Did you ever have a day when “everything” went right. A day when you got up on the right side of the bed. The phone rang all day with calls from good friends instead of spam and telemarketing messages. Everyone just called to chat, and no one had any problems or issues to face. A day when the sun was shining and the weather was perfect. There were no bugs or mosquitoes to be found anyplace in your town. You felt like a million dollars with no aches or pains. No one you knew was going to the doctor for cancer treatments or therapy of any kind. It was as the younger generation like to say “Perfect.”
Now as you are reading this, you are probably thinking “He must be daydreaming, such days do not exist.” Or maybe you are thinking that it is my birthday. I concede the possibility that such days are perhaps rare, but then again should they be any more rare than days where “Everything that could go wrong” did go wrong. Or is it just our perspective which is goofed up. We are more likely to remember the days when our dog disappeared or when the doctor told us to come in and see her as soon as possible than days when our dog reappeared or the doctor called to tell us everything is fine. Cognitive scientists have a term for our propensity to remember the bad more than the good.
“Negativity Bias” is a cognitive bias that refers to the tendency to remember negative events and information more vividly and with greater impact than positive or neutral ones. I will not bore you with the reasons for this propensity. I am sure that you recognize that it exists. Thus, if the Yin/Yang of the world is an accurate theory of our existence, we should have at least as many of the Perfect Days as we do the Shitty days.
I ask you to stop reading this blog for a few seconds. I challenge you to see if and when you can remember the last perfect day that you have had. Now I would like for you to describe that day in my comments section before reading the rest of this blog. Think of the happiness you will bring to me as well as the rest of our readers. What if the news carried as much good information as they do bad information? What would your world be like if you only remembered and had perfect days.
At this point, you are probably ready to skewer me as some deranged Pollyanna or Don Quixote. A nutcase who sees everything through rose colored glasses. Someone who is madly optimistic that there is hope for a better world. That Donald Trump will not get a statue on Mount Rushmore and that he and his sycophantic followers will soon disappear in the abyss of forgotten history. I assure you that I go to sleep every night praying to a god that I do not believe exists that these latter events will happen while I am still alive to witness them. Instead, I wake up every morning to more bad news from the front line of the independent media I subscribe to. Thus, either giving me less hope for humanity or making me feel guilty by asking me for more money that I do not have.
See, you thought I was going to write some really optimistic idealistic treatise that would make you feel like your existence meant something and life was worth living. Instead, I refer you to Ecclesiastes from the Bible:
Everything Is Meaningless
1 The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
11 No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
However, I refuse to finish this blog on a nihilistic note. I want to finish on a crescendo of hope and faith and happiness. A belief that one idea, one word spoken, one action taken, one step forward can change the course of humanity. We can look back to the past and find untold mistakes and failures that have eclipsed the sunlight of joy for the world. But we can also look forward to a future that we can create because the vast majority of human beings are decent peace-loving equality seeking individuals. The Negativity Bias blinds us to the positive outcomes that prevail every day in our lives. At the end of each day, we seem destined to remember the bad things that happen in the world. This effort is reinforced by a negative biased media which thrives on horror and destruction and pain. I love the words from this song by Peter Paul and Mary, “Light One Candle”
Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand
And light one candle for the wisdom to know
When the peacemaker’s time is at hand
Don’t let the light go out!
It’s lasted for so many years
Don’t let the light go out!
Let it shine through our love and our tears
Light one candle for the strength that we need
To never become our own foe
And light one candle for those who are suffering
Pain we learned so long ago
Light one candle for all we believe in
Let anger not tear us apart!
Light one candle to bind us together
With peace as the song in our heart
Don’t let the light go out!
It’s lasted for so many years! (lasted for so many years!)
Don’t let the light go out!
Let it shine through our love and our tears
We need to counter this tendency for negative bias by reinforcing the positive “perfect” days of our lives. Here is a checklist that ChatGPT created from my query:
It is a printable daily practice checklist to help overcome negative bias. You can use it as a daily or weekly tracker to build habits that shift your mindset toward balance and resilience.
🌞 Daily Practice Checklist: Overcoming Negative Bias
| Practice | Done Today? ✅ | Notes or Reflections |
| 1. Morning Gratitude: List 3 things you’re grateful for. | ☐ | |
| 2. Reframe 1 Negative Thought: Catch a negative thought and reframe it positively. | ☐ | |
| 3. Notice the Good: Write down one positive thing that happened today. | ☐ | |
| 4. Kindness Practice: Do one kind thing for someone else. | ☐ | |
| 5. Mindful Moment: Spend 5+ minutes in meditation or quiet reflection. | ☐ | |
| 6. Move Your Body: Take a walk, stretch, or exercise. | ☐ | |
| 7. Limit Negative Input: Avoid or reduce exposure to toxic media or conversations. | ☐ | |
| 8. Evening Reflection: What went well today? What did you learn? | ☐ |
🗓️ Weekly Reflection (Use at the end of the week)
- What patterns of negative bias did I notice?
