Sometimes people are just dumb, and repeatedly do things that don’t seem to accomplish anything because they don’t know how to do anything better (because they don’t understand why they’re doing it in the first place). In other words, yes, there has to be a reason for them doing it, no, it shouldn’t be expected to be a good reason or to stand up to reflection.
In my personal experience, “I’m feeling cranky at innocent parties because of rough day” feels like a response to having less cognitive resources to spend on whatever is being asked of me. It’s the kind of thing where if it’s not too bad, “hey, I’m really not up to this. I had a rough day and need some space or gentle handling” would feel like an attractive alternative. However sometimes even coming up with that is difficult, so the temptation is to take the easy option of lashing out which communicates the same thing (“either give me my space or walk on egg shells, because I don’t want to deal with more shit when my plate is already full”) in a much more hostile manner. “Is it worth the costs of being hostile?” is the relevant question, but people often run into limits of just being overwhelmed and not being able to actually compute all the answers before picking a choice and running with it.
Does that help answer your question, or am I trying to explain the wrong part?
What’s the evolutionary reason for needing gentle handling after a rough day then? It’s a distinct emotion that evolved but I can’t understand what it’s for.
It feels like the same kind of reason that you need to be gentle with your body after running a marathon. I could try to be more specific about what might be going on that makes it difficult to keep it up, but the point is that it seems to be a fundamentally difficult to remain unfatigued and if you don’t slow down when fatigued you’re not going to move very well and are likely to break something.
Are you asking more “why can’t you mentally run unlimited marathons in a row without slowing down” or more “what damage do you risk doing when continuing through ‘mental fatigue’ that makes it something you have to heed?”?
Does every fact about human physiology & psychology need to be directly evolutionarily beneficial, though? I would expect that some things are harmful side effects of other beneficial things, some things are harmful but not-that-bad overall and not totally selected out, and some things are just due to constraints which can’t easily be overcome. I don’t think every frailness and vulnerability that human bodies have is evolutionarily beneficial; I don’t see why that would be true of human minds, either.
Getting intensely angry probably involves activating a lot of systems in your body to get ready for fighting—how quickly do those systems calm themselves down? How quickly was it correct for them to switch back to everything-is-peaceful mode when we were more like chimpanzees?
Put another way, it makes a lot more sense that humans stay in states too long if we find out that it’s a lot easier to make the derivative of that state react to evidence than the thing itself.
Sometimes people are just dumb, and repeatedly do things that don’t seem to accomplish anything because they don’t know how to do anything better (because they don’t understand why they’re doing it in the first place). In other words, yes, there has to be a reason for them doing it, no, it shouldn’t be expected to be a good reason or to stand up to reflection.
In my personal experience, “I’m feeling cranky at innocent parties because of rough day” feels like a response to having less cognitive resources to spend on whatever is being asked of me. It’s the kind of thing where if it’s not too bad, “hey, I’m really not up to this. I had a rough day and need some space or gentle handling” would feel like an attractive alternative. However sometimes even coming up with that is difficult, so the temptation is to take the easy option of lashing out which communicates the same thing (“either give me my space or walk on egg shells, because I don’t want to deal with more shit when my plate is already full”) in a much more hostile manner. “Is it worth the costs of being hostile?” is the relevant question, but people often run into limits of just being overwhelmed and not being able to actually compute all the answers before picking a choice and running with it.
Does that help answer your question, or am I trying to explain the wrong part?
What’s the evolutionary reason for needing gentle handling after a rough day then? It’s a distinct emotion that evolved but I can’t understand what it’s for.
It feels like the same kind of reason that you need to be gentle with your body after running a marathon. I could try to be more specific about what might be going on that makes it difficult to keep it up, but the point is that it seems to be a fundamentally difficult to remain unfatigued and if you don’t slow down when fatigued you’re not going to move very well and are likely to break something.
Are you asking more “why can’t you mentally run unlimited marathons in a row without slowing down” or more “what damage do you risk doing when continuing through ‘mental fatigue’ that makes it something you have to heed?”?
Does every fact about human physiology & psychology need to be directly evolutionarily beneficial, though? I would expect that some things are harmful side effects of other beneficial things, some things are harmful but not-that-bad overall and not totally selected out, and some things are just due to constraints which can’t easily be overcome. I don’t think every frailness and vulnerability that human bodies have is evolutionarily beneficial; I don’t see why that would be true of human minds, either.
Getting intensely angry probably involves activating a lot of systems in your body to get ready for fighting—how quickly do those systems calm themselves down? How quickly was it correct for them to switch back to everything-is-peaceful mode when we were more like chimpanzees?
Put another way, it makes a lot more sense that humans stay in states too long if we find out that it’s a lot easier to make the derivative of that state react to evidence than the thing itself.