Always focus on the negative things in life
I’m sure you’ve heard people say that you shouldn’t focus too much on the negative things in life, but rather that you should focus on the positive things instead. Instead of looking at the negative side of things, they say, you should look at the positive side and try to appreciate that. Perhaps you are also someone who shares the same opinion. I however have a different opinion: We should focus on the negative things instead. And I’ll explain why.
Focusing on the positive things in life seems to be human nature. When I see people doing this, I don’t blame them at all. In fact, I can very much understand why they do this. Imagine if you didn’t focus on all those small positive things in life, where would you get the inspiration and energy to keep on living? Life is so full of problems and it’s not easy to be happy and optimistic. In fact, it is quite impossible to be happy in life when you realize certain things and when you want to be really honest to yourself.
So this just makes the need even bigger for people to focus on the positive things. Even if those positive things sometimes don’t exist, they try to make them up instead. Religion is a perfect example of this. It serves to give people something positive to think about in life, something to hold onto, something to give them hope for the future, something to give their lives a purpose, something to explain the unknown to them to make them feel like they are in control and know what’s going on. Imagine if there were no religions, how would most people think of life? How would most people be able to live life without the comfort that religion offers them?
Another example is death. For as long as humans exist, they have been trying to put a positive spin around death. Religion has also been a great help in doing this. Death is another case where people have tried to make things up around it to make it look like something positive. “Yes, it sucks to die, but look at the bright side, you’re going to heaven!” Nobody is fooling me with this. Death is something negative. Nothing can explain that away. I’ll never accept it “as a normal part of life.” The sooner people stop fooling themselves and believing in all kinds of explanations for it, the sooner we’ll be more effective at looking for ways to solve this problem.
When something bad happens, or someone struggles with bad results or outcomes, people always say “Well I know it sucks, but look at the bright side…”, or, “It could have been worse, look at the positive side…” etc. That just serves as comfort. It serves to take our eyes away from the problem and to have us focus on something positive. It serves to make us think good about the situation or about ourselves. It serves to fool us.
We shouldn’t focus on the positive things so much. Instead, we should focus a lot more on the negative things in life. Why? It’s quite simple: Because those are the things that require our attention. We want to get better, don’t we? The positive things are already good and probably more or less where we want them to be. We should use our energy to get the negative things where we want them to be. It is unproductive and not of much use to keep ourselves occupied with the positive things in life and allow ourselves to be blinded by those things. It just serves to paralyze us to some extent to address the real issues. The problem is that people willfully do this most of the time. People would rather fool themselves to feel good, instead of facing the problems.
I see it happening around me every day. And what this does is limit the speed at which things can get better in life. Afterall, as long as people keep focusing too much on the positive things, they don’t sufficiently realize the need and urgency to take on solving or improving the negative things. And this isn’t just about improving life in the broad sense, but it starts at home, at the workplace, on a personal level. Sometimes I see people putting too much emphasis on the things they have achieved so far and what they currently have, instead of putting the most emphasis on what they have not (yet) achieved and what they don’t (yet) have. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t give yourself a pat on the back when you achieve something, but you shouldn’t be blinded by it. Give yourself a pat on the back for a few minutes and then forget about it and see the things you haven’t yet achieved or the problems that still exist and do something about them.
The important thing is that you have to know what you want in life or in a given situation. And if you don’t have it yet, do everything you possibly can to get it. Don’t be afraid to admit to yourself that there are things you’ve lost or don’t yet have, but really want. Especially don’t do this to make yourself feel like you have (achieved) everything you want in order to feel happy about it. Don’t look at what you DO have and try to think about that in a positive way. It doesn’t benefit you in any real way, other than to give you comfort, and to try to make you feel satisfied.
Don’t fool yourself. Know what’s missing, what could be better and what’s wrong, and focus on those things! It will only make you a better person. Be honest to yourself and be realistic about your expectations.
February 5th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
I wouldn’t want to think always about the bad things of my life. The things I’ve already achieved give me the power and energy to try out other (yet negetive) things. Maybe it helps you and some people to focus on the negative aspects of your life. But I don’t think this way fits for all people. I like e.g. the quote: Always looking at the bright sides of life …
February 5th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Hi Jona, I just want to point out that it doesn’t mean that you should disregard the positive things. You should just not get too distracted by them.
