It’s kind of amazing how much of a drug negativity can become for people. You see it in how everyone can immediately find common ground over a common enemy. Bad weather, a bad day, an illness, bad boss, or whatever.
I think ultimately it comes from two intense drives that we have: namely the desire for belonging and our monkey brain trying to find threats (real or perceived) to prepare and protect ourselves from.
It’s been common over history for people to band together over a scapegoat and all of us even have certain people(s) who we view as justified for blaming problems on which (we hate to admit) they had less control over than we perceived.
Out of those scapegoats you create a victimhood complex and a chip on their shoulder due to lack of self-esteem from the real and perceived slights that don’t make any rational sense to them as individuals.
The people focused on the negativity started scapegoating to try to claim power from their current powerless victimhood narrative. It’s an endless cycle that is seductively easy to get fixated on.
Whether you blame young people, old people, women, men, the jews, the fascists, or whatever boogeyman seems most applicable, the issues you have are often obviously more complex and often also have a great deal of factors within your own control that you are deciding to ignore for the sake of ease.
People are largely emotional actors who think they are acting rationally in the best interests of themselves or those around them. Fixating on the negative thing (lack of an outcome, the way someone disrespected you, mismatch of expectations vs reality, etc) is very easy to do and works in the same vain as over-planning works to prevent failure when you do choose to act.
Much like opting to have a bias towards action is rare, opting to have a bias towards positivity is similarly rare. I’m not saying to ignore recognizing patterns and be positive to your own self-detriment.
What I’m saying is it’s easy to accept the negative viewpoint and see yourself as a victim. It’s easy to become the person who things happen to because it relieves you of the burden of having to be the kind of person who is responsible for the life they are currently living.
In a world full of algorithms and media working to build negativity machines for increased attention, a worthwhile skill to learn is how to see the best in the current situation or how to turn things around.
The optimist isn’t the hopeless fool a pessimist smugly believes him to be. The pessimist is the troubled soul the optimist is hoping will one day realize lives in a cell of their own creation.