³⁹In fact, if somebody argues that frustration is actually good since it enables learning, the question arises as to why frustration is then painful. If learning is “good” and should be encouraged, and frustration is needed for learning, frustration should logically feel pleasant, not painful. The fact that frustration is painful means that at least in some sense and to some extent, it has been deemed to be bad for you. This may only hold from an evolutionary viewpoint, and only under some “normal” conditions, though. As a thought experiment, suppose frustration felt good, perhaps because you have become so thoroughly convinced about the utility of the ensuing learning that you are able to override millions of years of evolution. Then, you would presumably try to fail in everything you do—it feels good and you will consider that good feeling as a reward. You might learn a lot from such failures, although if you fail without even trying hard, the utility for learning might be meager. In any case, you would not get any reward; you might starve, die young, and would not produce any offspring. This (admittedly not very rigorous) argumentation suggests that frustration has to be evolutionarily made painful, at least to a certain extent. However, this argumentation was based on an extreme case. Perhaps there is an optimal amount of frustration which is not zero; perhaps it would be possible to detect circumstances under which frustration is good while it is usually bad. I leave this for future research.