Question

Describe the difference in attitude and actions when people are dealing with losing something they already have vs. What they will do to try to gain something they do not have.

Answer 1

When you lose something, you generally feel angry or frustrated, and that is defined as psychological entitlement. It happens to all of us at different levels. We are convinced that we deserve better and our expectations are higher than they should be. Generally we tend to overvalue things that we lose, because no one likes to lose.

This feeling is not the same as when we fail to gain something that we do not have. Since we never owned that thing, we may feel frustrated, but our frustration or anger level is much lower. We do not feel personally aggravated because we didn't lose something that we possessed, we lost the opportunity to possess something new.