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They taste sweet in the moment but dissolve almost instantly with little to no lasting value.
We all like to win. It’s a great feeling. A feeling we all need to experience from time to time in our lives in order to feel we have some degree of control and success in our lives. Victories do not need to be massive and epic affairs to generate genuine rewards but small victories and easy victories are not the same thing. Real results and the rush of winning are not the same thing.
None of us enjoys the sensation of losing, we don’t set out to fail. We would all much rather come out of every contest the winner and champion. Winning validates our choice of target, our method of approach, our personal capabilities, and it endorses us as being superior in some way when compared with others. We would all love to feel that way all of the time.
It also comes with the rush of escaping a risk, the risk we assumed by entering into whatever the contest was. As a species we do not like risk. It means pushing forward knowing the outcome is not certain and that there may be dangers we will not be able to avoid or overcome. Running in contradiction to our instinctive aversion to danger we also happen to be quite susceptible to the temptation of seductive rewards. If the reward appears tantalizing enough the temptation can override our survival…