Why so negative?

We live in a very binary world. There is black and white, zeroes and ones, yes or no, yin or yang, cities or nature, coffee or tea, being asleep or being awake, being creative or not creating anything, feeling happy or feeling sad, having good luck or having bad luck, working or relaxing, knowing how to swim or not knowing how to swim and so on, with many endless examples. This shows, in my opinion, that we as social and intelligent creatures, are very comfortable living in a compartmentalized world and like putting things in categories and assigning some sort of a state or status to things. And it’s nothing to be judgemental about – we like order because it probably makes it easier for us to live and to comprehend the world around us. If anything, it’s fascinating how much order we managed to create (at least in theory) to make the living so cozy as it is today for most of the people alive. But one could of course argue, that there are more colours to the rainbow than just two and even our emotions have more facets than just being simply labelled as “negative” or “positive”.

Indeed, there is no right or wrong way to live. Every human life and every experience will be perfectly unique and unrepeatable. Being original and authentic is something that everyone should strive for, in my modest opinion, because why would there be point in doing anything else, since it is impossible, for better or worse, to mimic something, that has already happened in the past? This leads me to the following argument I am about to make – as individual and special your life is, the net sum of your experiences will be either mostly positive or negative. This will probably lead you to having the same outlook on life and perception of other people – positive or negative. Of course, it will never be just one or the other thing, it will absolutely interchange, but it’s the trend that matters. And yet, so often do we feel like one negative experience almost erases all the positive ones. You can be an excellent worker and do everything to a level of excellence, and it seems like no one ever notices anything, but let one slip up come across your way and it feels like everything you have done before matters no more and all you get is negative feedback. Or you sometimes meet these people that seem to have lost themselves in one negative experience and appear to be going on and on in an endless loop of their own pity party and don’t have any motivation to give up the narrative or to move on in any kind of way. Or all of the headlines and news on the TV sound like they are only about bad things. So why does it feel like the balance between the negative and the positive is unequal, in a way that the first one somehow magically overweighs the latter?

Apparently, there is science to it (as you have probably been anticipating so far). Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and economist, says that the brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odd of living longer. The same circuit also causes schematic angry faces (a potential threat) to be processed faster and more efficiently than schematic happy faces. In another example, the psychologist Paul Rozin observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing for a bowl of cockroaches. As he points out, the negative trumps the positive in many ways, and loss aversion is one of many manifestations of a broad negativity dominance. No comparably rapid mechanism for recognizing good news has been detected so far. To cite John Gottman, the well-known expert in marital relations, a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1. Other asymmetries in the social domain are even more striking – we all know that a friendship may take years to develop and can be ruined by a single action.

What do we learn from this? Well, concentrating on the negative is our survival instinct. We don’t choose to see the bad, we are programmed to see it first and foremost. It is an automatic reaction that we can do absolutely nothing about. On the flipside, it has kept us alive and save for so long, so there must be some good to it. What I take from this, is that seeing the positive actually takes an effort. It is easy to go down the rabbit hole of negative chatter and catastrophize about some scenarios that never happened or will – it comes naturally to us. You can always count on it keeping you safe, but what is it that you want from life? Always keeping your guard up and looking for the next possible threat will only get you depressed and anxious. The modern-day world that we live in, fortunately (or not) removed most of the immediate threats from our surroundings, so we can go about our day without being afraid of getting eaten by a lion. This leaves you with a hard task – choosing the positive as often as you can. Being expensive with your energy and being conscious about who and how you spend your time with. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, since you never know what fights they are silently fighting inside. Being patient and forgiving, deciding to be the bigger person and not expecting anything in return. The energy you put out will definitely come back to you and choosing the negative will only eat you from the inside.

Be gentle, with yourself and your world.

Love,

Faja