When was the last time you answered a greeting question without thinking? The kind of thing I mean is this:

How are you doing today?

It’s a standard opening, which essentially means “I acknowledge your presence with my words”. The actual words themselves are rarely important, and one of the key agreed norms here is that the person initiating the greeting rarely actually wants to know the answer to the question. There’s a reason why the following exchange reads as comedy:

How are you doing today?

Oh well, you know. The bus was early to the stop which frustratingly made me late as I was on time, just in time to see the bus leave. And then the school called to ask me to come and pick up one of the kids as they were sick in class, so I had to bail back home, get the car keys. That said, after that I decided that we should make the most of the morning together so I called in a family support day at work and we watched some movies snuggled under a blanket on the sofa. Then she was sick again, so that ended that. How are you?

…

But the insidious thing I notice, at least around where I live, is that the answer really does hold a message, even when it’s terse. It’s often something like one of the following:

Oh, not too bad

Getting there

Could be worse

Surviving

Mustn’t grumble

All of these clearly position the default answer as being some form of “bad”, and so they seek to reassure the asker that things are not quite as bad as they would expect them to be.

Think about that. I know negativity bias is a thing, but think about how many times we engage in this exchange in a month, or week, or even day. How many times we repeat the mantra, implicitly reminding ourselves that the best we could hope for is a neutral day, and that in most cases, we’re happy to settle for somewhere slightly north of “the worst things could possibly be”.

What effect does this have on our view of the world?

And what if we could flip it. What if, instead of the default “better than disaster” answer or the long rambling life story, we said something like:

Actually, my day’s going pretty well thanks. How about you?

If we said that enough, might we start to believe it? And if we start to believe it, might our brains (hard-wired as they are for confirmation bias) start looking for evidence to support it?

I mean, it might be worth a try.

So yes, I’m definitely doing better than fine. I’m pretty damn good right now, thanks. How about you?