There’s a whole emerging area of study that is like a quantum physics of the human mind. It is constantly churning out new research which shows that, when you look really, really closely at the human mind and its behaviour, there are extremely weird, irrational things going on. Loss aversion is one of my favourites of these oddities. People are (almost universally) affected more by losing something they have than by gaining an equivalent thing they don’t have. Even more strikingly, people generally resist changes that leave them in an equally good or somewhat better position, just because change is involved.

On the surface, this is bizarre, irrational behaviour, but I think there’s an explanation deeper in. Part of the crisis of being a spiritual animal—a soul and body duet—is that we need a constant source of personal value to dissociate ourselves from the decaying material part of our reality. Most of the time, the easiest way to get this is from what’s right in front of us: all the symbols and structures that we build into the physical world, like money, recognition, property, professional accomplishments, and so on. These are easy sources of personal worth because (1) they’re around us all the time and we don’t have to make much effort to notice them, and (2) they’re reinforced by acknowledgements from the people around us, who mostly agree on the value of money and glitzy cars, or even the value of a thorough painting job.

Once we have a reliable source of worth like a house or a respectable job, we can easily wrap our value tentacles around it and draw on it for personal fulfillment. If I gain something new, it doesn’t add much to the picture; I just adjust accordingly and get fulfillment from the new house or the nicer job. But if I lose something, it’s like the water supply has been temporarily cut off. Suddenly I am thrown back on my own resources for a sense of value.

Ideally, we need sources of value that are indestructible.

What keeps us in loss-averse mode is that we try to pretend the physical symbols we depend on for value aren’t temporary, so when we DO lose something, it shatters this illusion of safety. We become mildly obsessed with security and constancy, to ward off the slightest risk of being caught on the side of the proverbial mountain between two footholds.

When you face the fact that the earth-bound accumulations of our lives don’t make it past our last breaths, loss aversion suddenly makes no sense. We literally have nothing to lose in the end.