Today’s post is an excerpt from my book, 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life.

A fascination with the negative, the dark, and the drama

Have you noticed that most people seem drawn to the darkness? When there is a horrible car accident, we can’t help but look over to see what happened, even though we know it cannot be good. People enjoy gossip, talking about the bad things happening in other people’s lives. We watch violent TV shows or movies, attracted somehow to the extreme and dark depths of human nature.

I call this general fascination with the negative and the darkness and how we are attracted to it, The Daily Drama. This is my name for it because I have noticed that many of us create a lot of drama in our own lives – we experience this daily, yet we don’t even seem to realize that we are a primary reason for its existence.

We can end the drama, often by tuning out of whatever is causing it. Is it a personal desire to always have attention on yourself? Is it a colleague or a friend? Is it your overreaction to any minor event that you did not expect? We can learn healthier ways to acquire attention or learn to overcome our need for this attention. We can minimize communications with the colleague or friend, and we can learn that our overreactions make things worse. We may fear disconnecting from the drama, thinking that we will make things worse by ignoring it or by not giving it our full attention. But often, one drama arises, then it is corrected or forgotten. Then another drama arises, and the cycle repeats again and again. We do not need to worry – the drama will always be alive and well. It is ourselves that we must take care of.

If this daily drama rules your life where every day is filled with it, I urge you to break the cycle. Understand that you are playing a role in the drama by how you react to it and that it is not fully out of your control.

Ask yourself: Am I going to feed the drama? Or am I going to allow it to die a quiet death without feeding it any further?

A matter of survival

Why are we attracted to the negativity and the darkness?

By having some darkness in us, we can better identify it in others and protect ourselves from it. For example, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli and The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene were both written on the theme of gaining power and using manipulative tactics to get what you want. However, they were not necessarily written with the view that you must do dark things, but also with the understanding that you must at least be aware that there are people out there willing to use dark means to get what they want from you. And thus, if you understand their intentions, you can prevent the use of these manipulative tactics on yourself.

We have to understand the darkness to overcome the darkness. If you do not understand it, you risk succumbing to it. The issue is that our minds sometimes dwell on the darkness and become stuck in it, plagued by it. This is when we know that we have a problem.

7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By is available on Amazon, Google Play, Apple, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.