There is always room for improvement

People have the ability to rationalize their own personal flaws and deficiencies, not something you can do when there's no one around to talk about your problems or perspectives. If you were to witness a great tragedy or injustice, you would never let your suffering cloud your judgement of that individual and would instead determine to be the hero of that event. You could look at a hundred's of personal tragedies that have happened to other individuals and attempt to determine their various personal causes, unless that activity is just the end result of doing nothing to change anything.

Actually, the relationship between preference, the object, and the expectations of others is relatively simple: the object's function is dependent on the expectation of the people around it. In other words, the more of what is expected of you the object serves, the more choice it has in making its action possible. It also has more choice in how it uses its function; its function can only be used in particular ways.

But this platitude is incredibly damaging because it comes from a place of "We all have our own fantasies. I'm not infallible." This is an open admission that you can't possibly know everything. You simply cannot anticipate all of the dilemmas and nightmares that one might face, and therefore, you cannot know that everything can or should be improved. It also implies that some problems might be too big to fix, and others might simply never be. It's hard to accept that in the endless pursuit of perfection, something else might also have to give.

I didn't realize that there were those who could empathize with someone's reactions to unemployment—and worse—perhaps with other macroeconomic events.Clearly there are people who can't empathize with my predicament. Thus, you have to come up with some other explanation.

We really have to figure out how to deal with our own internal feelings that we might not share with others. In times of deep grief it's important to feel connected to a community of people who share your perspective. If your purpose is to support and comfort those who are grieving, it's important that you don't exploit the grief process. You should act accordingly and seek to understand your friends and family members.

The tendency to consider improvements an impossibility in the real world should serve to remind you of the fallacy of that notion. Almost every single technology has been improved upon, and since an improvement never replaces an existing design, such improvements do not even introduce a new design. To the extent that you can improve upon something, you don't necessarily replace it with something better. There are exceptions to this general rule, but these exceptions are actually quite rare, and generally occur only in extremely specialized situations.