he had posted in his austere monk’s quarters, right on the door so he’d notice it on the way out of his room. See the good, it said.
See the good. How many of us train our eye to see the good? How many of us train our ear to hear the good? And how often, in our daily rush of bad news, bad politics, and bad hair days, does the mind incline itself toward what’s already good?
Let me ask another question: Did you know that most people, most of the time, actually treat each other pretty okay?
Soaked as we all are in the constant onslaught of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, pasting our eyeballs to the next terrible thing that’s happening somewhere in the world, we forget that most people, most of the time, actually treat each other with relative care, with pretty decent okayness. Right now, people are yielding at yield signs. Right now, people are giving up their seats on the bus. Right now, mothers are loving their children. Right now, doctors are taking care of patients and shopkeepers are smiling at customers and people are giving to food banks and somewhere someone is meditating, letting their wholesome states of mind arise and flourish.
But did you know that Americans today think violent crime has risen in the past three decades?
And did you also know that violent crime has actually dropped in the last three decades?
The truth of the matter is that the world is all things—an incredibly complex, nearly hallucinogenic presencing of sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings, impressions, sensations—and our mind, this lightning-quick organizer of energetic influxes, makes sense of all this complexity with a handful of limiting but mostly useful shorthands that reduce it all into meaningful, workable sound bites.
But what if the mind is getting it wrong? More to the point, what if the mind is being duped by clickbait, by ad copy, by the pressurized insistence of a multinational media complex that needs you to look and look and look, and doesn’t care a wit about how you feel about what you look at—as long as you just keep looking? And all this grasping for your attention ties right into a very human foible psychologists call negativity bias.
Have you heard about negativity bias? This is one of those classic psychology terms that, when you understand it and start to live the implications, can really change your life. Here’s the deal:
Negativity bias is the simple but powerful idea that we, as humans, are more likely to see what’s bad than what’s good. Why? Most likely it’s evolution. Evolution doesn’t care whether you’re happy. Evolution just cares whether you pass genes along. And so if you’re living in a jungle with a bunch of attack cats and poisonous snakes, better to be on high alert all the time, and a little stressed out, than relaxed and happy and dead at sixteen.
Maybe all that made sense ten thousand years ago. But these days, with the advent of the information age, our negativity bias is continually enforced. You turn on the TV and there’s a news report of some meaninglessly gruesome murder that happened in a quiet South Carolina town two thousand miles away. And then you go on Facebook and read about how the .01 percent are raking in huge dollars while the rest of us fight for scraps. And then you Netflix a bunch of crime shows and horror flicks and serial dramas where nothing ever resolves. And then you get an email about something going wrong at your job, and a text from your dad saying he’s getting a CAT scan, and a friend sends you the latest apocalyptic account of what global warming might bring. And on and on and on. Which means your negativity bias is being confirmed and confirmed and confirmed and confirmed, until all you see when you look out at the world is people doing bad stuff and the planet going up in flames.
But here’s the thing. As I just said: most people most of the time actually treat each other pretty okay. And though we are in the midst of an ecological crisis that needs to be addressed yesterday (or ten years ago), we can still train the mind to look, right now, in this present moment, at everything that is going right. Not because we are trying to fool ourselves. But because we have already been fooled, and we need to reset the focus and look with fresh eyes at what