extremity of randomness
Hell is not the most tormenting space. Limbo is.
Uncertainty is unbearable for the human psyche. Torture methods that involve randomisations are the worst. For instance, releasing water droplets onto someone's forehead at random intervals apparently drives people insane. (Disordered raindrops have a calming effect on rough oceans. It has the opposite effect on brain waves since our natural resting state itself is actually pretty wavy.)
Reward mechanisms also perform best when they involve randomisations:
Whether the subject is a pigeon, rat, or person, Skinner found, the strongest way to reinforce a learned behaviour was to reward it on a random schedule.
- How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (Simon Parkin)
In other words, randomisation has an overall amplification effect, making the negative more negative and positive more positive.
Although we are not good at psychologically guarding ourselves against randomised suffering, we are very good at offloading our psychological suffering onto random factors. (For instance, we consistently underestimate the role of chance in our successes and overestimate it in our failures.)
We can not offload the pain associated with randomised suffering back to random factors because stories can be deformed only after the fact, not when they are unfolding in realtime.
