Ever run into these types of people?
Are you one??
My cousin goes so far over the end…bugs me to shit! BUGS BUGS ME!
Anyone in your life??
I try to be positive and I know its hard to always be positive but damn!! :eek:
You could explain what “negative people” means? Because it’s not a dictionary phrase, and it’s not obvious. As far as I know, you mean “people made of antimatter”. Which would be quite unfortunate in a universe made predominantly of positive matter.
Do you mean chronically depressed people? Pessimists? Haters? Cautious people? People not currently in a manic phase? They’re not all the same, and if you lump them together that says more about you than them.
Yes, I have run into these types of people and they are energy drainers. It is especially unfortunate if one is related to a negative type, as it’s very difficult to totally distance yourself from them.
I know! You are a subatomic particle in the hadron collider! Amarite?..
I almost married one. Nothing was ever good enough, everything came with complaints.
I was never so happy as when he moved out and to seal the deal and end any attempt at reconciliation, found a new girlfriend. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted.
Basically I look it is as this is MY life and I don’t have to spend a second listening to these negative people.
I will WALK away from them with their mouths still jabbering. They look shocked that I would do such a thing.
If someone has positive things to say, then I am happy to listen for hours.
Note: When I say negative, that means people who say hurtful negative things about me or never have anything good to say. That does not include someone sharing a problem they are having in their lives - maybe asking for my opinion as to what they should do, etc. Pretty much it is people who use the word “you” in a negative sentence that I don’t care to listen to.
I am like this in times of stress. My brain goes into hyper-problem-solving mode, and suddenly everything is a problem to be identified (verbally) and solved. It doesn’t feel negative to me, but it comes across that way and is really annoying to others. I don’t notice I’m doing it until it’s pointed out.
I work with a guy who is not happy unless he has something to complain about. Does that count?
well:eek::smack:
Negative people are people who always have negative thoughts.
I will never get married
I will never have children
That will never happen in my life time
I will die alone.
etc.
The particular thing that struck me wrong today is that
my cousin joined Match.com again the other day. Scoped out a guy she liked and sent him an email. OMG the guy came online without even contacting her! OMG, its all down hill from there. She is a very good looking woman. I have no idea why people dont write back but if you did not pay you cannot play.
So I told her that wait until Monday so he has a chance to be online for more than a few minutes!
She also says that guys are looking for younger women. At 56 she things she is too old…She doesnt look her age.
So anyway, get the idea??
My sister is a negative person too. With a slight twist that she thinks she knows it all.
My motto is “NEVER say never”
Big time!
It seems like all my cousin wants to do is play “poor me” and doesnt realize it! :smack:
:eek:
One of these days…POW in the kisser! 
Briefly dated one.
He was new to town, and seemed to be going through a rough patch, in that he didn’t like his job. (He was in visual design, so he often did contract work.) He thought the job was beneath him, and the people were unprofessional. Well, after showing up late to work three times in a week, he was let go.
Then he was upset that he was unemployed and didn’t know how he was going to pay his bills.
Less than a week later, he gets a new job, and then another one comes along shortly thereafter, so now he’s upset because he’s overworked.
Meanwhile, his parents ended up disowning him for some reason - I honestly don’t remember. And, he was having issues with his apartment. They were allegedly raising his rent, mid-contract. Whenever I explained to him that they can’t do that, he’d insist they were, but wouldn’t ever provide any proof.
A nice guy with an amazing body, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t exhausted after every time we spoke. Also, had a habit of posting a lot of shirtless pics to social media (he used to model). It only served to confirm my belief that people who plaster people’s feeds with pics like that are insecure and likely unhappy, seeking validation from others.
My father is a negative person. I was reminded of this recently when my aunt and uncle (his brother) visited and we were reminiscing about when I first sought my uncle’s advice about the prospect of going to medical school. My uncle remarked “your father didn’t think it was a good idea, did he?” I said, “he never thinks anything is a good idea.” My uncle said he had inherited this trait from their mother, which is interesting because I don’t remember my grandmother being a negative person.
