Do people think you are negative and/or pessimistic?

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Aside from the "No! I mean yes" bit at the start, which I don't understand : yes, totally this! Especially the bolded part.

Over time I've become quite careful in how I present my "but what if..." and "but isn't that..." and I think people now take them better than they used to, but still, it can be perceived as "being negative" when to me it's not a matter being positive or negative, but of being accurate or inaccurate.

Last edited by FMX on 31 Jan 2014, 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

umm, because only talking about negative things IS being negative

I do actually go out of my way to praise people, for instance on the day a bus drive to my shock stopped in the street and let me ride my bicycle past before pulling over to pick up riders at a bus stop - I noted the time, place and which bus number it was, and then sent an email to the bus system praising that driver for being a safe and polite driver. If you only point out bad and never the good they stop listening

Not when you're trying to solve PROBLEMS. You need to be acknowledge the negatives in order to be able to do something about them. Burying your head in the sand and making posters with feel-good slogans on them doesn't work forever.

The question posed was general, the OP even stated that the one example was not the best example of the situation, the OP I thought wanted to ask about are you GENERALLY neg or Pos - not just in the case of "how do we work on this problem?" of course in a situation of "working on a problem" you need to concentrate on what is wrong - the whole situation is "problem oriented"

but what I believe was being posed was - do you approach LIFE as if your entire life is a problem - in which case if yes you are negative, if you approach life as an adventure you are IMHO a Pollyanna or to others positive, if you take a balanced approach you are a realist (seeing that life has hard knocks and sometimes crap happens TO you and you did not make your situation but you have to fight it)

Yes, but YellowTamarin was talking about being called too negative for bringing up problems within the context of problem-solving.

ok - last attempt, maybe you don't understand how forums work, the OP is supposed to set the tone of a thread, if someone want to pose a different objective you start a new thread.

I am hitting unsubscribe from thread now as I don't want to get involved in anything harsh, this is frustrating me and my therapist told me to take care of myself

There is no rule that the OP is supposed to set the tone of the thread.
They make the opening post and people respond as they wish.
If you are so upset by someone disagreeing with you then perhaps your therapist should have advised you to stay away from the internet altogether, or perhaps just never converse.

I agree, it is simply realistic (and rational) to at least address the negatives. It is naive to only expect the best and never prepare for the worst.

I am not seen as negative or pessismistic though, I can be. Optimism is a great feeling (minus the blindness); failure is always a possibility but leads to huge growth. Learn from mistakes, get back up, try again. Ignoring the negative decreases the learning experience.

Blind optimism leads to a person saying things like: Getting your hopes up only to be let down again...

Thanks everyone for your replies. The great thing about WP is you always get LOTS of interesting perspectives.

This possibly best describes me. I do tend to worry a lot. And, I am pretty good at contingency planning. Put those together and I do a pretty good job of identifying all the possible things that could go wrong so as to minimize what actually does go wrong.



I do this as well. If I am with someone, and they are bringing up all the negative things, I will take the other side. Again, just to explore (at a very detailed level) all of the possibilities. I have a saying that, in the end, everything works out. And more often than not, it seems like it does. We somehow adapt, even those (like me) who really dislike change that it outside of our control.



Well, I imagine many NTs have issues that they must live with and adapt to as well. I, myself, am not so good at adapting. Perhaps it is the inability to effectively adapt to adversity that causes a pessimistic trajectory. And, on the flip side, the ability to effectively adapt to adversity that causes the optimistic trajectory. I have no idea. Just throwing it out there.

I like to think I'm less verbally pessimistic than I used to be. Last year my company hired a new woman, she's really fun and we all like her, but sometimes (often actually), she starts freaking out about the future. The country is going to collapse, our jobs are going to be obsolete, Obamacare is going ruin medicine for everyone. She just gets a wild look in her eyes and goes stiff and starts ranting.

I don't think I was ever quite that extreme (although it's possible I was). I still feel unsettled about how our country is going, etc. But it's really funny to see someone doing what you do and realizing by association that you are overreacting. Plus it's oppressive to be around.

I understand why she's scared (she has some extenuating circumstances), but I can now see how you can loose part of the fun of NOW, worrying about the bad that might come TOMORROW.

There's a general consensus that pessimism is bad, but personally I don't believe that's true. Optimists, realists, idealists, pessimists.. they are all just as toxic as one another in extended doses. There is no good 'ist' to be, there is no 'one' that you are all the time, they are just words to describe attitude, and shouldn't be unmoving labels that you attach to someone. Everyone is a human, which means prone to experience and thus subjectivity. If experience doesn't affect you, then you're basically either just living EXCLUSIVELY in the moment (like literally down to the 0.00000001 nanosecond), or dead. Attitudes are always changing, and those labels are really only to describe what one individual presents as, what appears to be the majority of the time.

There seems to be a lot of emphasis put on the good side of being a realist.. but really, there are bad sides too. I don't know what's so attractive about being a realist, perhaps because there is less said negatively about it because it appears more logical? This is what I mean:


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+ A person that is mostly pessimistic will be seen by some as negative, a vortex that sucks all fun, mood wrecker etc. The same person may be seen by others as aware, wise, careful etc.

+ A person that is mostly optimistic will be seen by some as naive, perhaps inexperienced, annoying, blinded etc. The same person may be seen by others as energizing, lifting, stimulating etc.

+ A person that is mostly idealistic will be seen by some as unrealistic, head in the clouds, immature, rigid etc. The same person may be seen by others as original, valuable, visionary etc.

+ A person that is mostly realistic will be seen by most as logical, avoiding the 'petty' emotions perhaps? Something like that? No one really mentions the downsides, such as that if everyone were a realist the world wouldn't really progress, or if it did it would do so slowly. There would be no fun, there would be no real surprises. There would be no interesting outlooks into upcoming events, a general lack of excitement. Things like landing on the moon would have been seen as unrealistic before it happened.. being a realist really is limited to what we think we know. So in my opinion, being a realist is somewhat of a contradiction in itself. While it is good for the moment, it isn't really great for the future, at all. It seems logical, but at the same time it's not.

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There are a lot more ways to describe attitude, but I can't be bothered explaining my view of them all. Everyone has parts of each and changes all the time, and it's impossible to deny that.

Just a lame attempt at a joke, as "no" would be the negative response.

YES. My parents are a classic case. I don't think they mean to be pessimistic; it's just that because they're not accepted by the world, aspies don't get to see the brighter sides of things or the better sides of people, as they are shunned by them, taken advantage of and helped by almost no one. An NT with more charisma will attract people; therefore they get to see friendship, helpfulness, etc. This gives us a biased outlook of the world.

People often accuse me of being pessimistic or negative; this is illogical, as I am merely being realistic. With the Laws of Physics in this universe, for every 100 ways to do something, only a few lead to the desired outcome; the universe is not sentient and doesn't care about our happiness or success.

I merely assess the things that may go wrong and the probability that they will, in order to prevent them if possible and mitigate them if not. I suspect the real problem is that many of us have had a bad life being AS in an NT world and find it difficult to objectively assess those things, due to the availability in memory of bad experiences.

People have a false sense of what is realistic. What is "realistic" is only realistic according to their own mindset.

People who are negative/pessimistic are simply people who blame external factors/conditions for their problems and do nothing about the problems but complain about how unfair the world is to them on messageboards. In other words, they REFUSE to become bigger than their problems.

The most successful people in the world are simply people who devoted their lives to becoming bigger than their problems.

I'm the most cynical person I've ever met.