Monday’s can be difficult.
You wake up, it’s the start of a new week and you might be feeling a bit anxious.
Your mind is racing ahead to all the things you need to do and all the challenges you need to overcome.
It can be a bit daunting.
So here’s a mood booster for you.
A reason why you don’t need to feel so bad, why you should be grateful for your life and why today is a great day to be you.
Life has its inevitable ups and downs.
But emotional lows seem to have an iron grip and can be hard to shake off. While the highs feel fleeting.
This asymmetry where “bad is stronger than good” is rooted in our biology.
The theory behind this is well documented from a scientific perspective, but I want to take a philosophical look at it today.
One of my favourites in this area is Schopenhauer’s work ‘The World as Will and Representation’.
He observed that negative emotions and experiences leave a deeper impression on people than positive ones and therefore cause our negativity bias.
To illustrate his point, Schopenhauer urges you to think of the feeling of a stone in your shoe.
99.99% of your body is fine, happy. But all you can do is focus on this tiny stone.
And how annoying it is.
As humans, we struggle to be satisfied. Negativity comes more naturally.
And this aligns with modern psychological research on our negativity bias.
However, while our negativity bias served an adaptive purpose for early humans focused on survival, it can cause immense suffering in our times.
Thankfully there are some useful mental models you can use to counteract this default tendency towards focusing on the negative.
There are two mental models I’ve adopted that have genuinely transformed the way I look at life.
Training these two perspectives – 1) seeing the good in all things and 2) loving your fate – can profoundly transform your mindset and lived experience.
1 – Replying “Good” to Everything
This first antidote may seem improbable at first.
And a bit trivial.
But adopting a practice of replying “good”, no matter what happens, trains incredible mental resilience, cultivates joy and makes you a better person internally and externally.
This approach traces back to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and its emphasis on distinguishing control from lack of control.
The Stoics realised that since we can’t fully control or avoid external events, even painful ones, the only thing we can truly control is how we perceive them.
Re-read that again if you need to. It’s the most profound and powerful idea toward a happy life.
Take any bad thing that has happened to you in your life. How much control did you have over that?
And if nothing majorly bad has happened recently, think of what could happen to you.
Maybe your partner breaks up with you despite you having done nothing wrong. They may just inexplicitly decide to end things.
This could either be earth-shattering or life-affirming. It’s up to you and how you judge the situation.
Everything in life is just the narrative we tell ourselves and how we frame the world around us.
The fact is, there’s no external truth in the world.
There is nothing in the world that everyone agrees is good and everyone agrees is bad.
It’s all just judgement.
And so you always have a choice in how you react to the outside world.
Therefore, to master emotions, and to feel better, we have to first master our judgments.
We must separate attachment to external events from our judgments of those external events.
And the practice of responding “good” to all outside occurrences, forces you to take on a positive judgment, no matter what.
Not good in the sense of morally good, but good meaning positive or advantageous FOR ME regardless of social norms.
By deliberately looking for the learning, growth, redirection or any small positive angle in every situation, you cue your mind to interpret events benevolently.
Modern philosophers and researchers echo this.
Martha Nussbaum encourages looking for the silver lining in negative emotions themselves, probing what they signal we care about.
Author William Irvine went 30 days replying “good” to all fortunes to transform his emotional patterns from victimhood to empowerment.
And the effects bear out powerfully.
Let’s take another example, let’s think of being overlooked for a promotion at work.
Saying ‘good’ in response stops you from over-dramatising or stressing about it.
It’s good, for example, because you have the motivation now to do even better at work.
Or its good because you can move to a company where you’re properly valued.
Ot its good because not getting a promotion means less work, which means more time for you to spend with your family, friends and side projects (the things you truly value anyway).
Either way, the point is that there are always silver linings.
You just need to understand that any situation can be seen as good.
Reframing experiences as benefits, assets or blessings counteracts our default tendency to fixate and amplify the bad – thereby escaping head spaces where negative thoughts and feelings feed off themselves cyclically.
It’s far easier to endure pains and problems (and find peace and happiness) when they no longer define your inner world.
2 – Love Your Fate
A second mindset shift centers not on rational analysis of external events, but willful alignment of your attitude with reality.
The philosophical notion of amor fati means loving your fate – embracing what IS as it is.
People have this tattooed on their arm or engraved on a ring which is funny.
And potentially not a bad idea to keep it top of mind.
But you don’t need to go that far. Just take heed.
The seminal thinker behind amor fati was Friedrich Nietzsche.
He recognised that resentment and denial of reality as it unfolds severely limits wellbeing.
So while we can work to change circumstances, resisting or denying what comes to us only breeds anxiety, frustration and self-torment – draining vitality and stunting growth potential.
The message here is essentially, ‘what will be, will be’.
Nietzsche thus concluded that acceptance of our fate allows us to channel energy previously wasted on bitterness towards creative aims instead.
Life opens up possibilities when you relinquish impossible expectations and wish for things to turn out differently.
So, loving life on life’s terms, not yours, let’s you be at peace with the world.
And Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius also touched on amor fati, before the official formalisation Nietzsche gave.
To the Stoics, asserting preferences for how anything “should be” is delusional.
Wishing reality was different than it is makes no more sense than wishing for different laws of physics.
You have to love what happens to you.
Especially if it’s something you don’t like.
Say to yourself; ‘This is happening for a reason. It will all be ok in the end.’
And you will begin to love your fate, find happiness and be at peace.
The Ultimate Reset Switch
Two millennia old, these mindset practices remain profoundly relevant for managing our negativity bias today.
Through repeating the mantra “good” as your reflexive response to events and intentionally aligning your perspective with conditions outside your control, you trigger an inner reset switch.
Your lens changes; situations once labeled absolutely awful transform into intriguing opportunities.
Victim becomes creator.
Of course, adopting these habits takes concerted effort and repetition – our default wiring can be stubborn.
But gradually retraining your beliefs about the world and your interpretations in it unlocks incredible emotional resilience and personal power.
And when you change your mind, you change your experience.
That makes the work well worth it.
So I encourage you to read more about both of these.
Martha Nussbaum, Seneca, Nietzsche, William Irvine + Schopenhauer are all good places to start.
Keep learning + living.
Love,
Max
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