Glass Half Empty

This very typically little story happened to me just the other day and I thought it was, well, very typical of the difference in culture between the US and Germany.  So here it goes.

General German sentiment: things will be worse tomorrow and even worse later.

I am on the LinkedIn Alumni list of my old/first university, the one in Germany.  As you might or might not know alumni relations is rather new to Germany, and in general people graduate and then pretty much forget about their universities.  So when they slowly started building closer relationship with their alumni I felt honor bound to at least sign up and participate.  The group is not very active but every once in a while an interesting post comes along which is worth reading and commenting on.

So the other day I saw that somebody had posted a ranking of “new” universities (those less than 50 years old) and my good old – or should I say new – university secured a spot among the top 15.  Pretty darn good, I thought for a small university in a provincial town in southern Germany.  I commented positively and tweeted the article.  Exactly the behavior that is expected from and commended in every good American.

The reaction I got should not have surprised me but still it did: the next person responding to my comment basically wrote: it ain’t all that great, in 5 years the university will not be “New” anymore and where will that leave us?  On the list of all universities this places is only “whatever not so stellar number) and the German universities in general aren’t doing so well, worse than the Dutch, blablabla, etc.

How very German!  Instead of focusing on the positive, the good ranking now and thinking that we have a few years to improve the overall ranking the focus is on the bad, the negative, the problem.  Maybe the typical American focus on the forever positive outlook, the incessant “everything will be alright” attitude is not realistic and at times outright annoying but the relentless focusing on the negative, the automatic assumption that whatever can go wrong will go wrong and that it is downhill from here is depressing. Why is that the automatic negative reaction, why forever focus on the bad?

I hate to say it, but it seems almost German nature.