Smarter Faster: Embrace your dark side
A new perspective on negative emotions from psychologist and author Ethan Kross.
with Stephen Johnson • Thu 13 February, 2025
Hey Big Thinkers,
Using your negative emotions to your advantage has long been seen as something like black magic — a dangerous and likely immoral game. Greed, wrath, envy? Snuff out those dark forces; don’t toy with them.
So it’s no wonder our most memorable quotes about exploiting negative emotions were not uttered by paragons of morality. “Let the hate flow through you,” said Emperor Palpatine. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” declared Gordon Gekko. “Anger is a gift,” said, well, Rage Against the Machine, a band that, depending on your politics, isn’t quite like the others (so apologies, Tom Morello).
Ethan Kross might see a kernel of truth in these statements. A psychologist and director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, Kross makes the case in his new book, Shift, that even our “darkest” emotions can be positively productive. The trick is not to avoid them but to manage them wisely. Big Think’s Kevin Dickinson recently spoke to Kross about how to do just that.
Read on,
Stephen
THE BIG SHIFT
Embrace your dark side: A new perspective on negative emotions
A life without pain would be full of suffering. Take it from people with the rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain: Because they lack an internal alarm system, they fail to recognize when they’re in serious physical danger — letting cuts go untreated, not sensing infections, walking around with broken bones. A lack of negative emotions would be similarly dangerous. As Kross explains, negative emotions might be unpleasant, but they deliver us useful information about our inner and outer world.
Fast Stats
9.5 billion — The approximate prediction of the global population by 2050, after which it’s expected to fall below current levels by 2100.
3 — The key ways “anti-micromanagement” can backfire.
90,000 — The approximate number of dams in the U.S., some of which could be retrofitted to generate hydropower.
25% — The rough share of Earth’s landmass that was used for human purposes in 1900, while only 23% was still “wild” as of 2018.
THE BIG REACH
At what distance could a “twin Earth” detect our signals?
If intelligent alien civilizations exist, would they be able to detect our presence on Earth? While we can’t know for sure, scientists can devise clever experiments to determine the theoretical distances from which aliens would be able to “see” us. Big Think 13.8 columnist Adam Frank recently participated in research that accomplished just that: The team considered all of the “technosignatures” that humans transmit into the cosmos and asked, “At what distance could a civilization with our present-day technologies detect each of these types of signals?”
MINI PHILOSOPHY
The hidden mathematics behind why you find things beautiful
By Jonny Thomson
Even accounting for tastes and our modern tendency to “live and let live,” the Pythagorean cult was an odd bunch. They were not allowed to eat beans; beans were seen as terrifying. They couldn’t pick up anything dropped, couldn’t walk on paths, and were strictly forbidden from touching a white rooster.
But Pythagoras and his cult were not famous for their peculiar penchants; they were famous for their mathematics. Pythagoras was one of the first recorded mathematical geniuses, and he argued that "all things are numbers." As philosopher Bertrand Russell put it, “This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense.”
Pythagoras believed that numbers were more akin to what we’d call “structures” today. And many modern philosophers agree with him. This week, I spoke with one such modern Pythagorean: Marcus du Sautoy, who argues that all things in the Universe — including beauty — are made up of mathematical structures.
Read this week’s article to find out more.
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THE BIG FULFILLMENT
The “5 Types of Wealth”: Why you’re wealthier than you think
Who’s wealthier: An 82-year-old with a ton of money in the bank or a 22-year-old with a ton of time on his hands? I’d guess most people would vote for the latter. After all, it’s common knowledge, as any lawyer or therapist will remind you, that “time is money.” Sahil Bloom, author of “The 5 Types of Wealth,” agrees that both of these are valid definitions of wealth, but he thinks we’d do well to expand our definition even further — and to rebalance our portfolio with different kinds of “wealth” as life’s seasons change.
WORTH SHARING
Ask Ethan: What are the worst cosmic misnomers?
Historically, astronomers have often named things creatively, bizarrely, and often inaccurately. While some names, like “George’s star” for what’s now known as the planet Uranus, have righteously faded into the dustbin of history, others that are equally suspicious have somehow persisted. So which terms are the most egregious? Let’s explore.
Stephen Johnson, Managing Editor at Big Think
 | A guest post by
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Square peg, dark hole? Yes, we can find Fibonacci sequences in Mozart, primes in Shakespeare, and fractals in Pollock. But the real question is: Who put them there? The artist, or us? Is this us just doing a fancy bit of reverse engineering regardless of intent? This becomes, paradoxically, a kind of lazy exactitude.
The signs that the present times provide us through the actions of certain groups towards the rest often glorifies usage of negative impulses to harness something for instant gratification and what is alarming is it's glorification as smart, productive and efficient.
That absence of a moral compass in its judgement is worrisome.