The quality of keeping it light and fluffy. Has it always been this way or is this an adaptation to a world of so many people where everyone is regularly moving to a new job and new house, etc such that it's just very rare to have anyone other than a few relatives that you're really keeping in touch with over the long term? Instead you learn to treat even what few people that you keep in touch with for a few years as if each meeting is the first and last time you'll see them.

And how do you treat someone/have a good time with a total stranger that you're meeting for the first and last time? You keep it light and fluffy. You crack stupid jokes. You keep it meaningless. You don't talk about anything 'personal' or 'private'. This is just how the well adapted people are such that even if you know a person for years you're still acting this way.

Or is 'light and fluffy' The Optimism? Is showing anything 'private' or 'personal' being 'negative' and dark and thus to be avoided?

I'd rather just stay home and read a book than associate with the light and fluffy. These people really annoy me. I respond to their idiotic exuberant hellos with a frown. I'd as well watch some corporate garbage TV, some reality show as associate with these people. And understand the saying, 'the difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man learns something from the fool.' I think it quickly quits applying when the fool is a marionette. When their every action is just an act and there's nothing at all real occurring. The real them is buried so deep they can't even find it anymore. They're buried in layer after layer of meaninglessness. Nothing that isn't a complete and utter waste of time ever comes out of their mouth and they're defiling the truth. They are a lie.

Unfortunately this all means that it's always best for me to just stay home.

A bunch of people successfully caught and shipped off to a concentration camp because they're insanely optimistic such that they refuse to face the obvious. But at the concentration camp they keep their optimism. Making jokes and having a grand old time as they starve to death and/or are killed by their tormentors. A heart warming story for the whole family.

First they gathered up the foreign Jews. Took them all on a train out deep into the forest, had them dig ditches and then shot them. One survived and through great hardship made it all the way back to town. Where he told all the others what had happened. They didn't believe him. Said he was nuts. Laughed at him.

When they gathered up all the Jews onto the cattle cars, one woman screamed that she saw a fire, they gagged her and finally beat her to make her shut up while her very young son held on to her.

What sort survived compared to what sort didn't?

It appears things didn't work out so well for the optimists. But then for sanity's sake, one must become an optimist. And they so routinely faced persecution that all this, at first, must not have seemed so new. And with their optimism they assumed that surely the Germans were basically still human...

So you ignore the negatives. You ignore, you ostracize, you dislike... those who aren't optimists. And usually this makes life mostly tolerable.