The pleasure of a good negative rant
When I looked over this thread in the music production forum, I couldn't help but notice that people were ready to write a lot more about the negative side of production than the positive side. This is something I've noticed more generally, too: it seems like people spend a lot more time ranting against things they hate or dislike than they do praising the things they like.
Think of Fred Phelps and his family's harassment of gays and grieving military families -- and also of the people who feel stirred to indignation by this and spend time ranting against him. Think of political pundits, most of whom are so consistently negative. Think of Dante's Inferno, so much more popular than the Purgatorio and Paradiso (heaven) that many people probably don't even know the latter two books exist.
I think that for a lot of people (I include myself) it feels really good to let off a bunch of steam and gather up all their rhetorical resources to strike out verbally against an "enemy." But we don't get nearly the same pleasure out of doing the same to exalt the stuff we enjoy. For example, I've praised and denigrated lots of different tracks in the music forum, but it seems like my angry or irritated rants are always much longer and more forceful than my positive posts.
Thoughts on this asymmetry?
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