Negative, Positive

Recently I was told that I ``sound too negative on my blog'', or rather, I have a tendency to be all ranty and what-not instead of being thankful for the good things that have happened to me.

Honestly, that observation is correct. I do not have a legitimate reason to be pissy at life, with all things considered. I am gainfully employed, am happily attached with long-term plans of settling down, have interesting hobbies that I haven't really gotten bored with yet, and am generally contented with what life has thrown at me thus far.

But no one wants to read about how great someone else's life is! If anyone wanted to read that kind of drivel, it's probably better to look at Facebook and its ilk, where almost everyone self-selects their positive experiences in life to showcase to others.

That is, for those of you who haven't realised by now, the reason why I don't want to use the Facebook. Too phoney. Life isn't a bed of roses, but Facebook and other ``social media'' stuff skews the representation to the point where the ugly aspects of one-upmanship becomes the dominant factor, even if people aren't actively trying to outdo each other.

Actually, in the early days of the Facebook, people tend to be a bit more candid, showing a bit more of their ``other sides'' in a more personable sort of way, you know, the way a friend in the real world might share with others. Then it got opened up to the general public, and HR professionals start to apply the guilt by association fallacy and scan through all ``public'' information of their candidates, which led to a feedback loop where the whole sanitisation process/self-censorship process takes place, which in turn leads to the current behavior of only showing what is good in one's life.

So... in the bid to encourage people to put more of their information out there, we end up with people putting out only their most positive front. Maybe that's a backfire right there. Heheheheheh...

Anyway, yes, I have a tendency to not talk about the good things that happen to me. There are two reasons why, one more rational, the other more irrational.

The rational way of looking at it comes from a quote from Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

No, this isn't an academic blog, so I'm not going to go all out MLA/APA and cite sources. Suffice to say, what this means in context is that talking about good things is just plain boring -- the set of good things that can happen to someone is the same, while that of the not-so-good is very different.

The irrational way of looking at it is that I don't want to jinx myself.

I'll leave it as that for now. Till the next update.