Euphoric interaction

Net gain is the test, and primary is the qualifier that does the sorting. An interaction producing a net gain in secondary anima is not euphoric in this sense, since secondary anima is taken from somewhere and the gain is somebody else's loss. A euphoric interaction adds rather than moves. Marsh's examples are deliberately unremarkable, and their point is that the other party need not be a person. Viewing or experiencing art, playing a guitar that belonged to a beloved friend or family member, smelling a flower that grew in a family garden are all euphoric interactions rather than encounters between a subject and an object, and she is explicit that subject and object are a very particular feature of endoreality rather than a description of how experience works. The exoself lives in expectation of these. An exoself is in a natural state of excitement every day in anticipation of primary euphoric interaction, since excitement is the anticipation of euphoria. Their absence is what boredom names. Boredom occurs when someone is near a euphoric interaction they cannot access, and nothingness is life inside an endosocial membrane blocking all euphoric conduits, which is why boredom, destruction and depression turn out to be linked and all three characterize an endoself. Laughter belongs here too, since all people may laugh in anticipation or experience of a euphoric interaction.

Positive psychology studies what Barbara Fredrickson calls positivity resonance and micro-moments of connection, and the broaden and build theory treats positive emotion as expanding a person's resources. Csikszentmihalyi's flow describes absorbed engagement in an activity. Both remain accounts of states occurring in a person. The nearest philosophical parallel to Marsh's move is Martin Buber's distinction between I-Thou and I-It, which likewise denies that encounter is always a subject meeting an object and likewise extends beyond human partners. Marsh differs from Buber by supplying a quantity, so where he describes two modes of relation she specifies a measurable outcome, a net gain in primary anima, which makes the distinction testable in principle rather than only phenomenological.