Moving On From Negative People
It may be foolishly optimistic to say, but life is too short to live in the company of people who make you unhappy.
What is important to understand before reading this, is I am by no means a source of wisdom. What will follow are the words of a near-graduate with an optimistic disposition, an honourary membership to the Blue Lantern Corps of hope, and a mild addiction to comic books. Please bear this in mind.
As undergraduate studies reach their conclusion, I would like to believe I have learned a lot over the last three years. I have developed as a person, experienced many things outside of my comfort zone, and faced difficulties which I have approached to the best of my ability. Above all I am grateful to have met so many new people. Thankfully, my university experience has allowed me to meet a vast array of wonderful people. I’ve made fantastic friends, worked with great people, and largely managed to encounter individuals who were a positive influence on my life. However there have been some along the way who are the direct antithesis. And when moaning or bringing people down is a person’s default speech setting, I swiftly lose interest.
I’m genuinely saddened to say that I’ve witnessed some horrible displays of behaviour at university. And a lot of it is rather textbook negativity, but some has been expert standard, new wave messed up bullshit. I’ve seen people masquerade cold and nasty behaviour as being confident and independent. I’ve met people who performed disrespectful and disgusting acts to women just to get a tie for a fucking sports team. I’ve witnessed people actively acknowledge someone’s fragile mental health and then proceed to manipulate them and make them feel worse. And after all of the shocking behaviour I’ve witnessed which showcases a total lack of empathy, it didn’t take much to realise this is not the life for me.
As I have written in a previous article, I believe one of the crucial stages in seeking a happier life starts with social media. Just recently I conducted a Facebook purge, deleting over 300 people, for no other reason than I wanted my social media feed to be more positive. Because whether you’re making someone’s day harder through petty comments, or using Facebook to join a handful of others in their stupid EDL witch hunts, it’s negativity that should be kept out of the public eye. And it’s important to say this because people often feel bad for purging their social media, but we are under no obligation to keep negative people in our lives. It’s often said we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take, so why not take a shot at happiness? It’s a shot that’s always worth taking.
So what’s the best thing to do when negative people are impacting your life? Move on. Distance yourself and focus on the people who make you happy. As we all know, life is no picnic. We have to deal with personal loss, disappointments, plans going astray, bad days, worse weather and lord knows what else. But when life shits on us from a great height there is some comfort to be found in the friends we keep. I’ve found that no matter how upset I’m feeling or how bad my day is, my friends and family are always there to make thing easier. Positivity truly is the way forward.
Basically, live a happy life and surround yourself with people who help you do that. It costs absolutely nothing to be nice, and as I’ve said before, nice should be our default setting. We shouldn’t wait for a formal invitation or an emergency, we should just make the effort to be more understanding of others. Life is too short to abide negativity, and if there is a way to move beyond it and surround yourself with people who enable you to live a happy life, take that option every time and do not look back.
“Live for today. Because yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is never a guarantee.”