- What helped me shift my mindset the most?
- What’s one small thing I want to improve next week?
The End Folks.
Hope you enjoyed this blog. Let me know what your perfect day was.
Holiday time or Holy-Day time? Each holiday season, I wonder what time people are really celebrating. Christmas becomes X-Mass. Holy-days become holidays. Days of remembrance become good days to host a backyard barbecue and Thanksgiving simply becomes the springboard to “the shopping season.” The big kickoff being “Black Friday.” Where is our soul? Where is the spirit in our natures? Is time off meant to be simply another day to watch the “big game.” Are holy-days meant to be spent shopping? Is Black Friday now the most important day of the year? Is Santa Claus a Good Christian because he gives toys to tots? Was that Jesus Christ’s message, to spend Christmas roasting chestnuts round an open fire singing Jingle Bell Rock?
Please note, it is not my intention to sound like the Grinch or to “cast stones” at others. We all need time to relax and we all need time for fun and games. However, when do we say enough? What about the meaning of the time that we are granted? Do we simply see our time off as a holiday or do we embrace this gift of time to remember our dead, our veterans, our special leaders and those that helped pave the way for the lives that we can live today. These “holidays” we are given each year, whether in remembrance of a religious or civic event should not pass by without our taking the time to remember what their true meaning is.
I have so much but I am continually looking at people that are more successful, make more money, have more friends and are in better condition. Yet once I pause for just a few seconds to reflect on my blessings, I realize that I have the greatest wife in the world and I am healthy and moderately well off. I have six happy and wonderful grandchildren. I have more friends than I have time to spend with. In short, I have nothing to complain about. I have nothing to be selfish or greedy or jealous about. I have been blessed with a wonderful life and yet I hardly ever stop to say “thank you God for what you have given me.” I am usually too worried about what I have not been given.
I want to talk about Gratefulness today. It is the first in my list of the Key Seven Virtues that I think are worth developing. Gratefulness is the opposite of ingratitude. It is easy to fall into the trap of being ungrateful. The world besieges us with evidence of our incompetence and faults. Hollywood glamorizes the mundane and makes the rest of us feel inferior in comparison. American Idol becomes the graven image that we now worship. It is not an image of a gold calf or a prophet or a saint. It is the image of success and fame and fortune that we all desire. Even as I write this, millions of people are buying a lottery ticket in the hope of achieving instant wealth. How many of these people are grateful for what they have? I suspect many of them are very grateful in their daily lives, but it makes you wonder how grateful most people are when they will spend their money against all odds to become an overnight millionaire. What don’t they have that they will buy if they do win?
publish their lists of the most beautiful people in the world. Beautiful people marry other beautiful people and are constantly in the news. The Kardashians would seem to have few talents except their almost incredible beauty. Rich men marry beautiful women. Beautiful actresses marry NFL football players. Beautiful heiresses marry rock stars while beautiful rock stars marry record producers.
I once asked my MBA students whether they would rather be smart or beautiful. They almost unanimously selected beautiful. I was very surprised but the more I have observed about life, the more it would seem that beauty will get you further than brains. Brains can get you some things but being nerdy is not one of the things that most people aspire to. Anti-intellectualism is a fact of American life as noted by Richard Hofstadter in his famous book: “Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 1963.”
As we both have aged, the process of deterioration taking place in our bodies is clear in the more wrinkled, wizened and paunchy body shapes we now exhibit. While neither of us was ever beautiful by societies standards, we never had any chance of making any top ten beautiful lists before and certainly not today. Nevertheless, when I see my spouse in her pajamas or in the shower or when she cuddles up in bed with me, I can’t help but think how beautiful she is and how much I love her. While I still see the shades of societies standards of beauty in the many young models punctuating my daily life, the beauty I see in my wife is something I cannot describe. It is a beauty that comes from who she is and not how she looks. I only know she is more beautiful to me today than she was 35 years ago when we first started dating.
You can claim as you grow older that you either have regrets or you have no regrets. I have had at least one friend who on his deathbed made the claim that he had no regrets. I admired his attitude very much. I wanted to emulate this attitude as I grew older, but try as I might it has escaped me. I can tell you I have no regrets, but it would be a big lie. I have enough regrets to write a book about. One of my regrets is that I am shorter than my father was. He was six feet four inches 
tall and I barely make five feet eight inches. Mostly though, I wonder what it would have been like to have been born handsome. To have had the looks of Paul Newman, Sean Connery, Brad Pitt or Robert Redford. Would I have used my looks to achieve fame and fortune or would I have simply squandered it away on wine, women and song? How much different would my life have been if I had been a “beautiful” person?
I understand and fully believe that like ingratitude, (Please read my blog on
Aging Capriciously 