Life essentially comes down to a battle between short-term and long-term benefits. Taking the easy way out to gain immediate gratification will often result in later consequences and often in important life areas, whereas doing the hard thing now will often pay off in big ways. There is no path without pain, so choose the pain that benefits you. Nothing worth having comes easy.

Our brains are designed to work effectively for 20,000 years ago. It has been unable to keep up with what we've created.

Makes complete sense, and as you said, the invention of the internet has absolutely exposed this part of human nature, perhaps more than ever before.

You got it! New album next year. Super psyched!

Rising above our tribal instincts? I feel like we were moving in that direction, now we seem to be doubling down on these instincts.

I'm not sure everyone would do the same, but it's stories like this that keep my belief in humanity from being completely extinguished.

You can't know that. Any different decision creates a completely different trajectory in life, and you can't know where that would have led you. Even if the choices we made fucked things up for us, we can't ever know where a different decision would have led us. Which is what makes regret so hard: our imagination is powerful, and create entirely different and happy realities for us.

I think this mentality could be a way of reframing regret. Often people can get stuck in regret, wishing they'd made a different decision. I think a lot of regret comes from believing things would have been better with a different decision, even though there's no evidence for that. So I think one can and should process painful feelings related to whatever is happening, without needing to compare their reality to an imagined alternate one.