wild speculation: crushes are a symptom of "stuck" emotional energy, and are actually a form of anxiety, a socially sanctioned one that you are encouraged to enjoy instead of freak out about
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so:
1) if you move the stuck emotional energy behind a crush it changes flavor. gets less frantic, dissipates, or deepens
2) very clear example of how a potentially "negative" experience that you're supposed to enjoy can be made enjoyable *by that expectation*
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consider by contrast a hypothetical society in which crushes were regarded as a kind of mental illness. "someone help, i am plagued with unwholesome thoughts about this woman, they will not leave me be"; there's an initial experience and then a lot of *secondary* suffering
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this is part of a broader point i'd like to make in a lot more detail in its own thread, but: basically i think this kind of secondary suffering is happening whenever we use "mental illness" as a concept, with its associated baggage of medicalization and pathologization
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I stopped reading to QT my hot take on this, which turned out to be almost word-for-word what you said here.
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This is unironically most of my working hypothesis about "mental illness" in the modern era. We pathologize a significant portion of basic human nature, because it's inconvenient to modern society's elites, and then use the trauma-responses of the pathologized to justify it. twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/st…
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