A quick chat with friends, and a couple of overheard conversations sparkled it all.
The chat was about how no one wants to be dragged into the downward vortex of negativity, we all heard it hundreds of times, I have been actively portraying the idea for like 20 years now, and yet, hearing it back chewed and served as a mainstreamized concept, scared me, for the first time in 20 years.
See, when avoiding negativity is a niche concept everything goes well, but making it mainstream could be going a little too far: we now want movies where we can have a laugh about anything, whether it’s cancer or other small and large dramas of life, we want to pretend that negativity doesn’t affect us, in fact, we want to pretend that it doesn’t take any part of our life at all.
Can pushing it this far have negative consequences like, I don’t know, teaching us how to not ever face problems? To the point of affecting our ability to do so? That’s a question…
Can it make us less likely to spend time with those friends who tend to bring their problems to our table, and can in turn make us less willing to share ours?
Check out this thought provoking french clip…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxVZYiJKl1Y]
Now… this was only the first part of the reasoning.
What really happened next is that I realized: if I noticed could be a potential problem, and the author of the clip above noticed it before me, we may be about to reach a tipping point in the constant fluctuation of our culture through the decades… in a few years, we may be reaching a point where many other people will start to get tired of this happiness at all costs…
What if, in reaction to a decade of deliberate lightness of spirit and forceful positivity, we will wake up one day in 2020 thinking “hey, I miss the ability to face my problems”, or that warm feeling of sitting on a chair and being… SAD, if only for a little while… what if this, in reaction was to become a new wave of Sadness-at-all-costs?
Ok, this is a little bit of a heavy finale for a post, but the idea is that maybe if we see it coming we we still have time to find our own balance before reaching that tipping point, and before igniting a chain of overreactions!
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