For example, if I had a car accident, I could say “well, look at the bright side, although my car is badly damaged I did not get hurt myself “, and try to feel good about it afterall, but I can also say “it was my fault, I should have paid more attention and I would have seen the other car and wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place!” and focus more on my mistake and take it more seriously.
That causes me to try harder not to let it happen again. My experience so far is that I see people getting too distracted by the first positive option and as a result not taking (good enough) care of the real problem.
February 10th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Okay, I see your point now
February 17th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
I agree to this. “Be honest to yourself and be realistic about your expectations.”
But I do not agree to this. “Don?t look at what you DO have and try to think about that in a positive way.” You can still look at what you do have and be honst to yourself and then pursue what you do not have at the same time. These two are not contradictory to each other.
And sometimes it’s hard to pursue some goal (or dream) while you’re being very realistic about your expectations. Human beings have very sophisticated minds. It does not work only on positive ways or negative ways. Both sides should be balanced, to be a truly better person.
For me, if I just think about what I do not have and at what I am bad, without having confidence on myself about what I have and what I’m good at, I will be constantly unhappy and unsatisfied, and it will cause me to underperform, which will make me realize how bad I am again, causing me underperform again, on and on and on.
About the car accident example, I still think that I will be really grateful that I was not hurt even though the car was broken. I will only feel unhappy if I concentrate on the broken car, instead of me being all right. I will just feel thanksful that I’m all right, and if the accident was because of my fault, then I would have learned a great lesson, and I will be more careful and cautious from then on - Balance of positive and negative. If that accident was not by my fault, then what do I do? Blame the other driver or the situation and just feel bad about my broken car?
My friend had a big car accident on the highway recently because of one car lost the control and hit my friend’s car so suddenly from the side. Her car was grounded and totally broken, but she was fine. She had to spend a lot of money to buy a new car, but I am still grateful that she is just all right.
So, was it what you wanted to say - the balance of positives and the negatives? Or do you think people just focus on the positives?
February 18th, 2006 at 7:57 am
Hey Pretty, what an honor
so you said: “But I do not agree to this. ?Don?t look at what you DO have and try to think about that in a positive way.��? You can still look at what you do have and be honst to yourself and then pursue what you do not have at the same time. These two are not contradictory to each other.”
You are right in that they are not contradictory to eachother. But that’s the case mostly in theory. In reality, like I said in my post, most people get too distracted by what they do have, and the need to pursue better or more becomes of far less importance. The more people feel satisfied with what they have, the less they will realize the need to improve or the possibility for improvement. To want to improve means that you first have to essentially admit to yourself that you are not satisfied with where you are. This again means that you have to evaluate the negative aspects of your status quo to see how to make them better.
So I also agree that you should not completely disregard the positive things, you should just not focus too much on them. Be glad with what’s positive but focus A LOT more on the negative things.
And about the car accident, you can be glad about the fact that you didn’t get hurt, but you should not put too much emphasis on that when you know it’s your fault. You have to put the most emphasis on the negative side, the fact that you were not careful enough, in order to really want to improve. And the result is that you will feel bad about it, but that is the general idea.
And even if it wasn’t your fault, focusing more on the negative aspect will help more to come up with ways to try to avoid this in the future. Would you like to be lucky and not get hurt a second time because of someone else’s fault, or would you like to avoid it completely?
So yes, what I was trying to say is that people focus too much on the positive things, and this holds them and everyone else back most of the time. I don’t want a balance of positives and negatives, I want more positives! I realize it’ll never be 100% positive, but it will never stop me from trying to get closer.
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February 25th, 2006 at 8:49 am
You have an interesting point of view here. I hope you write more about this in the future. The world would be a better place if we fixed some things that are wrong instead of hiding our heads in the sand.
