victorl.ai

negativity is not welcome

I don’t understand people who are blatantly aggressive.

Maybe it’s the culture of nerds or the culture of the technology industry or the culture of kids who haven’t grown up, but being hostile is apparently an okay thing. Worse of all, it’s become even okay to be actively frustrated, openly negative.

I have my share of faults and I may sound hypocritical, but it’s probably better to thinking about holding yourself to higher standards than to not think about them at all.

Maybe you’ve heard that yawning is contagious. If you yawn, people pick up on the yawn subconsciously and yawn themselves.

It’s the same thing with being happy - smiling. If you smile, people pick up on the smile subconsciously and smile. And smiling is enough to make yourself happier (it’s true).

But it’s also the same thing with anxiety, stress, frustration, anger, hostility. People pick up on it subconsciously, and begin feeling the effects themselves, and then spread it on to others. Try it yourself. Wait in line at a bus stop and start tapping your feet anxiously and looking at your watch. Within 2 minutes, half the people in line will do the same. And now we’ve created an atmosphere of negativity.

Yet we seem to be okay with that.

We seem to be okay with swearing out loud when we encounter a problem. When we’re frustrated we think it’s okay to get mad. We think it’s fine to sigh loudly like we have a problem. We think it’s fine to slam on the desk. We think it’s fine to yell at others and raise our voices and get mad because we are mad. We think it’s fine to be anxious and show that we’re anxious in public. Because it makes us human.

But it also makes us monsters. If the presence of you in a room results in more anxiety, more stress, more anger and more negativity, you are a monster.

But we seem to be okay with that.

Maybe I’m overly analytical of my relationships and the people I’m with, and I’ve been told that I am, but if the my interactions with someone consistently remind me of anxiety and stress and anger and negativity, that’s probably a good reason to not be around them. Maybe that’s where I’d draw the line.

Problems are okay. We need to face problems to learn and to grow. We need to be told that we are wrong and we need to find out what is wrong. We need to face problems that make our hair fall out.

But we need to realize that problems don’t need to be negative. Problems don’t cause negativity. People cause negativity. People cause negativity when they respond to problems with the stress, anger, anxiety, frustration, negativity that they’re not aware of. But people can cause positivity when they respond to problems as challenges.

This site is maintained by blisse