As a writer and editor, I am fascinated by the human tendency to focus on the negative at the expense of the positive. As a young reporter, I got more plaudits from my cohorts when an article I wrote skewered some politician than when I delivered something in praise of someone’s achievement. I never felt comfortable with those plaudits because I knew they came at another person’s expense.

When the Internet arrived and reliable statistics on the number of hits an article received became available, I saw the same phenomenon. The love of negativity wasn’t limited to the newsroom but was shared by the public. If you want people to read your writing, be controversial. Draw sharp lines between right and wrong and emphasize what’s bad.

What makes us that way? Why do humans so often turn their attention to evil when goodness hovers nearby?

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St. Ignatius of Loyola has the best answer I have found to this issue. Ignatius posited that there is a good spirit and a bad spirit, always eager to offer advice on what you should do. The bad spirit is sort of like a bratty two-year-old, shouting, crying and pulling on your pant leg, always grasping for attention. The good spirit is not like that. This spirit is calm and collected, hoping you will turn your attention toward them, but doing little to capture that awareness.

In such a situation, of course, you pay heed to the bad spirit, even if your only desire is to make it go away. However, the bad spirit doesn’t want to be obnoxious. What it really wants is to draw your attention away from the good spirit. The good spirit wants you to be open to the world and its possibilities, to be creative and to do things that will please God. This is what makes the bad spirit bad. The bad spirit wants to keep you from doing anything that inspires joy and happiness.

Ignatius saw this tension between the good and bad spirits as the central feature of the spiritual life. We should be attentive to this battle going on in our hearts and minds and act accordingly.

The problem is that it is one thing to know this and quite another to recognize it when the battle is taking place.

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Last month, I had the flu for four weeks. I’ve never had the flu last that long. I wasn’t bedridden, but I was housebound. Mostly, I was just tired and listless.

In the first two weeks, I read a lot and wrote a little. I felt productive despite my illness. Then, one day, I hit a wall. I lost my desire to read, and I felt it was impossible to turn to God in prayer. After a day or so, this passed. When I raised this with my spiritual director, he asked whether I stopped to think that Jesus was on my side, that His love goes through every wall.

“Well, uh, no. I never thought of that.”

This is my biggest problem: being unaware that I am falling into what Ignatius calls desolation and then taking action to climb out of that space. I didn’t recognize the bad spirit whispering in my ear. That is, I was paying too much attention to the little guy’s antics while failing to heed his presence.

These movements go on constantly in our hearts. The bad spirit is totally engaged in getting you and me off track. “The distinctive trait of the good spirit,” Ignatius writes, “is to give courage and strength, consolation, tears, inspirations and quiet, making things easy and removing all obstacles, so that the person may move forward in doing good.”

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Rob Marsh, a British Jesuit, says we give the bad spirit too much airtime. Instead, we should starve him of attention. “While the bad spirit is fascinating, the good spirit tends not to draw attention to itself: like the God it serves, it specializes in humility and gives itself freely and without fuss.”

That brings us to the spiritual practice of the examen. Few people can give constant attention to the movements of the good and bad spirits. But we can take time every day to reflect on how those spirits have been acting in our hearts. Maybe if I did this daily, I would be better at recognizing when I fall into desolation, when I let the bad spirit set up a wall before me.