Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

>But today, you can be stressed out about Trump or COVID-19

Stress has nothing to do with it. I can agree that stress rarely has application in our modern day lives. You can be a stress-free negative thinker and also it is possible to be a stressed positive thinker. (positive thinkers fail more, it is possible for that to have an impact on people)

>becomes grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression

Again, none of these are necessities to be a negative thinker.

>Most things to be negative about are not actionable.

That is correct. It is undeniable that negative people are not very effective in our world. Even further - all negative philosophies and religions (Buddhism, stoicism, western pessimism, etc.) focus people on enlightenment and perfecting the person's inner world. A monk has zero interest in changing the world at scale.

However it seems to me that there are certain practicalities about negative thinking. You can be smart with it. If you take it at face value - negative thinking is kind of a superpower, it allows you to think what can possibly go wrong and frequently you more cautious than you had to be. You can use that to minimize risks and if successful - you can take actions, because the risk is no longer that high.

[0] https://www.kindspring.org/story/view.php?sid=63753

You know those games where you select the phrases you want your character to say, and certain phrases lead you to different scenarios ?

Games like Detroit become human.

All those choices form a tree where each choice is a branching point. What I've found in RL is that negative actions generally lead to smaller paths in the "choice tree", which is generally no fun and you don't learn and enrich your brain with new information. As in video games, I want to explore all the branches, but you usually can't repeat a choice in real life, so I end up exploring the biggest path that coincides with my preferences, which is the the one with the most content that I like and, coincidentally, most of the times, this is a path that has a good balance of negativity, positivity and neutrality.

So yeah, tldr is: I see some actions in my life as actions in a story branching video game, and I actively look out for actions that give me the longest path in the "action tree" of stuff that I like to do, that indirectly makes me a "balanced" but active person.

I became a more neutral person over years...I accept things as they are and don't complain about things were complaining won't have an impact (yes, stoicism played a role here).

I will be honest and say that I live in a well functioning country with a good job and a decent salary... that being said, so do some of my friends but they like to be negative and do negative spins on things.

There is an overall shift in people to be negative and to search for gotch ya moments. I accept it but I refuse to take a part of it, which means active self reflection as it is very easy to "go there".

Probably unpopular option, inspired by NNT, is to straight go to the "go f... yourself" when someone obviously is taking the most negative aspect of an opinion and is try to hook you for his own "gotchya moment". This cuts through the charade and illusion of respect when in fact the other person is not giving any.

There's also a great question to ask yourself even before those: is it worth it?

A lot of times just ignoring improvements you can see/sense is the right call. Every time you bring up a suggestion (whether it is to a teammate or to yourself) your are affecting the environment in ways that can compound. For instance:

- You may break the creation flow, interrupting the far more important "advancing to the greater goal" by perfecting a middle-step that matters much less and can be easily corrected afterwards if need be.

- You are de-valuing your future suggestions/feelings, because the more stuff you bring up, the less weigh they get in the long run.

- You risk lowering your teammate's confidence / degrading your relationship (just like you were doing in your story).

If you are one of these people who just cannot "let something go", what you can do is write that thing down. Just make a note "revisit X thingy" and come back to it later when the rest is done/clear. This should allow you to actually move forward towards the "big picture" with a clearer mind (i.e.: without having that thread stuck wasting effort on what you just "ignored").

Finally, if the issue is important enough that it requires solving to advance, another great attitude is to ask yourself "how can we make this work?" instead of stopping at "this doesn't work because X".

Propose things even if you can see they don't completely solve the issue. This fosters a collaborative building attitude where you can fill in your teammate's blanks and vice-versa. Simply stating what doesn't work shuts down idea sharing and limits the team's creativity to that of the individuals, instead of the (oftentimes much greater) sum of the team.