Überdrehtheit versus Zufriedenheit / Overexcitement versus Contentment:

"Überdrehtheit hat oft mit Überreizung, nicht mit echter Freude zu tun. Aufgedreht zu sein bedeutet, dass das Nervensystem überaktiv ist – durch zu viele Reize, Stress, Zucker, Müdigkeit oder innere Anspannung. Das wirkt äußerlich wie Euphorie, ist aber physiologisch eher ein Alarmzustand.

Bei Kindern sieht man das gut: Wenn sie „aufdrehen“, sind sie oft übermüdet oder überfordert, nicht wirklich glücklich. Sie lachen oder toben, aber ohne innere Ruhe oder Zufriedenheit. Echte Freude ist ruhiger, stabiler, weniger gehetzt.

Kurz gesagt:

Überdrehtheit = Erregung, oft Stress-bedingt.

Glück = Wohlbefinden, mit innerer Balance.

Das eine kann wie das andere aussehen, fühlt sich aber ganz anders an."

-----

"Overexcitement is often linked to overstimulation, not genuine joy. Being hyped up means the nervous system is overactive—triggered by too many stimuli, stress, sugar, fatigue, or inner tension. It may look like euphoria from the outside, but physiologically it’s more of an alarm state.

You can see this clearly in children: when they ‘get wild,’ they’re often overtired or overwhelmed, not truly happy. They laugh or run around, but without inner calm or contentment. Real joy is quieter, steadier, less frantic.

In short:

Overexcitement = Arousal, often stress-related.

Happiness = Well-being, with inner balance.

One may look like the other, but they feel completely different."

Interest:

Paul J. Silvia:

"Izard (1977) provides a description of the conscious experience of interest: At the experiential level interest…is the feeling of being engaged, caught-up, fascinated, curious. There is a feeling of wanting to investigate, become involved, or extend or expand the self by incorporating new information and having new experiences with the person or object that has stimulated the interest. In intense interest or excitement the person feels animated and enlivened. It is this enlivenment that guarantees the association between interest and cognitive or motor activity. Even when relatively immobile the interested or excited person has the feeling that he is “alive and active.” "

Emotions:

Paul J. Silvia:

"As William McDougall (1908/ 1960) observed, “a person who had not experienced [an emotion] could no more be made to understand its quality than a totally colour-blind person can be made to understand the experience of colour-sensation” "

Selflessness:

Richard D. Alexander:

"Selflessness, the second general kind of behavioral act in terms of positive or negative social effects, is, as noted earlier, essentially opposite to selfishness. Whatever selfless behavior does, by itself alone (i.e., without return benefits), causes some of the selfless person’s calories to use some of its fitness to benefit another individual (or individuals), because some calories are being donated to the person(s) those calories assist. Without some kind of compensating forces, selflessness must continually decrease the organism’s likelihood of maximizing reproductive success.

Selfish acts are not likely to generate cooperative tendencies that can help the selfish person increase his or her likelihood of extending reproductive capabilities across generations. Helping selfish people is likely to decrease the fitness (probability of reproductive success) of the helpers because helping selfish individuals is likely to impose selflessness on the part of a helper. Cooperation as selflessness is unlikely to benefit the cooperator if the helped individual behaves selfishly. Selfless acts are not likely to be rewarded, or compensated, by assistance given to truly selfish individuals. But selfless acts that come about accidentally or incidentally can also be detrimental to the receiving or “helped” individual. We will need to ask whether selflessness can evolve, and if so, how. Genes and gene groups that are consistently surviving across generations are by definition successful. Genes that continue to fail trans-generationally eventually disappear, sometimes along with parts or entireties of genomes that fail because of dependence on failing genes. For genes and their combinations, success or “winning” is little more than continuing to exist, via changes with positive effects, generation after generation, which is all that natural selection can accomplish. Unsuccessful genes may persist temporarily if their negative effects are nullified by incidental appearances of novel modifying genes that (at least temporarily) cancel or mask the deleterious effects of the unsuccessful gene, which nevertheless is doomed to disappear, to be replaced eventually by successfully functioning mutants at the same locus (assuming no significant changes in organismal function, as when environments change). Complicated human behavioral topics are among the most difficult ones to interpret. Several concepts require understanding for the topic of selflessness. Thus, social investment refers to any personally expensive act (including selflessness) that, with or without conscious intent or knowledge, may yield no positive returns to affected individuals, such as a selfless, useless, or reproductively negative act. But social investment may also initiate or precipitate return beneficence in the form of direct and indirect social reciprocity. An example of direct reciprocity is “You scratch my back and I’ ll scratch yours.” Another is “Turn-about is fair play.” Indirect reciprocity occurs when a needy person is assisted without return (that is, direct) compensation from the helped individual. But others may observe a helper’s behavior and in turn help the helper, or they may mimic the helper by helping others, and those others may be among the ones who assist the original selfless helper. Such interactions potentially generate complex and widespread flows of beneficence that can be broadly rewarding because of numerous small and large benefits returned from many individuals (cf. Trivers 1971, Alexander 1979, 1987). Such indirect reciprocity -- the interplay of selflessness as social investment and return beneficence from diverse persons (see below) -- surely represents the most widespread, complex, and difficult interacting networks of human behavior, the interactions of everyday social behaviors. What has been termed selflessness -- and what may be thought of as evolved selflessness (meaning adaptive selflessness shaped by consistent natural selection in the form of return beneficence) -- can cause what appears to be net-cost altruism to become social investment, with or without conscious awareness of the selfless or socially investing person. Without compensating return benefits, what we humans have learned to label as selflessness cannot, it seems, exist for long, if it is consistently exposed to negative consequences of continuing differential reproduction, or natural selection. Enhancing the reputation of a socially investing individual can itself be a significant return of beneficence (Trivers 1971; Alexander 1979, 1987; Milinski et al 2002). But we are faced with a startling and at first seemingly unlikely claim. Contrary to what might be thought of as common sense, neither evolved selflessness nor incidental or accidental selflessness can persist indefinitely without return beneficence. Selflessness alone, except in kin relationships, seems not to contribute to the persistence of its own genetic elements. But return beneficence that, for example, transfers more beneficence than the cost of the original selflessness, converts that selflessness to a positive gain, essentially turning the completed exchange into a selfish transaction. This transaction provides “the other side of the coin” that includes both evolved selfishness and evolved selflessness in human sociality. These transactions can be difficult to identify because they can occur with or without conscious knowledge of likely or potential results." 

