On [the not-so-fine art of] negativity and the importance of hedging your bets

After my last post, I was asked this: ‘are all your posts going to be so negative?’ From the falling intonation and the forlorn look on my interlocutor’s face, I think she was somewhat disappointed with my, uh, ‘tone’ in my last offering.

A few days later, I was asked an almost identical question, yet with a completely different look and sound of expectation and delight: ‘are all your posts going to be about complaining and the things that people do to annoy you?’ This time it was said with rising intonation and a look of ‘oh, please, more, more, more!’

I said something like ‘most probably.’

She broke into a wide smile and started rubbing her hands with glee. A fellow misanthrope!

Hey, you can’t please everyone

“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”

Schopenhauer

“Have I not the reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.”

William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating

Loyal and regular readers dating back to the early days of the Layman’s Guide, from early 2009, will of course be aware of my fondness for grouching and groaning. I don’t know how many times I have referred to or mentioned one of my seemingly endless pet hates/peeves in these pages and I have often been asked whether I’d ever put them all into one post for convenience’s sake. So I started compiling them all into one list, gradually adding to them over the years, until they reached well into the hundreds. I never got round to that particular post, probably because it would have turned into a 20,000 word diatribe against humanity and been the most doom and gloom-ridden, miserable piece of writing in existence. Better to do it piecemeal, I think, sprinkling in my grumblings as and when they happen. I rail against technology, people’s behaviour, politeness, manners, cars, public transport, customer service, cafés…nothing and no one is off limits from my wrath.

It’s a fine art, I’d like to think. Or maybe it’s not so fine and not even an art.

I have a simple philosophy – or so I think – when it comes to this. A certain amount of negativity is part of human nature, but we all respond to it, deal with it and feed off of it in different ways. I’m sure for many it’s not even noticeable or it gets blocked out of our minds. There are times when we feel the need to whinge, or get things off our chest. I am perfectly fine and even rather enjoy listening to other people moan about stuff, as long as it’s cathartic and productive. Those are the keys for me, especially the catharsis part.

That, and moderation. You can’t overdo it, and you have to pick and choose your battles. Like anything else in life, moderation is the key, whether it’s eating, drinking or grumbling. Or gambling.

Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, listed his 13 virtues for leading a good life. Among them, 

9. MODERATION: avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

For a slightly more modern-day take on this, Oliver Burkeman captures so much of this sentiment in his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. A great read, and one I re-read last year.

And this Oatmeal comic, on the futility of pursuing ‘happiness’, is splendid as well.

In all of the endless reading I’ve done on neuroscience, how the brain works and behavioural economics, I’ve come to realise that we’re all wired differently. We all respond to situations in different ways. For some, unpleasant situations and unpleasant people just wash right over us. When someone lets a door fly in their face or almost gets wiped out by a car ignoring a red light, they just shrug it off and don’t let it faze them. Any displeasure or agitation is brushed aside, responded to positively and then life goes on.

For others, the story is different.

It all boils down to this, for me: one of my guiding principles is to ‘question everything’. If there is something that upsets or irritates me, I want to, first and foremost, understand why it might have happened, what prompted such-and-such person to be such a nasty SOB. I can respond in a variety of ways, but it’s usually a passive-aggressive one. Sometimes it’s effective, as in this example:

Bad things happen on public transport, we all know this. Journeys are usually fine but very often they’re not. It’s all part and parcel of life in a big city, right? Hell, I’ve written about this ad infinitum, but here’s just one more. Many, many months ago, as happens so often, I was aggressively and forcibly shoved aside in the metro while trying to get onto the escalator by a little old granny clutching her 4-year old granddaughter’s hand. As anyone who lives in Kyiv can attest, some of the grannies here are fierce, nasty creatures. This was one of them. I visibly made my annoyance clear and muttered something sarcastic (in English). The little girl looked concerned, and then turned to her granny and said something like (I’m not sure, my Russian’s pretty spotty) ‘granny that man looks upset/unhappy, why did you push him?’ and she muttered ‘oh to hell with him, he’s just a grouch anyway, for goodness sakes, kid, look at his face, he’s a miserable old git’, while I silently stewed and cursed the world, and the granny. But then the little girl turned to look up at me on the escalator and said, as meek as a mouse, ‘sorry’, with the saddest little face. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll turn out to be more polite, more courteous and more respectful to her fellow human beings than her miserable old biddy of a granny.