One of my sister’s high school friends has a father who in middle age started buying rental properties, and is apparently quite successful now as a full-time landlord, with his own little real estate empire. My brother-in-law decided to try his hand at this, and met with the guy to develop a business plan. The guy had confidence in my brother-in-law and agreed to invest in him. I took a trip with my father in July, and he reminded me more than once of something I’d heard him say before, that when my brother-in-law was just starting out at this endeavor, he said to my father “I don’t even want to talk to you about it, 'cause you’re just going to tell me all the things that could go wrong.”
When I was 16, I decided I wanted to be a writer. Until that point, I had been a real underachiever, so some parents would be thrilled their kid had at least identified a goal. I had been a voracious reader as a young child, but starting in adolescence I became more interested in computers video games, and started failing classes at school because I just didn’t do homework. We fought many battles over homework for several years, with long arguments, shouting matches, meetings with teachers and guidance counselors, sessions with a psychologist, and tears all around. Then one day in 11th grade, I was in the library on a free period, and recognized the name “Jerry Pournelle” on the spine of a science-fiction novel, because he was a columnist for BYTE magazine (yeah, I was that much of a geek.) On a whim, I pulled it off the shelf and started reading–and it was as though I’d had an epiphany. I started reading for pleasure again. I started enjoying reading the great works of literature we had to read for English class, enjoying following the author’s train of thought, improving my vocabulary, learning new words and constructions. I took pleasure in writing essays for school, delighted in constructing a particularly witty turn of phrase, setting down in permanent form thoughts more complex and profound than I could hold in my head or speak in conversation, imagining my reader following along and being piqued and stimulated by my insights. My teachers complimented me on my writing style, and I got into honors English for 12th grade. I was constantly jotting down ideas for short stories and novels in the margins of notebooks.
I decided to share with my parents, the two most influential people in my life, naive and optimistic young kid that I was, that I had finally found my calling. My father’s reponse: “Heh! A writer? Do you know how many people want to be writers? EVERYBODY’S trying to get a book published! Remember that guy Joe Smith who did some work for me downtown? He spent 3 weeks writing an article, and sold it to a magazine for a hundred bucks! You wanna make a hundred bucks every 3 weeks? The only way to get something published is to know someone in publishing. You know anyone in publishing?” Now, I realize you don’t want to give your kid false hope–of course, there are many more kids who want to be pro ball players than are good enough even to play at the college level, let alone make it in the pros–but that was extremely deflating, coming from my own father. I vowed that if I ever had kids, I would never say anything like that to them. I never did try to become a writer.
My father’s own livelihood was as a home-remodeling contractor, and while he did very high quality work, he was not good at the business end of things, and did not make much money at it. Also, he longed to have a salary and benefits. So when I was a teenager, he briefly explored other options. He had always liked history, so he decided to investigate the possibility of becoming a high school social studies teacher. He made an appointment to meet with a professor in the education department at a local college to determine the feasibility of this endeavor. I remember being told, when he got back, that this person had essentially told him that it wouldn’t work and he couldn’t do it. That was that. I thought no more of it, and didn’t think to question it. But years later, in my thirties, having lost that youthful naivete, more worldly-wise, with more life experience under my belt, I was ruminating on the past as I’m wont to do, and a thought struck me that had never occurred to me before: that “it won’t work, you can’t do it” might have been my father’s own spin on what the education professor had told him, rather than what he actually said. I’m not saying I can know for sure, but it’s possible this person had simply laid out the pros and cons impartially, described possible difficulties or obstacles, so my father could make an informed decision, and my father’s interpretation of this, what he came home telling us he had taken away from the meeting, was that it wouldn’t work and he couldn’t do it. Because he’s a negative person.
I’m almost forty, unmarried and childless, but I still want to have children if only so I can be a positive father.
No.
My mother.
