Finding Positivity Through Negativity
I was listening to a podcast interview with Peter Adeney (aka Mr Money Mustache) and a very simple concept he mentioned has virtually changed my life. For those of you who don’t know, Mr Money Mustache is a lifestyle and financial blog started by Peter Adeney, a guy who was able to retire in his 30s by investing money into index funds at a young age and then living very frugally within a specified budget. He advocates for cost-saving, life-improving measures such as biking to the grocery store and living in an inexpensive area. A huge part of his philosophy is that money is only useful to the ends that it brings us greater joy and happiness. For instance, will financing a new BMW really improve your quality of life enough to justify a $500 a month car payment? Or would you be just as happy driving your 10 year old Honda into the ground and then buying another used car. Or could you be working less and earning less, but spend that extra time pursuing something that makes you feel fulfilled.
The conversation honed in on the idea of increasing joy and happiness around the house, what to allocate funds toward, etc. Mr MM said something along of the lines of: we focus heavily on what items we could add to our environment that might make us happier, but it's much more worthwhile to focus on the things in our environment that bring us dissatisfaction and mitigate them. If you trip over the cord to your computer every time you get up from your desk, you are far more likely to remember that negative experience than you are to remember not tripping over the cord every time.
If you flip this philosophy on its head, you get some version of what Marie Kondo talks about in her extremely popular book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Essentially, the idea is that you should only keep items in your home that bring you some sort of joy and, more practically, that you actually use. Anything else is, at best, not going to elicit any strong emotions or, at worst, actively contribute to your daily dissatisfaction.
Psychologists, researchers, and neuroscientists alike have often puzzled at the quandary of why human beings give negative experiences so much more weight than positive ones. Is it an evolutionary advantage to remember negative experiences so we can avoid them in the future? Do we ruminate on negative experiences longer, thus solidifying them more soundly into our long-term memory? However perplexing, it remains a fact that we seem to give more attention to information and experiences that are negative than those that are positive. Total bummer, right?
On the contrary, I found the concept of removing these small, controllable negative experiences to decrease the sum of negative interactions in your day to day life to be so simple, but empowering. And we have so much more control over these things than we do over what makes us “happy”.
Since listening to this interview, I have tried to incorporate this incredibly simple philosophy with radical results. Through the ongoing process of applying these principles to my life and my habitat, there is a fluidity to my environment. I’m not often frustrated in my home and the only thing I trip over to get somewhere is the dog (she’s very spatially unaware, but she most certainly brings me joy).
The application of these ideas are necessarily individualized. Maybe that BMW is absolutely contributing to your joy and happiness and you love working the job you work to pay for it. For me, this processes has thus far looked something like this:
I got rid of an incredible amount of shit. My husband and I bought our house 5 years ago and have proceeded to continually fill it with things. Things we thought we might need later. Things that seemed too nice to give away or throw away. Things we thought we wanted. A lot of these things also predated our homeownership. When my mother passed away 12 years ago, I clung to many of her possessions as though they held some piece of her soul that I could never part from. I remember crying hysterically when my then boyfriend broke the mug she used to drink coffee from in the morning. I still have clothing I’ll never wear that belonged to her. But, most of these items I am keeping not because I want them, but because I don’t think I should get rid of them. I have started the process of doing that now, and what getting rid of some of the things allowed me to do was to incorporate the more meaningful items into my life. I now have framed pieces of her artwork hanging in my bedroom that serve as a daily reminder of her creativity and individuality.
Once I got rid of things, I began to brainstorm ways that I could make the things I still had more practically accessible. I got rid of the 20 pairs of shoes I never wear, so what was I to do with the ones I still do wear? This came in the form of splitting all my items (bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, etc) into two categories: stuff I use daily and stuff I use occasionally (hint, hint, there is no category for stuff I don’t use). I stored all the things I don’t use daily in easy to access, but not daily use areas, and all the things I do use daily in their standard locations. My bathroom medicine cabinet literally has my hairbrush, my toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, sunscreen and deodorant in it. EVERYTHING ELSE is in organized bins on my closet shelf.
So, great. I organized my stuff and decluttered. Big woot. But, not having to deal with these tiny negative things has made me a substantially more positive person. I don’t have to look for stuff when I need it. I don’t knock 10 things out of my medicine cabinet when I grab my toothbrush. I don’t have tons of stuff on my bathroom counter preventing me from cleaning it.
This process started miniscule, lest I stress myself out MORE at the prospect of doing it. I think the first thing I did was get an appropriately sized surge protector for the electronics next to my bed because the cumbersome one drove me crazy. So, I would recommend starting by just being aware of the things that make you angry or stressed or upset. Do you get that little shot of adrenaline every time something falls out of your kitchen cabinet when you go to grab something else? Do you run into the edge of closely spaced furniture when you walk by? Start there!
Happy negativity squashing, folks! And let me know how it goes in the comments.