Last week in the newsletter, I posted the following as one of my brief thoughts:
Generalized Negativity Disorder. An unpleasant condition characterized by: high levels of complaining, venting, and gossip; a strong tendency to ruminate and dwell on what has or might go wrong (while stubbornly avoiding considering what might go well); an overarching instinct to criticize, judge, and find fault with other people and ideas; and a powerful proclivity to drain rather than give energy to those around them. In my experience, it’s incurable. But we can become more compassionate toward these folks by considering that, deep down, all that negativity is a protective mechanism evolved not only to shield them from being disappointed by others, but more fundamentally, to shield themselves from the disappointment of their own abandoned potential—an idea that should give us all pause to reflect on ourselves.
I had a lot of people write in either confused, angry, worried, or some mixture of them all. Some said they were worried they suffered from it and asking what they should do about and if it was really incurable. Other people said they disliked the idea because it felt too negative. A couple people even told me they googled chronic negativity disorder and were surprised when they didn’t find it in the DSM!
Let me make a few points to try and clarify what was likely an ill-conceived scheme from the beginning.
1. There is no such thing as generalized negativity disorder
There’s a reason I don’t write about mental health diagnoses: Our tendency (desire?) is to take things like horoscopes, Enneagram numbers, and labels of all sorts much too seriously—as if they were real things in the world, rather than what they are: occasionally useful fictions and heuristics.
I described the supposedly incurable generalized negativity disorder because that’s how many of us perceive other people—as hopelessly and essentially negative. And it’s this act of perceiving others as negative that sets up the real point of my post, which we’ll get to in #2 below.
Still, you might be asking yourself:
Aren’t there people like this—constantly complaining, hypercritical, and invariably pessimistic?
In my 41 years, I’ve met two people who, in my experience of them, perhaps fit this fabricated and extreme construct of generalized negativity disorder. They complained almost constantly, literally never had anything positive to say, and were extremely draining to be around. But the existence of people like this doesn’t validate the construct—it just means I’ve met a couple really negative people in my day.
As to their negativity being incurable, in both of these cases, the individuals had almost zero awareness of the fact that their negativity was extreme or unusual. For them, it felt completely normal, justified, and even good. In technical terms, their negativity was ego-syntonic, not ego-dystonic, which just means they didn’t see it or feel it as a problem. And as a rule, people are unlikely to try and fix something that they don’t see as a problem, hence the incurable part. An implication of this, by the way, is that if you are painfully aware of the fact that you are sometimes or even frequently overly-negative, hypercritical, or pessimistic, that suggests a lot of potential for change—and working on mental boundaries is a good place to start.
But again, I wrote this post for the person who perceives extreme negativity in others and the work it suggests the perceiver needs to do (not the negative person), which brings us to my second point.
2. Reframing character flaws as defense mechanisms
What we typically perceive as personality traits or character flaws (e.g. extreme negativity) are often better thought of functionally as defense mechanisms. This is not a new idea. In fact, it was one of Freud’s greatest insights and contributions to psychology. People aren’t negative because they’re trying to be a bummer; they’re negative because that negativity is doing a job—it’s functional.
One suggestion I made in the original post is that chronic negativity often functions as a “protective” mechanism against disappointment. If someone had an early history, for example, of being painfully disappointed by important people in their life, they might unsurprisingly go on to develop a set of habits designed to avoid future disappointments—like catastrophizing and expecting the worst. Over the decades, those habits can become calcified into what we perceive as personality traits or even character flaws. But we should resist this interpretation, and instead, learn to see functionally: every “bad behavior” is doing a job; and I believe we become better people—more compassionate, more flexible, and wiser—by resisting the pull to label other people, and instead, to view their behavior functionally.
Appearances can be deceiving. And what this post was trying to do through irony (but probably failed at) was to encourage us to stop putting people in boxes—ourselves included.
3. Fear of ambition is the real enemy
In the last part of the post, I suggested that while fear of disappointment might be one explanation for someone’s chronic negativity, a deeper, more interesting, and ultimately more harmful fear driving that negativity could be the fear of our own denied potential. Because, I would argue, even if we don’t use chronic negativity to defend against our own fear of ambition, we use something else: Chronic Anger, Chronic Productivity, Chronic Worry, Chronic Humor, Chronic Video Games, Chronic Niceness, Chronic Overeating. The specific content doesn’t matter. What’s important is that any time we perceive someone else as being too anything, it’s an opportunity to look more carefully at ourselves—to acknowledge how, in some way, we’re exhibiting the exact same psychological dynamic, and to use that insight to spur growth, awareness, and compassion in ourselves.
Now, some of you might be reading that statement and saying to yourself:
Well, I’m an ambitious person so this doesn’t apply to me.
Hopefully, this whole essay has shown that that way of thinking is exactly what I’m talking about in the previous points: using labels to avoid looking carefully at a deeper psychological truth, which is that even if you are indeed ambitious in some part of your life and getting close to your potential, you are almost certainly unambitious in others. We all are.
I frequently work with clients, for example, who are highly ambitious and successful in their professional lives but shockingly unambitious in their interpersonal lives. They made partner at 29, or started a business worth tens of millions of dollars, but alienated the love of their life along the way. It’s not that they didn’t have ambitions for being a great spouse—it’s precisely because they had such great and terrifying ambitions for being a spouse that they ignored, suppressed, denied, and eventually sabotaged those very ambitions. In fact, in many cases like this, their professional ambition itself was actually an elaborate defense mechanism to avoid confronting their relational ambition and the fear of intimacy and vulnerability that often goes along with it.
Is this always the case—that your ambition is actually some subtle Freudian defense mechanism? Of course not. But if you think you don’t have a fear of being ambitious in at least some aspect of your life, you’re being just as naive as the person who willingly accepts a label like chronic negativity disorder. Both are an abdication of the responsibility to do the hard work of knowing ourselves—especially our fears and the defensive patterns they elicit.
What I learned writing about generalized negativity disorder
Compression is powerful but risky. Part of the appeal of the Brief Thoughts segment of the newsletter is to compress an essay’s worth of information into a paragraph. When it works, this information density is attractive (most of the value and information at a fraction of the words/read time). But it also risks making things more confusing and even creating negative value via misconception. I’m going to be more careful with these brief thoughts in the future.
Irony is similarly powerful but risky. When it works, it encourages us to work through multiple (sometimes conflicting) layers of meaning and arrive at a richer understanding. It can also backfire and lead to, again, confusion or even internalizing unhelpful ideas. I don’t usually do this in my writing, but for whatever reason, I tried it here. Of course, I mostly heard from the folks for whom it did not work, and maybe a lot of you simply appreciated it and moved on. But either way, irony is not very “on brand” for me and this newsletter, so I’ll probably steer clear of it in the future.
Finally, if you found this whole generalized negativity disorder thing confusing, I am sorry about that. I should have anticipated that as a pitfall. I should also be more aware of one of my own defensive tendencies—wanting to appear clever and smart—and be careful not to let it impact my work.
Works in progress, all of us.
Onward.