If my mother won $1 million in the lottery this week she would bitch that if would have been better to have won $1.5 million next week.
She is never happy, never.
This is a true momma tale.
One day when my niece was about 17 or 18, she came over my mother’s house and said she was going to clean the kitchen as a surprise for her grandmother and to show appreciation for everything she has done for her.
My niece spent several hours scrubbing and cleaning. She washed the floors, the walls, the baseboards, the window, dusted the light bulbs, polished and shined the appliances, wiped down all the cabinets, cleaned them out, and replaced the shelf paper.
When she was done the kitchen sparkled.
My mother walks in from shopping and asks me who cleaned the kitchen. I told her my niece did. My mother got that weird smile she gets and she started inspecting the kitchen, looking for something, anything to bitch about.
When she looked out the window she got that satisfied smile on her face. I knew my niece had washed the window, and dusted the sill, there was not a speck of dirt to be found.
Then mother says, with her haughty nose in the, ‘WELL! Didn’t she look out the window? Didn’t she see all those leaves out there? If she really wanted to do something to make me happy she should have raked the leaves!’.
My niece was crushed.
And my mother wonders why nobody ever does anything for her.
Look.
I don’t care WHAT you’re selling. You can’t Always be positive. And that person there? They can’t Always be negative.
If Either of you are, you are mentally ill or well on your way to it.
One of the true things that Seinfeld mentioned decades ago was “Serenity Now” (with insanity later implied). You can’t bottle all of that shit up inside you to force out some Polly Pure-Bread Smile or tears when you can’t handle it, or you are going to go fucking insane.
Conversely, you can’t be 24-7 some hateful shit-spewing M-effer or you are Already insane.
Healthy people find a Medium Point between the two… and while the line graph may have hills and valleys, they know and do come back to that medium point. In math, some people call that average… a Norm.
…And some people call that… drum roll …Normal…
And what did mom say?
Are you still writing?
It’s never too late. I’m finally pursuing my dream of fiction writing and I need it like air. I love talking about it. PM me any time. Need a beta reader? I’m here for you.
Whether I am negative or positive depends wildly on my mood, and it can really shift dramatically due to major depressive disorder. No matter what dark pit I’m in I try to make it a point not to be critical or hurtful toward other people. But in terms of my general orientation toward existence, I can be wildly optimistic or crushingly cynical about the prospect of life depending on whether I am in a healthy state of an unhealthy one.
To give an example of the range, here, in a thread about our general feelings toward people, I wrote
About four weeks ago, I had the following messenger conversation with a friend:
[contains SPOILERS about the Stephen King novel, The Long Walk]
That dark part of me is one I rarely convey with others, but this Friend also has depression and knew exactly how I felt so there was no need to sugarcoat things.
These are both pretty fundamental parts of my personality. I can’t say one is less authentic than the other, though I can certainly say one is more useful.
FTW.
Mmm. Dealing with a negative person is difficult. Sometimes you just walk away and avoid that person until they show a change.
But often - as elegantly described in the above posts - that person is a relative or a friend. You are touched by their dark view of the world and cannot easily walk away. Such people tend to be so bitter and cynical that it is exhausting to talk to them.
If the cynical person is close and you care about them, it is possible to probe deeper into their thoughts and develop a mutual understanding. This takes time possibly weeks or months but it can be vastly enriching for you both.
The strategy to begin with is “reflective listening” Empathy Movement - Reflective-Listening. The idea is that instead of arguing with a person, you repeat back what they have just said. Ideally you use slightly different words so you don’t sound like an echo.
I have used it often and its surprising how people will open up.
After doing that for a bit, you introduce examples or ideas which seem like exceptions to the statements but in areas the person likes. Eg. “Donald Trump is a fine candidate.” Repeat. Then muse “Its odd though. Can a President really ask Russia to hack emails?”.
After building trust you may eventually hear what deeply troubles this person and it may be events 50 years ago but they are still real today.