[quote=flu]I think it’s a personality disorder in my case. When I enter into some deal, I always think I’m getting screwed, and it ends up being sort of self-fulfilling.
Clearly, I have the glass half empty syndrome.[/quote]

Seeing the negative side of a situation always gets a bad rap, and I’m tired of it. I personally think that the insistence on seeing every situation as a positive one more closely approaches the description of “personality disorder”. During the salad days of the early- to mid-aughts, I kept hearing about the wonderful economy and the endlessly rising value of housing. Hell, even Alan Greenspan was enthusiastically extolling the virtues of adjustable rate mortgages, claiming how American families (if they could only get over their allegiance to old-fashioned fixed rate loans) could use ARMs along with low interest rates and rising housing values to manage their debt more flexibly. Sorry, but that phrase still gives me a chuckle. Was Alan referring to homeowners using the equity in their homes to buy designer clothes, luxury automobiles, and even groceries (per one bank’s commercial) as flexible debt management?

Being afflicted with a negative attitude since birth (I’m convinced that it’s a result of my Catholic parents having lost their rhythm), and a nagging memory of my 5th grade study of events leading to the Great Depression, I persisted in questioning the reality of this economic utopia that everyone from my neighbors to the leading economists and financial experts believed in. I endured the pitying glances from friends and neighbor when I ventured an opinion that the unusually rapid rise in our neighborhood property values might not necessarily be a good thing. And my husband received their sympathy when he regaled them with tales of how I would not stop nagging him to sell our large empty nest before the bottom fell out of the market.

I’m not patting myself on the back because my instincts were dead-on. I’m just wishing that there had been a few more people out there who weren’t afraid to flaunt their negative attitudes. I know that they exist, because I’ve been hearing a whole lotta negative in the last couple years from many former cheerleaders, Mr. Greenspan included.

So, flu, keep envisioning that glass as half-empty. In fact, I’m thinking since housing went south, that the glass is closer to 3/4 empty. Personality disorder? Bah, humbug!