How hard is it to develop a POSITIVE outlook? And why does it MATTER?

I'm always amazed by the sheer volume of negativity that seems to permeate our modern world. 

It seems like a huge number of people spend an extraordinary amount of time looking at every tragedy and failure with an array of magnifying glasses and microscopes... while such things as gratitude and joy are broadly relegated to "a footnote on page 74."

The Negativity Bias

It's not just the news, fake or real.

Ask someone "how they are" and they'll regale you for two hours about how the single sneeze that woke them up at 5:00am is a "clear indication" that they have the mysterious and rare Bingo-Bongo virus from Senegal... while someone who woke up feeling really well will reduce it to "Uhmmm... I'm OK." And the person asking might even feel slightly disappointed when no tragedy is shared...

The negative is pervasive...

To wit, I am writing an article about having a positive outlook... which might get read 50 times... but if I were instead writing an article entitled "SCANDAL! Embarrassed Katy Perry gets drunk and loses her panties in public!" it would probably be read 50 thousand times... because we'd rather have a front row seat to misery, embarrassment and humiliation. 

Balance, not "Idiot Positivity"

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those "eternally positive" people who wanders around claiming happiness in every action, including the "joy" of some hooligan setting my eyebrows on fire. I don't believe we should blind ourselves to the sometimes harsh reality of life by whitewashing it with a veneer of false positivity. That's just the opposite side of the nonsense coin, from where I am sitting. 

I'm just advocating a little more balance.

And I find the pervasive backdrop of doom and negativity a little disturbing.

Actually... more than a little disturbing.

So much of life seems to be designed around profiting/benefiting from the demise and failures of others, rather than their successes. We tear down, rather than building up.

And most people don't care. People especially don't care about anything that might require them to engage in the process of creating their own happiness or contentment. We reach for quick fixes based in the negative. And part of that is choice, not happenstance.

Boosting ourselves through others' misery

One of the things we often choose (even if inadvertently) to do is to boost our self-esteem by celebrating someone else's failure, rather than working on-- and celebrating-- our own success. 

I spend a lot of time involved in-- and writing for-- the self-development, healing and spirituality "industry." In that field, the negativity takes a subtle and passive-aggressive form of an endlessly glorifying people's "wounds" and "suffering," while those who seem to dance through life relatively unscathed and unwounded are dismissed as "deceiving themselves" or have "avoided the truth of real life."

Somehow, there's a semi-hidden subtext that life isn't "real" unless it's (or has been, for 30 years) a miserable hell hole that beats the living daylights out of you. And yet? The entire industry is based around the notion of seeking and creating happiness, yet you're almost an outcast if you actually are/have what you seek!

Ironic, no?

"Not Depressed" is NOT the same thing as "Happy!"

Developing and maintaining a positive outlook is remarkably difficult... because even though we're told that's what we're ultimately supposed to be striving for, the road is paved with judgments largely designed to make someone who's actually happy feel like they have somehow "cheated" or "failed" to be real; somehow too Pollyanna-ish.

"How dare you wake up feeling good and happy about life when your cousin tried to commit suicide, last night?"

Uhmmm... why am I  not allowed to feel content about my own existence while still feeling sadness and empathy for my cousin's plight? Why is my experience suddenly only "authentic" if I am also sitting in the miserable hell-hole of depression?

And we actually judge happy people negatively. Think about it. How many times have you been part of a situation where someone said/thought "Here comes Barbara-- she's always so annoyingly perky and happy. I can't stand her!" And we may even automatically judge her as a "fake," knowing nothing of the truth of her life. Whereas she might be faking it, why is there no room for her to simply be genuinely happy? 

I remember some years back, watching a TED talk by Martin Seligman-- seen by many as the "father" of the positive psychology movement-- pointed out that the psychology industry has done a fine job of helping people out of depression... but being in a state called "not depressed" is not the same thing as being "happy," and we're doing a lousy job-- as a society-- teaching people how to actually be happy.

Society has no support system for "happiness" and "contentment." Life (effectively) revolves less around striving to better ourselves... and more around looking at something totally awful and patting ourselves on our collective backs because our lives are BETTER THAN "totally awful."

What a sad and low level aspiration...

So why does it even matter? 

Well, being aware of the negative and recognizing it is definitely not a bad thing, in and of itself. Again, I'm not suggesting "false positivity."

However, the negative is mostly really good at "finding fault." And it tends to tear down, rather than build. And that tends to result in emotional and aspirational lethargy, rather than encouraging growth. When we observe someone worse off than us, it gives us a subtle emotional "get out of jail free card" with respect to building our own lives. We have seen what's wrong with Bob, we feel better, and our plans for ourselves fade in importance.

And so, we become a little less likely to build, for ourselves-- we find a sort of cold comfort in a state of "not as bad as Bob," rather than risk authentic betterment. 

We can even observe it here is this local microcosm known as Steemit. We're really having a good time writing and blogging and interacting (positive), but we really don't want to invite any of our friends to share in that enjoyment till the whole  "bad whales" thing (negative) has been sorted out. Perhaps natural enough, even though those people would also have had a great time, whales or no whales. That's just a "micro" example.

Seriously? We can do better!

What do YOU think? Does the world spend too much time dwelling on the negative? Do we spend too much time "nurturing" faults and wrongs and personal pain... at the expense what what we do have and what we can do to make a difference? Is it time to swing towards a more balanced approach that gives equal time to the positive and the negative? Leave a comment! Share your experience-- start the discussion!

(as always, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)