Do you have someone in your life who can never look on the bright side of things?

Do you set out happily for your daily walk, eager to get those endorphins rushing all over to make you feel good — and do you suddenly encounter this someone? Of course, you think your happy positivity will be enough for the two of you and you don’t need to worry if she tells you a depressingly cynical tale or a ‘human interest’ story to curl your toes. You have followed all the instructions you have read on the internet about how to get the most of your daily exercise-cum-happiness routine and you are throwing your head up, pulling yourself up straight and striding with a bounce in your step. You are going to stay positive despite the murder and mayhem you read about in the newspapers and watch on television or on YouTube, or if you’re especially unfortunate, have experienced first-hand in some mall or street or bakery — because who knows who will strike next and where ...

And then your friend (who symbolises for you the saying: ‘With friends like this, who needs enemies’), launches into her pessimistic and no-hope-left view of the world.

For her — or him — every person’s action or reaction in that week or that month is questionable and has had a negative connotation and a harmful impact on the psyche. There is no goodwill to be seen anywhere around and the glass is always half-empty. In fact, on this particular day, it is down to rock bottom — and despite the gung-ho attitude you determinedly adopted as you set out (to help you deal with your own minor or major demons), you go sliding down with her as you listen.

Feeling depressed

Your resolutions dissipate. Your shoulders sag. Your steps drag. You get sucked into that murky world and your natural or determined optimism wavers and wilts and finally disappears altogether ... and you return from your outing with her — or him — feeling depressed in the extreme.

Why is it that some of us truly believe that every move by everyone is questionable? Why do we discard every ounce of optimism and refuse to see the good side of others, however small we think it is?

Undoubtedly, if we think hard enough and expend a considerable amount of energy on raking up old issues or new ones or imaginary ones, we can come up with some grouse against everyone and everything. And we can work ourselves surely and systematically into a state of misery and gloominess no matter what good tidings our little worlds have for us.

With people who are persistently ‘sunny side down’, it is difficult to talk of silver linings and the light at the end of the tunnel because all our positive thinking is shredded and scattered to the wind — and what’s more, more often than not our efforts are belittled as unintelligent and uninformed and infantile. It makes you want to run for cover, doesn’t it?

Such determination to cling to the negatives in life brings to mind a poster we had presented to our mother decades ago when, as teenagers, we were driving her crazy with our sometimes shared confidences/sometimes studied aloofness, our comings and goings, our waffling over almost everything while she tried to hold the fort together: ‘As soon as the rush is over, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. I’ve worked for it. I owe it to myself — and nothing is going to deprive me of it.’

All we have to do is superimpose the words ‘be miserable’ in the first line of that poster and we have that persistent naysayer’s frame of mind described to a T.

How do we raise ourselves above it — and take our friend with us?

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.