There is a negativity bias in almost everything, which is worth keeping in mind when the usual suspects comment about people complaining. Things that are wrong are easier to spot. Take a bike trip to work one day and try to notice everything that is right. You would have to comment on almost everything. Those comments would be both pointless and useless. So negativity bias is not just on social media. Why would we go around commenting on the things that work? Maybe it’s worth doing sometimes just to remind yourself that things could be worse, but it makes no sense to pay equal attention to the things we don’t want to fix as to the things we want to fix. Evolution has spent millions of years making us almost perfectly adapted to our surroundings. It’s hard to increase that fitness but easy to lose it. Find something that really can increase our fitness as easily as the negative stuff can reduce it, and I suspect the negativity bias will disappear. You said it yourself. You posted something that people liked and your post went viral. It wasn’t negative, was it? Social media has brought us the ”influencer syndrome”, where influencers that have a lot of followers always feel like they need to keep posting interesting stuff. And if there isn’t anything interesting going on, they sometimes invent things. It can get really ugly if an influencer has Münchhausen by proxy, and posts about their kids disease and so on. Keeping them sick just to have things to post about. That is something I think we will be seeing a lot of, unfortunately. So maybe we should stop complaining about people who complain!
There is a negativity bias in almost everything, which is worth keeping in mind when the usual suspects comment about people complaining. Things that are wrong are easier to spot. Take a bike trip to work one day and try to notice everything that is right. You would have to comment on almost everything. Those comments would be both pointless and useless.
So negativity bias is not just on social media. Why would we go around commenting on the things that work? Maybe it’s worth doing sometimes just to remind yourself that things could be worse, but it makes no sense to pay equal attention to the things we don’t want to fix as to the things we want to fix. Evolution has spent millions of years making us almost perfectly adapted to our surroundings. It’s hard to increase that fitness but easy to lose it. Find something that really can increase our fitness as easily as the negative stuff can reduce it, and I suspect the negativity bias will disappear. You said it yourself. You posted something that people liked and your post went viral. It wasn’t negative, was it?
Social media has brought us the ”influencer syndrome”, where influencers that have a lot of followers always feel like they need to keep posting interesting stuff. And if there isn’t anything interesting going on, they sometimes invent things. It can get really ugly if an influencer has Münchhausen by proxy, and posts about their kids disease and so on. Keeping them sick just to have things to post about. That is something I think we will be seeing a lot of, unfortunately.
So maybe we should stop complaining about people who complain!