negative

Yeah, yeah, whatever, for sure

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I’d like to think that this hasn’t happened to me, that I haven’t done it, but I’m not sure I can. Certainly, this Lifehacker article rang a bell or two with me because I’ve seen it happen to other people:

There’s a jerk inside all of us: we roll our eyes when someone in line has a complicated order, curse at little old ladies who don’t drive fast enough, and sneer at people who are just too happy. Over time, that snark kills our productivity and poisons our relationships.

There’s a difference between being occasionally sarcastic and a little derisive in your head, but when negativity becomes your default reaction, you have a problem.

The Snarky Voice in Your Head is Killing your Productivity; Here’s How to Stop it – Alan Henry, Lifehacker (27 June 2012)

The idea is that if you default to witty comments, you only do witty comments and you’re missing action.

Read the full piece for how it claims to show “how to keep your inner asshole in check”.

They’ll hate you anyway

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Most people do not create things. At least, they don’t create anything that many other people will ever know about. You can cook for your family for twenty years, nobody outside the ungrateful brats will ever know. You can save your multinational corporation a billion pounds and they definitely won’t tell the world. But if you do something that goes out to people, if you do create something or write something or produce something, you will be hated.

You’ll also hopefully be liked or even loved but the guaranteed one is hated.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers examined predispositions towards topics that subjects knew nothing about.

Some critics are harsh by nature, not because of what they see in the creation they are criticizing.

They found a reliable trend in the responses of certain participants. Despite being asked about a myriad of unconnected topics—and asked again about new topics at a later date, to confirm they weren’t just in a bad mood—they found two abnormal groups who they classified as “likers” and “haters.” The “likers” tended to rate most things positively with zero external information, and the haters… well, you know where this is going.

Born Hatin’ – Why Some People Dislike Everything, Gregory Ciotti, 99U

I’d like Ciotti to use the word ‘myriad’ correctly but we are many years into that process by which the misuse of a word becomes the correct use just because nobody can be bothered to stop it. Nonetheless, the rest of the piece is particularly interesting about how all this applies to what we write online – and why we get some hatred back.

You’re delusional – but stay that way

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We have no clue. I’m always surprised when someone remembers me, I’m regularly misjudging how meetings went, I haven’t the faintest idea about myself or what in the world I do. But apparently neither does anyone else – or at least, not apart from a very specific few – and apparently it’s also a good thing. It is good and even essential to be completely deluded:

At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower — the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.

You are Now Less Dumb – David McRaney (UK edition, US edition)

The quote is from McRaney’s book but I read it in a Brainpickings.org article about this topic which also pulls in advice from Helen Keller and comments from Hunter S Thompson/

Neither of whom are remotely as good a writer as what I am, like. Hmm. Not sure this is working.