One can hope, anyway.

I embody the approach of Anders Frisk, the former Swedish referee, who though spoke good English – as FIFA referees are supposedly required to do – used to berate and shout at players in Swedish. He said something to the effect of, ‘they may not understand what I’m saying, but they know exactly what I’m trying to say. They get it.’ I figure the same holds true when I chastise and spew invectives at anyone who dares affront me.

The other aspect to whingeing is that, as they say, ‘misery loves company’. When something bad happens to me, I want to share it – selectively, let me remind you, we can’t overdo it – with someone to see if they’ve either experienced it too, or whether they’ve got any profound insight into why and how this happened. In my ongoing quest to understand humanity, and people’s motivations, I might just get a bit closer to understanding more about our purpose on this planet. My insatiable curiosity is, more than anything else, the prime driver that fuels my negativity. If I can go some ways into figuring out why this stuff happens then that’s one more step into understanding the world a bit better. I really want to know the whys of why people let doors slam in your face, why they can’t say please or thank you or why they walk around in their little bubbles, insouciant to your presence or oblivious to the world around them.

And, in the interests of consistency and biblical ethics – ‘do unto others as they would do unto you’ – I love hearing tales of woe from others. Not so that I can revel in their misfortune, but so that I know I’m not alone, and that together we can try to make sense of why these things happen, and why so many people treat each other with such little respect. And because I find this stuff so damn fascinating.

I put it all down to trying to garner some insight into the human condition. Who are we, why do we act the way we do and where are we going?

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates

“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.”

William Hazlitt

All of this was meant to be a prelude to a major gripe I wanted to share. But seeing as I’m well over my word count already, let me save that for my next post. That will be part 2.

A Christmas music update

On 7 February, ‘Last Christmas’ was blaring in the local square from a carousel. Yesterday, 11 February, Christmas music was playing at a café where we were having breakfast. I mean, seriously – with Valentine’s Day mere days away, even Celine Dion or some other schmaltz would have been an upgrade.

I wonder whether any of the waitstaff even noticed or were aware of this. Don’t you figure that someone would have said ‘hey, hang on, why are we playing Christmas music still?’ Maybe they were afraid of the boss, who was in charge of music and is some Christmas-music loving junkie. Isn’t a waiter or waitresses’s primary responsibility to notice stuff? Like, when you might need something? Or when something is amiss or slightly awry? I’ve always maintained that a waiter/waitress is like a good football referee: though they should be noticing you, the participants/the players, we shouldn’t notice them. If they do their jobs perfectly, seamlessly, then everything flows and it’s like they weren’t even there.

Unless we’re talking about Anders Frisk.

And, at long last, the final instalment of this season’s cat & wife football gambling extravaganza

Damn it, the cat beat me into 2^nd place. I was one game ahead of the little shit, and I made my choices – Patriots (-4) and the under on points (48.5). She astutely went against me and pulled it off. What can I say, I’m a sucker. Olya clobbered both of us but I was at least hoping for some consolation.

Here’s a valuable lesson in the world of gambling and/or investing: hedging your bets is usually, almost always, a pretty good idea. I used to have one cardinal gambling rule: never bet on your team. Even better is not to bet on your team at all, but in the rare cases you do, bet against them. That way, if they lose, at least you get the consolation of winning a bit of cash to offset the pain. But if you bet on them and they – and you – lose, that’s a nasty double whammy. I’m not sure which loss was the more agonizing for me here.

Onto next season. Only 7 months away.