It’s easier to inventory what would ruin a good life than to define one.
It’s easier to catalog failure modes than to articulate success.
It’s easier to know what we’d refuse than what we’d accept.
We know the walls before we know the room.
Some might say the obvious explanation is that we’re broken. Negativity bias. Evolution wired us wrong.
But that’s not quite it. The asymmetry isn’t in us. It’s in the structure of reality itself.
Why are the walls easier to find than the center?
Because success and failure have different logical structures. They aren’t symmetric opposites. They’re different things.
Success is a conjunction. Finding love requires chemistry AND timing AND compatibility AND mutual availability AND shared values. Every variable must land in range simultaneously.
Failure is a disjunction. Bad chemistry OR bad timing OR incompatibility. Any single thing outside its range is sufficient.
Think of it visually. Success is the tiny sliver where all the circles overlap. Failure is the vast space where you only need to be outside one.
Threading a needle versus crossing a minefield.
If five things must go right, each with 70% odds, your overall probability is 17%. The math is punishing. Conjunctions shrink; disjunctions expand.
This is why postmortems work. When something fails, you can usually find the cause. The single circle you stepped outside. When something succeeds, you often can’t reverse engineer it. Twelve things went right, and you can’t isolate which actually mattered.
Failure is traceable and success is overdetermined.
The negative leaves clean data. The positive leaves mystery.
Once you see this logic, you will find it everywhere.
In biology: The immune system can’t enumerate every possible threat. The space is infinite, mutating. So it models self instead. Anything that doesn’t match gets flagged as foreign. Health is defined negatively. Health is the absence of not-self.1
In theology: Thomas Aquinas opens his treatise on God with a striking move. We cannot say what God is, only what God is not. Infinite, so not finite. Eternal, so not temporal. This is the via negativa. Aquinas is being precise. Some realities are too vast to approach directly.2
In fiction: Dystopias are vivid. 1984. Brave New World. The Handmaid’s Tale. Each details specific wrongs. Surveillance, thought control, coercion. Concrete and describable. If you try to write a utopia with the same specificity you might find that you can’t. It comes out thin, unconvincing, vaguely sinister. Dystopia is a disjunction of wrongs. Utopia is a conjunction of goods that must harmonize in ways nobody can articulate.
The pattern holds across domains because it’s not about the domains. It’s about the geometry.
Boundaries are lower dimensional than interiors. Disjunctions are easier to satisfy than conjunctions. Falsification is more decisive than confirmation.
The walls are always easier to find than the center.
Here’s something interesting, you can directly cause the avoidance of something. Don’t text your ex at 2am. Don’t invest money you can’t lose. Don’t take the job that makes you miserable.
These are fully within your control. You simply don’t do the thing.
You cannot directly cause positive outcomes. You can’t cause love. Only create conditions. You can’t cause creative breakthroughs. Only remove obstacles. You can’t cause meaning. Only clear away what blocks it.
Positive outcomes are downstream of factors you don’t control.
Negative outcomes can be blocked by direct action.
Your sphere of reliable agency is mostly negative.
Ancient wisdom understood this geometry.
If you look at the Ten Commandments, eight of ten are prohibitions. Thou shalt not. Don’t murder. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t covet.
Succinct. Enumerable. Walls you can locate.
The positive commandments such honor your parents or Keep the Sabbath are vague enough to require millennia of interpretation.
Every major ethical system converges on the negatives. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t betray. The prohibitions are nearly universal across cultures and centuries.
The positive prescriptions diverge wildly. Pursue virtue. Maximize utility. Follow duty. Express authenticity.
Convergent on the negative. Divergent on the positive.
You can command “do not kill.” You cannot command “be good.”
Because the negative is where agency lives.
So what do we do with this?
If reality is asymmetrical, if the positive is harder to find, harder to specify, harder to cause, how do we live?
We live like sculptors.
Michelangelo supposedly said he just removed everything that wasn’t David.3 The line is probably not a direct quote. But it works because it’s structurally true.
The sculptor doesn’t build the statue. He removes what isn’t the statue. The David was always in the marble. The work is subtraction.
This doesn’t mean the positive is fake. David is real. The good life is real. Meaning is real.
It means the path to the positive runs through the negative.
You don’t construct the life you want. You chisel away the parts that definitely aren’t it.
The secret isn’t that the positive doesn’t exist. The secret is that it’s emergent.
1 I’m simplifying here, but the basic idea is wild… your immune system doesn’t have a list of every possible threat. It can’t, new viruses mutate constantly. So instead it learns what you look like and attacks anything that doesn’t match. The technical term is “self/non self discrimination.” Health is basically your body successfully rejecting everything that isn’t you.
2 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 3. Aquinas writes: “We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not.” The via negativa (apophatic theology) appears across traditions. See Maimonides, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Eastern Orthodox theology. The pattern here is that some realities can only be approached by negation.
3 The quote is commonly attributed to Michelangelo but has no verified primary source. What we do have is Giorgio Vasari’s account in Lives of the Artists (1550), where Michelangelo describes sculpture as “liberating” the figure already present in the stone. The false version is honed, but the underlying idea is genuinely his.
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