From the author: What is more important for us: worries about losing something or the joy of finding it? Imagine that you are buying meat or vegetables at the market and you are overcharged a little, for example, by 100 rubles. It's a shame? It’s rather unpleasant, because you’ve just lost some of your honestly earned money. And so you go home, not in the best mood, thinking over the words with which you will tell your loved ones this heartbreaking story. Here you are approaching your own house, an instructive story in your mind is almost ready, and then you see a hundred-ruble bill on the asphalt in front of the entrance. In theory, the joy of finding an equivalent amount should completely cover the disappointment of losing it. But then the “fuse” for telling a story about a cunning salesman may completely disappear. Or we will have to introduce into it a new mystical element of “justice from above.” Oddly enough, but often the disappointment of losing something turns out to be significantly greater than the joy of finding the same thing. In general, this is not at all surprising. After all, if we lose something material, then along with it a part of something intangible that is inside us “goes away”. The thing we are parting with has become familiar, familiar, and familiar to us. Therefore, the scales on which we either gain or lose the same thing will never be balanced. Unless what we are losing was initially not valuable or we treated it as something alien, belonging to us temporarily or undeservedly. A thing that has managed to gain a foothold in our comfort zone so much that we began to consider it ours, becomes valuable to us. I remembered the computer chair metaphor I heard from one client. The work chair he had been sitting on for several months was taken away and then given exactly the same new one. It seemed that essentially nothing had changed, it should even have gotten better (after all, the chair had been updated), but now it felt like “something wasn’t right.” That chair managed to settle down comfortably, acquire a more convenient shape, in other words, it became “mine.” Loss and the ability to feel Often, losses create internal limitations that deprive us of the opportunity to rejoice and the desire to strive for something new. Intellectually, we understand that it is, in principle, possible to return what has been lost, but we feel that this will not give the desired effect. It seems to us that the previous pleasant feelings will not return, as if we have lost the ability to feel with the same intensity as before. In fact, our emotionality has not gone away. We limit ourselves, afraid to find ourselves in a situation of loss again, and create a kind of defense. However, by avoiding negative emotions, we reduce our own sensitivity to positive ones. And we make a decision that is very limiting to normal life: to leave everything as it is and give up trying to return something or create something new. Fear of attachment The decision described above is nothing more than the result of an unconscious fear of attachment that has arisen in us. The latter, in turn, is based on the fear of again experiencing the pain and disappointment of loss. If we succumb to this fear, it can evolve into a feeling of learned helplessness, when once-contrived restrictions turn into real barriers to our ability to live and develop. And, as you know, catastrophic expectations develop much more intensively than positive or anastrophic ones (see my previous publication). And often the basis for the emergence of catastrophic expectations can be a situation of loss, even the frivolous hypothetical one described at the beginning of the article. So, it turns out that we unconsciously value more what we lose than what we find and gain. The well-known saying can be remade as follows: “What we find, we don’t keep; when we lose, we cry.” And at the end of the article, there is a parable about a wise man who was able to use to his advantage the tendency of our psyche to value more what we lose. Having retired, one a wise man settled in a quiet>>