Another funny way to comfort myself goes along these lines (I've become interested in philosophy over the last few years).
In philosophy there is a concept known as
possible worlds.
It's used in modal logic.
David Lewis went a step further and suggested that possible worlds might actually exist. (Even physicists have hypothesized about the
multiverse).
In theory, when an agent (a person) makes a choice, our universe becomes split into many more universes, each of them containing a different "me" who makes a specific different choice. (like I want to go to college... in each world, a different me attends a different college).
Lewis made this argument (at least according to a friend of mine who is a philosophy professor): if there are many "me's" out there, then perhaps, if I am a moral person, I ought to sometimes do things which cause
me pain, knowing that if I'm performing the action that causes pain, then the
other me's are
not experiencing that pain (because in those other worlds they would be doing something else).