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“…all my friends in New York define themselves by what they hate,” says Lena
Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath, on Girls.
“I don’t even know what any of my friends like. I just know what they don’t like….”
Take a minute to really think about this observation.
Now think about three people you know relatively well.
How much of what they like do you intuit from a clear understanding of what they don’t like?
Or who they don’t like.
Do we reject more than we embrace?
Do we define ourselves—do we ‘make ourselves great’ (or simply, ‘make ourselves’)—by belittling, denigrating, de-valuing, or otherwise taking issue with things we dislike more often than we affirm aspects of life we value and appreciate?
Is defining self through critical appraisals of ‘Others’ simply a function of identity construction in the 21st century?
Positive psychologists would caution us to beware of such mental habits. Emphasizing the negative, especially in the construction of identity-narratives, may well jeopardize our ability to arrive at feelings of contentment, happiness, and well-being. A critical gaze (and the cognitive predilections and concomitant emotional states that accompany it) is simply not in keeping with the joyfulness and sense of fulfillment most of us orient our lives around achieving.
Evolutionary psychologists might, on the other hand, challenge the extent of our ability to choose to think positively, querying whether happiness and well-being are necessarily in keeping with evolutionary agendas. Consider: if emotions orchestrate behaviors that maximize evolutionary aims, of what benefit is happiness? Is it incidental? Perhaps it is linked, in our brains, to whatever the individual / species defines as “good.” (And perhaps good = defining and rejecting differences in Others that might threaten the cohesion, even the survival, of the group.)
The implications of this warrant consideration: What happens when “good” applies only to a particular sub-group, such as heterosexuals, or Christians, or even just the popular clique?
Further still, what happens when our world becomes so overwhelmingly complex that the sorting and classifying of information—the cognitive processing that results in stereotyping—increasingly dominates our mental functioning?
It is hardly a stretch to argue that the routinization of negative thinking sets the stage for rejection, humiliation, and bullying. And, while culture professes (on multiple platforms) to have taken a stance against emotional violence, more and more of our political (and personal?) rhetoric belies such a commitment—or perhaps, belies our ability, on an evolutionary, neuro-biological level, to hold firm to positive, inclusive principles.
Think about it.
How you define yourself in the world?
Is it predominantly in terms of what you like, or what you reject?
And how is it that you have come to these mental ‘habits’?
