Learn English – How to describe a person who cares only about beneficial things

Selfless

1. Having, exhibiting or motivated by no concern for oneself but for others; unselfish.

Also altruistic. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism

An activity closely related to this is sometimes called misery poker. This refers to when two (or more) people are comparing how bad they have it, playing their miseries as you would cards in poker – as in the Four Yorkshiremen sketch that Michael quoted, though in general you don't bluff (much) in misery poker, at least not to the extent the Yorkshiremen do.

The term was in common usage at Swarthmore College when I was there (2007–11). It seems at least somewhat spread beyond that: there's a tvtropes article, and you found a WSJ article. But it's not common enough in print to be in Google ngrams, my officemate who's a Brown alum from the same time period hadn't heard of it, and looking through Google I'm seeing primarily Swarthmore-related results. It seems that non-Swatties likely won't have heard the actual term, but its meaning might be sufficiently transparent to use.

There's also a new version of it that I like a lot: "misery Pokémon." I recently saw it referred to in this recent article from one of the campus papers¹, but the first instance I could find was in the 2010 orientation play², which was probably most students' introduction to at least the name of it. (I'm fairly certain I was introduced to the concept of misery poker by the 2007 version of this play, though it didn't contain misery Pokémon.) There's a video of the play on YouTube, with the misery poker component beginning here and the Pokémon part starting at 1:12:20. They also give passing references to "Trivial Pursuit of Happiness," "Torment Yahtzee," "Bitchy Bitchy Hippos," and "Apathy to Apples."

^{2. I was actually in the audience at that play, but I forgot about it until finding a reference to the clip....}