It is impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others.
-Daisaku Ikeda
It is the summer after my third year of college. I have returned from spending a month at the ashram and am now interning for a finance firm. I'm at lunch with a couple of my colleagues we've grabbed sandwiches and brought them to the concrete courtyard in front of the building, where low walls crisscross the hardscaping and young people in suits eat speedy lunches, defrosting in the summer sun be- fore returning to the hyper-air-conditioned building. I am a monk out of water.
"Did you hear about Gabe?" one of my friends says in a loud whisper. "The partners tore apart his presentation."
"That dude," another friend says, shaking his head. "He's sinking fast."
I flash back to a class Gauranga Das taught called “Cancers of the Mind: Comparing, Complaining, Criticizing." In the class, we talked about negative thought habits, including gossip. One of the exercises we did was keeping a tally of every criticism we spoke or thought. For each one, we had to write down ten good things about the person.
It was hard. We were living together, in close quarters. Issues came up, most of them petty. The average time for a monk's shower was four minutes. When there was a line at the showers, we would take bets on who was taking too long. (This was the only betting we did. Because: monks.) And though the snorers were relegated to their own room, sometimes new practitioners emerged, and we rated their snores on a scale of motorcycles: this monk's a Vespa; that one's a Harley-Davidson.
I went through the exercise, dutifully noting every criticism I let slip. Next to each, I jotted down ten positive qualities. The point of the exercise wasn't hard to figure out every person was more good than bad—but seeing it on the page made the ratio sink in. This helped me see my own weaknesses differently. I tended to focus on my mistakes without balancing them against my strengths. When I found myself being self-critical, I reminded myself that I too had positive qualities. Putting my negative qualities in context helped me recognize the same ratio in myself, that I am more good than bad. We talked about this feedback loop in class: When we criticize others, we can't help but notice the bad in ourselves. But when we look for the good in others, we start to see the best in ourselves too.
The guy sitting next to me on the wall nudges me out of my reverie. "So you think he'll last?"
I've lost track of what we're talking about. "Who?" I ask. "Gabe he shouldn't have been hired in the first place, right?"
"Oh, I don't know," I say.
Once I'd spent time in the ashram, I became very sensitive to gossip. I'd gotten used to conversations with primarily positive energy. When I first arrived back in the world, I was awkwardly silent. I didn't want to be the morality police, but I also didn't want to participate. As the Buddha advised, "Do not give your at- tention to what others do or fail to do; give it to what you do or fail to do." I quickly figured out to say things like "Oh, I'm not sure ...” or “I haven't heard anything." Then I'd shift the conver- sation to something more positive. "Did you hear they've asked Max to stay on? I'm psyched for him." Gossip has value in some situations: It helps society regulate what is acceptable behavior, and we often use it to see if others agree with our judgments about other people's behavior and therefore our values. But there are kinder wavs to negotiate these questions. More often, we use gossip to put others down, which can make us feel superior to them and/or bolster our status in a group.
Some of my friends and colleagues stopped trying to gossip with me altogether; we had real conversations instead. Some trusted me more, realizing that since I didn't gossip with them, I wouldn't gossip about them. If there were people who thought I was just plain boring, well, I have nothing bad to say about them.
NEGATIVITY IS EVERYWHERE
You wake up. Your hair looks terrible. Your partner complains that you're out of coffee. On the way to work some driver who's texting makes you miss the light. The news on the radio is worse than yesterday. Your coworker whispers to you that Candace is pretending to be sick again. ... Every day we are assaulted by negativity. No wonder we can't help but dish it out as well as re- ceive it. We report the aches and pains of the day rather than the small joys. We compare ourselves to our neighbors, complain about our partners, say things about our friends behind their backs that we would never say to their faces, criticize people on social media, argue, deceive, even explode into anger.
This negative chatter even takes place throughout what we might consider to be a "good day," and it's not part of anyone's plan. In my experience, nobody wakes up and thinks, How can I be mean to or about other people today? or How can I make myself feel better by making others feel worse today? Still, negativity often comes from within. We have three core emotional needs, which I like to think of as peace, love, and understanding (thanks Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello). Negativity-in conversation, emotions, and actions often springs from a threat to one of the three needs: a fear that bad things are going to happen (loss of peace), a fear of not being loved (loss of love), or a fear of being disre- spected (loss of understanding). From these fears stem all sorts of other emotions-feeling overwhelmed, insecure, hurt, competitive, needy, and so on. These negative feelings spring out of us as complaints, comparisons, and criticisms and other nega- tive behaviors. Think of the trolls who dive onto social media, dumping ill will on their targets. Perhaps their fear is that they aren't respected, and they turn to trolling to feel significant. Or perhaps their political beliefs are generating the fear that their world is unsafe. (Or maybe they're just trying to build a follow- ing-fear certainly doesn't motivate every troll in the world.)
For another example, we all have friends who turn a catch-up phone call into an interminable vent session describing their job, their partner, their family-what's wrong, what's unfair, what's never going to change. For these people, nothing ever seems to go right. This person may be expressing their fear that bad things are going to happen their core need for peace and secu- rity is threatened.
