Do you surround yourself with overly positive people? That’s good! … right? You know these people. These are the people who appear to be kind and helpful, they are dreamers and always think of the possibilities; they are the glass-half-full type of people.
But when you actually surround yourself with these people, you can’t shake this underlying feeling that something is off. In this post, I’m going to talk about the excessively positive people in your life, and how a true optimist is one that embraces reality rather than masks it with happy thoughts.
Why Overly Positive People Exist
This post isn’t to trash-talk overly positive people, rather it’s a warning to look out for them because they can drag your life down.
But how can that be if they are so nice? Well, let’s look at the reasons why overly positive people even exist.
Our world is inherently negative, right? Wrong. Our world appears to be inherently negative. It appears this way because our internal ego (all the negative aspects of ourselves) projects its negativity onto the world.
People might see as they get older, life just gets harder. If you read my post about dating in your 20s, I talk about this thing called “entropy”; this is the natural declining nature of life. We live and we die.
Some may view this as negative. They see the duality of it: Living is good, dying is bad. So it is easy to assume that life is just one big negative sad drama, and if we don’t remain overly optimistic or positive about it, then we are doing everyone a disservice.
I mean, how many seminars, or business mixers have you been to where everyone is trying to get hyped up on positivity, as if they took some sort of happy drug and if you dare frown or make a small pragmatic observation, the whole crowd will turn on you for being a Debbie Downer.
The world is neither good nor bad, it is neutral. What determines the quality of our life is the lens through which we see it. This is the truth of the phrase, “life is what you make it.”
The first step to becoming a true optimist is to see life from a realistic perspective.
What Overly Positive People Get Wrong About Life
As people grow spiritually, they become more sophisticated. They become better at reading people and seeing the full context of a situation. In other words, your intuition to know truth (reality) from falsehood (non-reality) becomes stronger.
As your intuition grows, one thing you start to notice is that the things people say are a reflection of their inner thoughts and feelings.
If someone complains about their friends or family, it’s more of a reflection of the person complaining than the friends or the family.
Some people get very good at hiding their internal thoughts and beliefs by verbalizing the opposite of how they feel. For example, an angry or depressed person might appear as an overly positive person and say things like: “C’mon guys, don’t be negative.” “I don’t like to surround myself with negative people.” “Why do you look so angry all the time.” “You just gotta work on having a positive mindset.”
These overly positive individuals would be wise to take their own advice. Why is that? The reason they feel the need to verbalize these things is because they are battling their own inner negativity.
They believe that by changing their thoughts to be more positive, it can make up for the constant barrage of negative thoughts that plague them constantly.
Now, this isn’t a “Haha, I’m better than you because I don’t have the need to use optimistic words all the time.” No, there are definitely plenty of negative people who also verbalize negative words.
If you are human, you have an ego, and if you have an ego, you feel negative inside. However, if you are a human, you also have a soul, and if you have a soul, you also feel loving inside. The degree to which the ego or soul dominates internally depends on how advanced you are spiritually.
The key here is to live in reality. To live in reality is to neither demonize the good nor the bad, as well as neither choosing one over the other. It is to be indifferent to both. Good/bad, positive/negative, optimist/pessimist are just labels, reality is beyond words and thoughts.
The tricky part is: how do we live in reality, rather than get caught up in this positive and negative dynamic?
How We Can Live In Reality By Embracing Our Problems
Where is reality? It’s the balance between good and evil, right and wrong, positive and negative; in other words, it’s what is known in Buddhism as the “Middle Way.”
The Middle Way is the way of balance. To be non-attached to the extremes.
When we are caught up between two extremes, positive vs. negative for example, we are caught up in thinkingness. Thinkingness is the cause of all our miseries.
An overly positive person might THINK they need to be optimistic, they might THINK they need to be nice all the time, they might THINK they need to correct others for being negative. All because they are running away from their own inner negativity.
When internal negativity dominates your mind, a flood of negative thoughts come with it.
Instead of getting caught up in our thoughts, we can make them go away with one simple solution. Embrace our problems.
You see, there’s thinking and then there’s doing. When we are “doing” things, we don’t have time to sit and wait for our thoughts to come in pull us between two extremes.
When we embrace our problems, we don’t make excuses for why things are or aren’t; we simply take the next right action. It’s wise to know what the right action is and when to tell the truth. See: Is It Better To Tell The Truth? 5 Ways To Know
Someone who lives in reality is like a skilled fisherman. They are patient and don’t let the waves or weather distract them from their ultimate goal. Just like in life, the person who is like the fisherman is not fazed by the good or the bad, the positive or the negative. They simply accept what is and keep moving toward their ultimate goal.
Transcend The Positive And The Negative
True optimism comes from someone who has gained the wisdom of reality.
Overly positive people struggle to be true optimists. By ignoring the bad and only embracing the good, they live in illusion.
When seeking guidance from someone, you don’t want the cliché response of “just be positive,” when the world is filled with the good and the bad.
You want someone who is going to tell it to you like it is. Someone who can speak directly about a problem so that true change can be made.
Even better, become that person yourself.
If you can be honest and direct with yourself, you start the process of transcending dualistic thinking.
When both extremes, positive and negative, are transcended, what you are left with is the ability to make the right decisions at the right time. Some call this wisdom. It is the guiding light that pulls you forward to your ultimate destiny.
Related: Wisdom In Movies: How Watching Films Can Change Your Life