“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand... I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
There’s a powerful psychological tool used in marketing called anchoring, though you’ll also hear your psych major friends call it focalism. The idea behind it is that setting an expectation for a human being then changes their perception of everything that follows it. They’ve dropped an “anchor”, and now everything else in your expectation rotates around it. It’s the reason $18 chicken doesn’t look so expensive at the bottom of a steakhouse menu when offered below a $95 steak.