On Jan 17, 10:40*pm, Immortalist wrote:
On Jan 17, 6:00*pm, "Jonathan" wrote:

"Roger Coppock" wrote in message

....

So, if you're in a loosing situation, like falling from high place
without a parachute, realize that it could be a good thing. *At least,
this will keep your mind busy, until you hit the ground.

You only read the subject line, right ~

"people tend to make the best of something they know is bound to
happen"

The Psychology of Inevitability

George Bernard Shaw was hard hit by his father's alcoholism, but he
tried to make light of it. He once wrote: "If you cannot get rid of
the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." In a sense,
dissonance theory describes the ways people have of making their
skeletons dance—of trying to live with unpleasant outcomes. This is
particularly true when a situation arises that is both negative and
inevitable. Here people attempt to make the best of things by
cognitively minimizing the unpleasantness of the situation. In one
experiment, Jack Brehm got children to volunteer to eat a vegetable
they had previously said they disliked a lot. After they had eaten the
vegetable, the experimenter led half of the children to believe they
could expect to eat much more of that vegetable in the future; the
remaining children were not so informed. The children who were led to
believe it was inevitable that they would be eating the vegetable in
the future succeeded in convincing themselves that the vegetable was
not so bad. In short, the cognition "I dislike that vegetable" is
dissonant with the cognition "I will be eating that vegetable in the
future." In order to reduce the dissonance, the children came to
believe the vegetable was really not as noxious as they had previously
thought. John Darley and Ellen Berscheid showed that the same
phenomenon works with people as well as vegetables. In their
experiment, college women volunteered to participate in a series of
meetings in which each student would be discussing her sexual behavior
and sexual standards with another woman whom she didn't know. Before
beginning these discussion sessions, each participant was given two
folders. Each folder contained a personality description of a young
woman who had supposedly volunteered for the same experience; the
descriptions contained a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant
characteristics. Half of the participants were led to believe they
were going to interact with the young women described in folder A, and
the remaining participants were led to believe they were going to
interact with the one described in folder B. Before actually meeting
these women, the participants were asked to evaluate each of them on
the basis of the personality descriptions they had read. Those who
felt it was inevitable that they were going to share their intimate
secrets with the young woman described in folder A found her much more
appealing than the one described in folder B, whereas those who
believed they had to interact with the young woman described in folder
B found her much more appealing. Just as with vegetables,
inevitability makes the heart grow fonder. The knowledge that one is
inevitably going to be spending time with another person enhances the
positive aspects of that person—or at least deemphasizes his or her
negative aspects. In short, people tend to make the best of something
they know is bound to happen.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

An Example from the Civil Rights decades;http://groups.google.com/group/alt.p...81e9ae3bd4cc5e

But what does all this mean philosophically? So, we lick this energy
crisis. What next? Our time remains limited, though we stretch it
out as much as possible. so, we get to survive another 100 years...or
a thousand...or ten thousand. It remains inevitable that someday,
humanity will be looking at it's last day of existence. Or is this
wrong thinking?

It seems to me we only get a "MOMENT" here...though that moment is not
defined exactly [days, years, or tens of thousands of years?]. But a
moment is still...only momentary.

Does this not change our philosophical purview of things? How does
any creature make the BEST of their moment? By spending it trying to
stretch it out? Perhaps. No one wants to die. It's just a question
I have; perhaps a rehash of the grasshopper versus the ant conundrum?
An old book title written by Robert Heinlein always stuck in my head,
"Time Enough for Love". Not sure if it is applicable, but makes me
think nonetheless.