Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/27/why-olympic-bronze-medalists-a.html
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Hell just managing to compete at that level is a feat in itself.
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Seriously, I’d be filled with glee if I had an Olympic participation trophy gathering dust on my mantle.
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Better than a sharp stick in the eye. Mom always said…
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Yes. I’ve got a friend whose sister was in the finals of the 5k and 10k races at the London Olympics of 2012. No, she didn’t get a medal. Frankly, we didn’t care. 
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But again, there are some ways to interrupt this process. One is to periodically force oneself to try living without the amazing thing one has become accustomed to. For instance, a summer night or two without air conditioning might make the rest of the season much more enjoyable.
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Thanks to the original Mad Max, I always think of crazed motorcyclists when I hear the words, “The Bronze!”
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There’s an entire meme dedicated to this reality…
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I spent last weekend camping. It didn’t make me appreciate anything I had at home more, it made me appreciate it less.
I remember reading that millenials valued experiences over belongings. That made me think that as a generation, they knew how to enjoy life more. Then I realized that it was all because they just want to Instagram everything they’re doing. That’s not the good life.
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Or is the glitch that some psychologists can’t fucking help themselves from wildly overgeneralizing from tiny, might-as-well-be-zero-sample-size, hyper-specific conditions into a unifying theory marketable book tagline. Fuck this malarky. this is what gives social sciences a bad name.
This “appreciate what you have” is the same line that conservatives love to pseudo-religiously trot out to get their flock to ignore the excesses of the wealthy. By her logic, we should all be just so fucking appreciative and blissful knowing our world of relative peace, justice and comfort is coming apart at the seams and we could lose it all at any moment to the whims of child-brained nazis.
Stuff it, Santos.
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"...the bronze medalists were probably thinking about how their alternative reality was receiving no medal at all."Or it might be that they simply lacked the intellectual ability to think about how they simply weren't as good as the others. As the saying goes, "All bronze and no brains."
(ETA: Sometimes the puns work, sometimes they don’t. 
Maybe next time.)
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It’s a sample size of one, but I found getting 99% in an exam harder than getting 85%. Both got me the same grade, but the 99% left me trying to work out where I had lost that 1% at for hours afterwards. I was content with the 85% though.
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People, says Santos "dwell on relative comparisons instead of absolutes—in other words, how what we have compares with what others have, not whether what we have is plenty for us.
Ask not what the Plutocracy can do for you, but what you can do for the plutocracy.
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Definitely. There’s a big difference between “almost got it perfect” and “eh, good enough”. If the perfect score was a long way away then missing it doesn’t feel so bad because you never really had a chance. If you missed it by 1 though, that sucks. You’ll be kicking yourself that you didn’t put in that one iota more effort and make it perfect, even if you did give it everything you have.
I just spent a few days in Tampa.
I would rather be less happy overall than a few nights without sleep. Shit, without the AC on we had standing water all over the hotel room tile. (No carpet)
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I’m no scientist, but isn’t that more an issue of air movement (or lack of) rather than air temperature?
The standing water I was of the belief that the tiles were somewhat cooler than the air, and also AC works as a dehumidifier.
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