I think that there are no consequences too, it's probably good to care what other people think about you, because it prevents you from being really bad. And so we do care a lot about those things, and while, like, bullying and ostracism is not the kind of thing that's gonna lead to you, like, starving in a field somewhere, they can lead to significant and serious negative health outcomes. So, there's probably an evolutionary reason why we should be more worried about negative things than happy about positive ones. But I feel like that's a little bit of a cheat. I think it's good to take, like, another step away from, like, the biological fundamental causes and understand, kind of, like, a little bit of the mechanism of it. I've been thinking about these things lately in terms of identity a lot. We work really hard to create our identities. It's a little bit maybe what makes us sentient, like, having a robust story of self. What have we done in our lives? How do we understand the world? What are our roles? What are we good at? And when we get information that confirms one or any of those things, that's not a threat to our identity. We don't have to shift our story of self. So that's nice, but it's not something that we have to, like, think about at all. But a new piece of information that challenges any of those things, like, that maybe you're not as good of a soccer player or piano player or human being as you thought you were, that takes work, mental work to either incorporate it into our identity or find some way to ignore or discredit. I think that our brains are built to create a story of ourselves, to create our identity. And negative feedback, I think, is more useful in that process. It hits us harder and it sticks with us longer. We've got to figure out a way to force that new data into our old identity and start telling, like, maybe a little bit more nuanced story of self, a little less simple and maybe a little less, like, shiny and pretty. A story in which maybe we aren't everything we thought we were. And it's pretty normal for a threat to that story to be, like, interpreted as a threat to ourselves. Because I think that the story that we tell ourselves, it is us. Like, and if you mess with that, it's scary and you have to deal with it. And how we respond to those threats, to those negative inputs with aggression or defense or fear or avoidance or acceptance, I think that ends up informing a huge part of who we end up being and how we end up interacting with the world. So I've been trying to think about that thing a lot. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. This is the end screen song. There's things that you can click on possibly, maybe not if you're on certain devices. Links in the description.