[Blarg]

You're probably making too much of it. Look at it this way -- the more you expose yourself to life in any form, the greater chance of taking damage. That goes for anything from thinking to bungee jumping to taking that long walk across the gym in high school and asking that cute girl to dance. You cannot expose yourself more and risk less.

I'm sure you yourself have found some issues and developments at some point interesting, alarming, or maybe distressing or depressing, only to find some people you know blessedly indifferent or ignorant of those issues and developments and thus unable to get bothered about them. Heck, maybe even after explaining those matters to them, they still wound up incapable of realizing their importance because they couldn't think long-term, truly understand the implications, or be bothered to care for anything that didn't immediately impact upon them, right in their face in the most overt manner. Being closed off to certain thoughts and experiences can save you from a lot of distress and unhappiness.

Take a job situation as another example. Two reasonably ambitious guys in the identical job. Who do you think is happier, the guy who thinks he has a future in the job, or the guy who, for the sake of this example, correctly understands that it's a dead-end?

I suppose I could have said all of that as "ignorance is bliss," but since it's such a simple concept that for some reason wasn't working for you, I guess I felt I had to be more explicit.