Get Away Negativity

Five months retired now and just recently I came to the realization of just how much negativity I was exposed to everyday while I was still working.

Customer complaints were actually very infrequent, but some customers actually brought my mood down when they talked about how bad their day had been going. I always tried to make that person's day brighter, and sometimes I'm sure I didn't succeed, but other times I'm sure I did.

Since I retired, I've found so much negativity in a lot of facets of my life. Whether it be watching the news, going to websites on a regular basis that tend to only talk of the negative or sites that try and bring others down for whatever reason or the usual group of naysayers on Facebook who seem to think the only thing worth talking about is how bad their health is, how bad their life is going or just how bad one particular political party is making life miserable for so many.

Back in December I decided to limit my news intake to less than an hour a day and I quit frequenting negative websites and blogpages that I normally used to go to each and everyday. My happiness and state of mind isn't in competition with anyone so why should I read sites or pages that seem to think otherwise?

Last month I began the task of eliminating friends from Facebook who are totally into the habit of being a bigot or a finger pointer against everyone of a particular group of affiliation. This was the hard one for me to do, because, quite frankly, I do have a lot of people I consider friends but I simply got sick of being drug down by all their negativity.

I've also, at the same time, tried to be very careful what I post as well, whether it be on Facebook or on this page as well. While I've not been 100% in that effort, I feel like I have passed that endeavor close to 80% of the time.

I don't see this as trying to put myself above anyone or thinking that I'm any better than anyone else, I just see it as an act of self-preservation. And while I am by no means in a totally positive frame of mind all the time, my mood is better and I tend to see most things in a brighter light than I did before.

Now that I am seeing things in a more positive vein, I hope that what I post both here and elsewhere can be of a more positive outlook as well.

As always, time will tell.

Also, I find myself spending less and less time online and spending more time doing those things that I just didn't seem to have time to do.

That right there has made this entire change in my life worth it!