March 25th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
It’s refreshing to see someone that actually gets it. Well said Karol! I live my life in the manner you’ve described and wish there was a way to more easily convey this philosophy to others. For those reading, this actually does work. I’ve never felt more fulfilled by consciously addressing, taking responsibility for, and looking at ANYTHING that bothers me as an opportunity for improvement in any area of my life. Put your thoughts into motion and make it happen. If you don’t know how, find out how. Ask, read, surf and self-educate. Those that don’t take the bull in life by the horns are going to get gored. Following this path will make you the ultimate happiest person because within time there won’t be any negatives left that need addressing. And when it’s all said and done isn’t that really the meaning? Finding as much happiness as you possibly can is what it is all about. When you’re sitting there in your rocking chair in the sunset of your existence you want to feel like you really lived. You want to feel like you weren’t mired down in your own frustrations. You have the sense of accomplishment that you lived a better life than 90% of the sad world out there because you took responsibility to make it that way instead of complain about it. There are no guarantees of an after life. Spend your time here assuming that this is your one shot. You also never know when it will really end. If it were to end in 2 weeks for you, could you look back and feel satisfied? In life you ultimately can’t count on anyone but yourself. (Read that last line again.) The toughest part of what I’d like to say to anyone that accidentally finds this post is that perhaps the biggest crutch in life is actually your higher power. When you learn to walk on your own you become your own God and anything becomes possible. You have no one to blame for failure except yourself. Once you take your thoughts, good or bad, and put them into motion via a spoken or written word or physical movement you are writing your own destiny. Living life in this manner is like having a pack of batteries that auto charge for you. How can you not be totally jazzed about life when you wake up everyday and everything is as the way it should be. It allows you to have fun now. Don’t forget to equally balance all the major areas of your life for best possible results. How can we completely happy if the table our fruit sits on is wobbly or could fall over at the slightest bump? The ONLY enemy becomes TIME itself. This is something that we can not change. However, if you go through it constantly pursuing excellence for yourself and your family and even the world that you interact with, then you have lived the ultimate life. Cheers! ++ Revolutionary Enlightenment View++
myEnlightenment.com (I Just bought this 5 minutes ago!!)
June 25th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
[...] It’s so stupid it’s very disturbing to realize most people buy into this. According to The Law of Attraction, you should forget about your problems because if you think about them, you’ll only attract more problems into your life. But if there’s anything the universe or nature has taught us, it’s that opposites attract eachother. So if I think about my problems, shouldn’t I attract solutions? Strangely, The Law of Attraction wants us to think about positive things to change the negative things, and thus to create or attract positive things in our lives. But ofcourse, you can’t just think positive and hope to change something negative with it. If you want to turn a negative (bad) situation into a positive (good) one, you’re going to have to deal with the negative (bad) things and change them (make them positive (good)). You can’t ignore the negative things and just keep yourself busy with positive things and hope that the negative things will automatically turn positive. You’re going to have to concentrate or focus on them and put some effort into getting them positive. It’s just like in math, which is often called the language of nature. In math, you can’t multiply a negative number with a positive one, and hope to get a positive outcome. No no, you multiply the negative number by a negative number in order to get something positive out of it. This again shows that you’ll have to work with the negative to turn something negative to something positive. Now when you view the whole process, you might say that you’re overall doing something positive (good), because turning something negative (bad) to something positive (good) is a good (positive) thing to do. But take note of the fact that in the process, you’ll actually be focusing on the negative because that’s what you want to change. I wrote about this before. [...]
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:27 am
I find this converstation interesting, as there seems to be threads of truth on both sides of the debate of \”the power of positive thinking\” or \”the power of negetive thinking\”. My biggest concern on thinking about negetive things is that it seems to dominate most of our media and personal conversation. For the media, this is only done because that is what sells there products…., people like to read about negetive events or situations. Unfortunately, this is usually in the form of gossip and has little to do with \’fixing problems\’. People consume much time complaining about the weather, crime, goverment, work, etc. etc etc, usually, things out of their control or if within their control and influence, not something they are willing to help improve or correct.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Positive thinking is to feel better, otherwise you’ll be always depressed and that’s cournter productive. But for me positive thinking is also about how you solve your problems. Thinking of negative shouldn’t always mean feeling bad about it. I see it as a feedback. OK, I did something wrong but i’ll try to get smarter and avoid this mistake the next time. Often being depressed used to be a problem for me, now it’s not. So, I got a feedback, analyzed what makes me feel so, and took control over my emotions. There’s no contradiction between focusing on negative and feelnig good. Yeah, some things in the world are too awful to feel good when you see them, and even worse it’s not in your power to change them.
But you can change some piece of the world around you, and hopefully the others will learn doing it looking at you. So you’ll probably affect the whole world indirectly. 
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:14 pm
hmm i see some good points around here and will read all the Comments
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