ABSTRACT
Everyone hates to lose. Indeed, losing can hurt very badly. As a result, it contributes greatly to human distress. Losses are not physically traumatic, at least, not in the sense of causing observable tissue damage. Some losers commit suicide because their pain is unendurable. Moreover, significant losses can compromise the immune system. When people foresee a loss, they commonly evade it by arranging to be someplace else. As a zero-sum activity, when it is played someone wins while someone else loses. The players intellectually understand most will lose, but the mere rumor of a huge payoff sets hearts fluttering. Back in the early 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers were the lovable losers of organized baseball. Loss and losing; the words are similar, but the concepts seem worlds apart. If the loss was sufficiently calamitous, the endpoint might be mortality.
