Not sure how to start this one, but the idea is that it is both a cultural issue and a personal issue.
Here in Hong Kong the small talk culture though exists is no where near popular. In local businesses staff/owner may have a little chat with you during non-rush hours, and if you met a friend you'd talk to them for a bit even if you are busy, but that's about it. Most other chats with strangers has to do with the problem both parties are trying to solve, and it exists mostly in a consumer/staff relationship, where you tell them what you want and they give you what you want while receiving money from doing so. There won't be "how is your day" or "how are you", the most that there is is an "唔該" which either means "excuse me" or "thanks" depending on the context, to most people here in apersonal relationships prefer simply to describe the problem, show gratitude in less than a second, and that's already rather polite for both sides, because after all everyone is busy and no matter how slow you are you want to make sure you aren't wasting everyone else's time.
So with this mindset what happened as a result is that people generally focuses on problems, in other words the negatives, no matter how insignificant. Even if things aren't nearly as bad as it seems, people would tend to focus on the negatives, because to them they want to prevent the negative from happening/solve something as soon as possible so that everyone can stay content. There are of course more people proportionally who amplifies the problem because of this, after all not everyone is resilient enough from when people keep saying that things just suck, eventually there are people who do feel like they are hust living in hell, and it shows when it's one of the most unhappy cities across the globe.
That aside, such a way of thinking in of itself isn't pessimism, pessimism is when one sees that everything is going to turn bad, not when people see negatives as negatives. Even if one says that this is terrible because one chose to focus on the negatives instead of the positives, this still isn't pessimism because the goal of that is to reach to a positive result. The way it is approached may be completely unorthodox, but this has also shown that it can solve problems that otherwise couldn't be solved, it might cause unnecessary issues, but so does when people act positively just because it would be considered rude not to.
Though the issue goes beyond the environment.
Even though the culture itself is considered to be direct and sometimes rude by many, there are plenty of times people call me rude or insensitive either because I cannot perceive that myself, or I straight up do not care.
The topic here is pessimism, so that's what this will be focusing on, even though other issues stem from the same idea.
It was very easy for outsiders to interpret me as someone who feels negatively, even during the days I felt the most positive. To me positivity is when I want things to be positive, and the most efficient way for my brain to do this is to address the problems and work on solving them. Culturally it techically is similar, but if the problem gets big enough it would no longer be mentioned directly. Another thing is that things are the best to be addressed privately, because nobody else should get involved into a matter that isn't related to them by any means.
And I really dislike that.
To me if a problem gets bigger there is more of a need to address it publicly, explicitly, to make sure that people are aware that problems in fact does exist, so that it can actually be solved.
And that just amplified the perceived pessimism, because to most people if you want to focus on bad things apparently that alone makes someone pessimistic. Sometimes this also make conversations difficult just because I apparently am trying to be gloomy when it couldn't be further from the truth.
Another problem is when I have a worldview so different that if I say it chances are that I dislike it, just because it sounds so negative to everyone else that I must also be thinking negatively even though to me it is as positive as it gets.
There were years of effort of me trying to appear less negative by simply silencing myself most of the time, but at the end of the day I hope for the time where people who focuses on positives and those on negatives can work together instead of seeing each other as incompatible enemies, there are no words that can describe the disappointment in me when there's someone who tries so hard seeing the positives the moment it breaks for them they themselves break. It is unfathomable how much of a polarisation in the modern world that makes it so that any opposing idea equates someone being a problem, even if they might not say it out loud.
To address this, first stop pretending that things can only be a positive or negative. Accept that everyone sucks, so that there is always room for improvement.
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