In life sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but it’s hard for humans to lose, we are sore losers. And by not accepting to lose something, we can end up losing much more, we can even lose everything.
Like someone who goes to the cinema and since they have already paid for the ticket, they stay to see the whole movie, no matter how bad it is. The entrance is already paid for, that money is already lost and it doesn’t matter exactly whether you leave or stay from an economic point of view. There is no reason to put up with the crap movie until the end.
It may seem like an exaggeration, but there are many experiments that show this intense human fear of loss. Comparatively we know that on an emotional level it affects us much more to lose something than to win it. If you want to convince someone that they have to make an expense, don’t talk to them about what they can earn, but about what they would lose by not doing so.
We know that the joy of what we have won goes away long before the frustration of losing something. Probably because, if we look at our evolutionary history, conserving the few “resources” we have had to survive has been very important, and we feel that giving up our possessions puts us in danger.
Precisely to resolve this limitation, to compensate for this intense tendency to be startled by relevant losses, evolution has selected a mechanism, a strategy, called “mourning”, which allows us to distance ourselves from the things we have lost, from the things we have lost. we go wrong And continue on our way by reorganizing our plans based on what reality dictates, or even changing and looking for new projects and new links.
Mourning is an intense process, which has a part of pain, but which also supposes a liberation, leaving behind something that cannot be fixed and to which we had chained ourselves. The elaboration of mourning allows us to “close chapters” of our lives and start new ones.
And dueling is a good invention of evolution because being a fighter is fine, but sometimes it is a lousy strategy, contrary to what we are indoctrinated from a certain self-help of “you can do everything”, “everything can be achieved” that precisely exploit this human weakness to recognize our limitations and accept losses. This attitude of denial of reality is for psychoanalysis the most destructive of defense mechanisms.
Another important factor that affects the fear of loss is that it is also related to self-esteem. Giving up something is not only losing that “resource” but also means recognizing that we have failed, that things have gone wrong, that we are limited. Many times it is difficult for us to accept this reality because our depressive, neurotic part is very alarmed by this recognition of limitations. What if we were worth very little, or nothing? Better not accept that we have lost. And to continue fighting, stressed, as if nothing had happened. And to continue failing, but yes, with your head held high.
All of this is not only relevant in our daily lives, but also this difficulty in accepting and processing losses, grief, is one of the main causes of mental disorders.