You will often see people happily going about their day and then happen upon something interesting that they would like. In some cases, that thing is no longer available or they can’t have it for some reason. In some cases, the person then gets very upset they can’t have the thing. However, if they didn’t happen upon the thing, they wouldn’t have missed it or even known about it.
For example, you go to a restaurant and the waiter tells you the specials. One of them sounds good to you and you chose that. The waiter comes back a few minutes later saying they are out of that particular item. You get upset and don’t want anything else and the whole meal is ruined. However, if the waiter had not mentioned that particular item, you would have picked something else and been just as happy.
This also happens a lot with kids. They may be having a great time playing on the beach or whatever and the ice cream truck comes by. If their parents say no, the kid may throw a tantrum, be upset for a long time, and not want to play anymore. But if the ice cream truck had never come by, the kids would have happily continued to play without any desire for ice cream.
It’s a form of disappointment, but it’s a special kind which is that you’re disappointed you can’t have this thing that 2 seconds ago you didn’t know even existed. If that thing didn’t exist at all, you would have not missed it and happily went about your day.
Is there a concise word or phrase which encapsulates this type of disappointment? Either in English or other languages?
I will say it’s the reason I hate ads so much. I can’t have what’s in the ads. If I have money to spend, I’m going to be deliberately looking for things.
It is the use of ads to create desire that makes me object to them, because it means making people less happy.
And, no, none of the words so far describe the situation in the slightest.
I came across the term relative deprivation recently which seems sort of related to the situation.
The person feels deprived because other people have X and they don’t. It’s not that the things they have are insufficient–it’s that other people have better things and so they feel they also deserve those things.
Those sorts of feelings are similar to how someone feels in the OP. For some reason they are told they can’t have thing X and they feel denied because they can’t have it. But if thing X didn’t exist at all, they would not have felt any loss and would have happily picked thing Y.
This actually happened to me last week- There was a top on display in a store all winter and I kept passing it up, not wanting to spend the money. The day it disappeared from the display, I went straight to the clearance area hoping to grab it, but there were none left.
Suddenly, this top that I could take or leave the day before was something I just had to have. I went home and started looking up availability in other stores or online (at 50% off, but still…)
It’s not that. A sense of entitlement is the feeling that you deserve something. You can be bummed about not getting something without feeling that you’re entitled to it.
There’s a hint in the OP that this sort of unhappiness isn’t valid, but it seems just as valid as unhappiness over any other unfulfilled want. Everything you want was, at some point, something you weren’t thinking about, or didn’t know existed. And not getting what you want is upsetting, regardless of how long you’ve spent wanting it.
Buddhists would call this the suffering of unfulfilled desire.
Of course, how you deal with the suffering of an unfulfilled desire is another thing. I would expect small children to be momentarily inconsolable at not getting ice cream once they have focused their attention on it, because small children have limited coping strategies for disappointment.
This person, though, could probably stand to grow up a bit.