The Meaning of a Man:

Richard D. Alexander:

The Meaning of a Man

Surely humans all are lucky to be living in this time,
Surely never were there beings who could live a life so fine.
But with three hundred million crowding all of just our land,
We may wonder what we’ve learned about the meaning of a man.

We can all attend the schools these days until we’re old and gray,
Gather elegant degrees and clever thoughts to while away,
Consider all the universe except the one within,
And wonder why we’ve never learned the meaning of a man.

Across the lives of unknown throngs, from caves to caviars,
Stone axes, bows, and arrows, city streets slam-jammed with cars,
We’ve practiced ways to slaughter men that stand our hair on end.
Is this what we have learned about the meaning of a man?

More than seven billion people now are packed around the globe,
With folks of different nations ever at each other’s throats:
We identify our enemies and kill them if we can,
Is this all we have learned about the meaning of a man?

If some of us grow up and everything is on our side,
We’re never hungry, never cold, and always satisfied;
If we share the world of riches and lead a life that’s grand,
Perhaps we’re not the kind to ask the meaning of a man.

But for anyone who wrestles with the riddles people pose,
There’s a thought I’ll freely offer, and here’s the way it goes:
Start by finding someone singing, just as boldly as he can,
The song he sings may be about the meaning of a man

Or a woman... 

The above verse was put together 60 years ago, adjusted across the decades. As the youngster who constructed it, I had absorbed the idea that only the most important of questions should be considered in a poem, because only then could the poem be important. No one would be surprised to learn that I got this idea from the poems I was charged to memorize and contemplate in my school. Nor that most of those poems were written by men, and a good many chosen for the grandiosity of their topics. It would not be surprising if the aspiring poet that I was then thought (briefly) that only men had the responsibility to search for the answers to sumptuous questions like the one I tried so long ago to deal with in this verse. 

Action und Explizite Szenen / Action and Explicit Scenes:

Actionfilme üben, insbesondere auf Männer, einen großen Reiz aus. Diesen Reiz haben sie wohl nicht bloß deshalb, weil Männer gern Action-reiches Geschehen äußerlich betrachten, sondern hauptsächlich dadurch, da sie der Rolle des Helden oder der Hauptfigur teilnehemend folgen: Da sie sich während dem Schauen selbst so erleben, als würden sie Held oder Hauptfigur dieser Szenen sein.

Analog verhält es sich mit expliziten oder sexuellen Szenen. Diese sind von Natur her besonders angenehm oder belohnend gemacht, da besonders bei Männern sich der Fortpflanzungerfolg erhöht, wenn sie häufig oder regelmäßig, oder gegebenenfalls mit unterschiedlichen Partner stattfinden. Personen also, die häufig solche Szenen schauen, werden nicht äußerlich beobachten, sondern werden sich tendenziell in der Rolle des Handelnden sehen, und also in der Rolle einer Person, die (ohne viel Aufwand) sich fühlt als würde sie ihren Fortplanzungerfolg steigern, als würde sie die Hauptrolle in diesen expliziten Szenen spielen.

-----

Action movies exert a strong appeal, especially on men. This appeal likely arises not merely because men enjoy watching action-packed events from the outside, but mainly because they experience the story through the perspective of the hero or main character. While watching, they feel as if they themselves were the hero or protagonist of those scenes.

The same applies to explicit or sexual scenes. These are, by nature, particularly pleasurable or rewarding, since — especially for men — reproductive success increases when such acts occur frequently, regularly, or with different partners. Therefore, people who often watch such scenes do not merely observe from the outside; they tend to imagine themselves in the role of the actor — as someone who, with little effort, feels as though they are enhancing their reproductive success, as if they were the protagonist in those explicit scenes.

Working With Our Hands:

https://meinnaturwissenschaftsblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/craft.html

Gary Rogowski:

"It is my belief that working with our hands is valuable. Connecting with tools to create things offers us a compensation that no electronic calculus can bring. The cacophony that is the internet keeps us distracted, impatient, anonymous, and searching, but rarely satisfied. When we can see the results of our labor - paring with the chisel, using the needle and thread, creating with paint brush, soldering gun, or pen in hand - there is a different sense of accomplishment. It is a needed blessing in a hurried world to be able to say at the end of a long day, "I did this. Here are the results." It may only be an attempt to create something that feels solid in a world of impermanence, but this kind of progress means something to me in a day. Perhaps to you as well."