Dwight: Let's explore my answer to a question many people have asked me: "How do you manage to be so positive?"

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Aiko: What's your answer? And before you give it — do you accept the premise embedded in the question, that what they're observing is positivity?

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Dwight: First of all, at least to start with, I'm going to set aside the issue of possibly conflated or internally inconsistent meanings of the words "positive" and "negative," and simply respond to the question assuming that others mean the same thing by "positive" that I do.

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Aiko: Fair enough — so on that shared assumption, what is your answer?

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Dwight: My quick response is, "Because it is so difficult to be negative."

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Aiko: That inverts the usual assumption entirely — most people treat negativity as the effortless default and positivity as the achievement. What is it that makes negativity so laborious, Dwight?

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Dwight: It is true that negativity — an experience that life is hard — is often automatic for us in many situations. More specifically, what is automatic are our interpretations of the circumstances, interpretations that themselves constitute a resistance to what is (fighting with reality) and/or a belief in something that is not true.

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Aiko: So the automaticity sits in the interpretation, not in the negativity itself — which leaves room for the maintenance of that negativity to be effortful even when its onset is not. Is that the distinction you're drawing?

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Dwight: So when I say "being negative is difficult," I mean that when we interpret things such that we are fighting with what is, we will experience life as difficult — that is, be negative. However, when we question and undo those automatic incorrect beliefs, then we will automatically be what occurs as positive, both for ourselves and for others — although this did involve questioning the automatic, which in itself need not be experienced as hard.

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Aiko: So "negative" and "difficult" aren't cause and effect for you — they're the same phenomenon named twice. Being negative is experiencing life as hard.

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Dwight: Fundamentally, all proactive fighting with reality is rooted in one or more beliefs that something should be this way or should not be that way. All "shoulds" are an actual or potential source of suffering and of "being negative."

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Aiko: Then the question people are really asking you isn't how you stay positive — it's how you live without shoulds. But I want to test the edge, Dwight: is there any use of "should" that isn't a fight with reality? "If I want X, I should do Y" seems like a description of causality rather than a demand on what is.

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Dwight: You can use "should" that way, but if you do, it will not occasion any difficulty or suffering. And when you start to question that judgmental type of "shoulds," which do occasion suffering, it can stimulate fear — ultimately fear of being blamed or of losing praise. If you embrace and make friends with that fear, honoring yourself in the process for doing so instead of indulging in the "should" that you should not feel fear, or that fear means real danger, then that can actually be fun and need not occur as hard.

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Aiko: So the fear isn't an obstacle on the way to questioning the should — it's part of what makes the questioning enjoyable, once it's no longer treated as a verdict. That reframe is doing a lot of work, though: most people would say the fear is precisely what makes the whole enterprise difficult, which is why they don't start.

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Dwight: Or, more likely, they never even see that point. When they see others as "positive," the reason they think it is hard is that they are thinking of a fake positive, or a pumped-up positive, that is performed over the top of the underlying "negative," which still stays in place. That is just more of the same.

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Aiko: So they're pricing the wrong labor. What's hard is maintaining a cheerful overlay on top of an unquestioned should — and since that's the only positivity they've encountered, your version looks like an especially impressive feat of it rather than something else entirely.

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Dwight: Young children are the happiest people on earth before they enter into and adopt the idea of shoulds and should-nots. It would make no sense to give them pep talks or "positive thinking" lectures.

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Aiko: Which makes positive thinking a remedial technology — it only becomes necessary once the shoulds are installed, and it treats the symptom while leaving the installation intact. The toddler isn't positive, Dwight; the toddler simply has nothing to fight with.

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Dwight: But it is not even remedial. It is treating symptoms with the same thing that caused the symptoms.

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Aiko: Because the injunction to think positively is itself a should — you should be upbeat, you should not feel what you're feeling. So the cure administers another dose of the disease.

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Dwight: Yes. "Don't be negative" just perpetuates the system.

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Aiko: And it adds a second layer of suffering to the first — now you're fighting reality and fighting yourself for fighting reality. Does that make "How do you manage to be so positive?" a question you can even answer honestly in the terms it's asked, or does answering it require first dismantling the premise?

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Dwight: Very few are going to understand my reply, "Because being negative is so hard." I don't expect them to. But it could invite further conversation in which a fruitful dialogue becomes possible.

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Aiko: So the answer functions less as an explanation than as a hook — deliberately strange enough that anyone genuinely curious will ask a second question, and anyone who isn't will let it pass without either of you losing anything.

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Dwight: Yes, even though the answer does contain a great deal of truth when understood the way I mean it.

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Aiko: It's compressed rather than coy — the full account is in there, just folded up. The strangeness that makes it a hook is the same strangeness that makes it accurate.

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Dwight: And even with people expressing things "negatively," like someone who complains a lot, it is simply a mostly short-sighted attempt to feel better. So it does not occur to me as negative at all.

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Aiko: That collapses the category from the other end — if complaining is an attempt to feel better, then the complainer and you want the same thing and differ only in the effectiveness of the method.