Day 2 and counting

I was talking to someone at work about the ways that we are sad during the 9 days, he had never considered things this way before so I thought I would share them with my readers as well.
1) We don't eat meat. This is to remind us of the korban shlomim, which was considered the ultimate happiness.
2) We don't listen to live music. This is to remind us of the levites who would sing in concert every day.
3) We don't go into water for pleasure. This is to remind us of the water that we entered to become spiritually pure before entering the Beis haMikdash (BhM).
4) We don't drink wine because of the wine that was poured on the altar.

Joe Settler wrote on the Muqata blog that he has a hard time with forced seasonal emotions, such as becoming sad during the 9 days. In a lot of ways he is correct because in our reality nothing has changed from last week to this week. There was no BhM then and there is no BhM now.
What we are doing by adding on these symbols of sadness is more then just making our lives less comfortable, we are putting the things that we are missing in front of us and saying, look this is what we used to have and we don't have it anymore.

With that you can begin to feel the loss, not because of an artificial forced sadness, but a sadness based on a reality check that we imposed on ourselves so that we remember what we lost.