George Loewenstein, an economist and psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, opens with Green Eggs and Ham and a naming problem: the book is not really about a dish. Sam-I-Am is the voice that asks why you are refusing something you have not tried, and the narrator is the voice that has decided in advance that the answer is no. Loewenstein’s claim, drawn from his book The Opposite of Happiness, is that a great deal of human suffering is manufactured by that second voice — and that the habit of steering around pain, promoted from an occasional sensible caution to an organising principle of a life, reliably produces more of it.
His argument is not that misery should be sought. It is that misery-avoidance rests on a false model of how happiness works: as though the good were a residue left once the bad has been subtracted. The evidence he assembles suggests the two are entangled, and that the strategies which spare us pain in the moment quietly shrink the range of experience we have to work with.
The cost of avoiding a boring conversation
Consider the small, low-stakes version. Declining to talk to the stranger beside you on a plane avoids one obvious downside — being trapped in a conversation you cannot politely leave. Nicholas Epley’s research on commuters found the opposite of what people predict: those instructed to talk to strangers reported a better journey than those told to keep to themselves. Do it every time, and you never learn what you missed, because the information that would correct the belief never arrives.
The stakes rise in close relationships, where the misery being avoided is rejection. People high in rejection sensitivity read ambiguous signals — an unanswered text — as the beginning of the end, and pre-emptively withdraw or turn hostile to protect themselves. Behaviour designed to ward off rejection ends up provoking it, which confirms the belief and tightens the loop.
Too little risk, for one reason
Loewenstein’s own research turns the question outward. He surveyed a large sample of adults and asked whether they took too many risks, too few, or about the right amount, across work, health, and relationships. Half said they had the balance about right. Of the remainder, the overwhelming majority said they took too few risks — and the reason they gave, again and again, was a wish to avoid miserable feelings like fear and regret. The people most worried about erring on the side of caution were, by their own account, already there.
Part of the mechanism is counterfactual thinking. We can imagine things going better or worse, but we dwell far more on the better: the offer not taken, the connection not pursued. This asymmetry is exactly what a life organised around avoidance maximises, because every avoided risk becomes another road not taken, and the psychology literature is consistent that regrets of omission outlast regrets of commission. The things we did and regretted eventually get absorbed into a story. The things we did not do stay available to the imagination.
Numbing takes the whole range with it
A second category of avoidance happens entirely inside the head — distraction, numbing, busyness — and here the cost is structural. You cannot anaesthetise sadness without anaesthetising everything near it. Emotional life does not come with a dial that lowers grief while leaving joy where it was; suppress one and the whole register tends to flatten. What looks like equanimity, Loewenstein writes, is often just absence: a person free of acute suffering and also missing the intensity, curiosity, and aliveness that make the good parts feel like anything. His literary illustration is Stefan Zweig’s Fantastic Night, whose protagonist lives in that numbness for years until a reckless act cracks it open, and what returns is not relief but a flood.
The research on what to do instead points the same direction. Work on physical pain has found that attending to a sensation can reduce its intensity more effectively than distracting from it, and there are parallel, if more mixed, findings for emotion: affect labelling — simply putting a feeling into words — dampens neural reactivity to distress, and people instructed to accept a negative emotion rather than suppress it recover faster, physiologically as well as emotionally.
None of this argues for courting misery or treating pain as a good in itself. The claim is narrower and more defensible than that: avoidance works as an occasional, well-judged response and fails as a governing principle. Loewenstein ends with his father, a German Jew who spent part of the Second World War in a French prisoner-of-war camp, hungry enough to dig for worms and chew shoe leather, who told his son that the ordeal — the companionship and the challenge of it — was the peak experience of his life. “Unhappiness avoided is not happiness gained,” Loewenstein writes, “but more often just misery in disguise.”