> Maybe it's a bug in our programming, who knows. I think so. When things are really bad, getting even a little worse can be utterly catastrophic; making your

> Maybe it's a bug in our programming, who knows. I think so. When things are really bad, getting even a little worse can be utterly catastrophic; making your problems loom larger when you're in a mess is probably an adaptive heuristic that forces people in bad but recoverable situations to behave very conservatively and maximize survival odds; however, in the extreme (e.g., chronic loneliness), that heuristic winds up compounding the problem by inhibiting the only kind of behavior that can rescue the situation, and yet the heuristic survives because it's adaptive in less extreme circumstances. Beware the psychology of edge cases.