"Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power."
- Shirley MacLaine, actor and positive thinker
And yet we do it.
Dwelling on the negative makes us the only species to do so and remain alive. Any other animal that acts that way soon becomes food.
Ask any pessimistic person why they do it and they will not have a good answer. Most will know that they shouldn't be negative or defeatist because it hurts them.
And yet they do it.
Internet discussion forums that find themselves plagued with verbal mouth-organs from time to time tend to get bogged down in reviewing and rehashing the misdeeds of the miscreants until everyone feels like eating dirt.
And yet they do it.
An unknown number of people take some comfort in dwelling on the negative or continually regurgitating stories of the bad behaviour of others. We know they derive some pleasure from it by the fact that they do it so often. What pleasure? It may be the holier-than-thou syndrome. They feel better knowing that others are worse than they are.
They know it's sad. And yet they do it.
It's yet another frailty that decorates the character of human nature.
Perhaps one reason that humans have been so successful at populating the planet is that we know our own weaknesses. We can continue to know without fear of becoming food. We may not be able to change much, but knowing our weaknesses somehow gives us strength that other species lack.
This defies logic and fails to show up in any explanation of how we humans came to be the way we are. Yet here we are. Doing what no other species could imagine.
Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to put human nature into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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Comments: 11
enerally I'm a glass half-full, look for the best in people kind of person but every once in a while I find myself slipping into that old negative head space. I hate to say it takes work to NOT be like that but that does seem to be the case from time to time.
Human nature, I think, I more mysterious than the meaning of life.
love and light
Great advice, Bill, and good points.
But its a much better mess than the world has ever been in before. Study any period of history and you will inevitably find conditions worse than today's.
Things are getting better, as you said.
Joe, people like you and Thomas and many other people on Gather are influencing how the world matures. The ripple effect works. I have seen it happen in a positive way in the small city near where I live (to my shock and delight).
Can you imagine living inside the miserable mind of a total pessimist? There can be no joy there. We all have negative moments, but we also remember how unhappy they make us feel and attempt to change. Does this degree of pessimism equal clinical depression?
But consider this. Is there any one person you know whose life you would like to have? When we learn everything about the lives of people we think we admire, they turn out to be worse than our own in many cases. Other people carry around burdens that we would not want to adopt. But they act happy.
When people are not taught to be positive and they are inundated with negative messages, they adopt a negative point of view about life.
According to a UN study published in 2005, the happiest people in the world live in Nigeria. In fact, though poverty and strife can be found in many parts of Africa, as a continent the people are happier than those of any other continent in the world.
There is only one explanation for that. They teach their children to be positive.