An unsurprising fact is that we constantly see, remember and expect the negative. We see the negative because we need to be ready if and when a threat manifests itself. To avoid what happened in the future, we remember the negative experiences. And since so many negative events took place in certain settings, we expect something negative there, too.

It is not uncommon to feel lousy when you have been clicking on things that you have no business clicking on the internet. But you feel that way only because the result was not pleasant. There were plenty of positive accidents in the past which we clearly can’t name any now. Same act (clicking on random things that you thought would be interesting), different experiences (feeling terrible vs. “Oh, I can’t believe I found out about this now”).

It is partly because we did not know what’s expecting us, and partly because we are in the pursuit of better constantly to begin with.