My whole comment was about how outwardly miserly behavior can still manifest from someone who really is a good, interesting, worthwhile person. So I don’t understand your “asshole” comment. That seems like you’re jumping straight for the nuclear option instead of allowing the possibility that among the population of generally good people, some are nice and warm, some are crabby and prefer to skip social pleasantries or otherwise come off as cold.
Maybe if you unpack the connection between your first sentence and your conclusion more it would help me understand.
The power of positive thinking can be destructive if it has been automated. Negative thinking can be the same way - it can be automated, although from my experience, my negative thinking usually helps me see flaws in my own reasoning to such excess that I don't feel I'm at risk for it being automated without being able to reason myself out of whatever is automatic.
I'm glad you are thoughtful enough (and that's not meant as a back handed compliment, abstractly positive thinking and negative thinking function the same way, they just interact with different components of self-social systems) to see things in less simplified ways. I have one friend who is like you, and it's constantly a struggle to override my belief system that they are sick of me. But that's the automatic thinking spiral I get stuck in. And I would think most people who are cynical like that think similarly, because that's what we are used to. Emotional vampires, black holes, draining. All those pejoratives affect our self perspective.
We don't know how people will judge us. It's nice that people are willing to speak from another perspective. Positive thinking, from when I've experienced it, can feel very group think, like, everything will fall apart if you stop thinking that way. That is such a suppressive ideology to me, it feels dangerous, and I'm not comfortable simply allowing myself to be one directionally convinced into thinking that way. It doesn't take my perspective into account.
So in the end, I find, the people who can handle interacting with me and staying positive have very strong minds, both intellectually and emotionally. And they demonstrate that there is a brighter side to life that doesn't imply we're all going to jump off a cliff because it's fun, and not see the ground coming. Sometimes bad things happen in life. It can't all be controlled by attitude. There are real things that happen in life that affect emotions. Forcing oneself to pretend everything is fine is suicidal.
I'm not used to being happy. It makes me uncomfortable often. That doesn't mean I fear it. It just means I have to be very careful in experiencing the emotion. Sadness too. Sadness over things that make you sad shouldn't be suppressed, nor should it be attached to people like 'those people made me sad'. That's just going to hurt a person in the long run, because sadness is an awareness. You need sadness to know happiness. Suppressing emotions leads to convoluted reasoning, missed connections, insight and clarity into one's own circumstances, real things.
I feel neutral talking to you, but I feel better in general knowing most of humanity isn't on a collision course to remove half of it's emotional reasoning away.
I just think some people are surly, miserly, cheerless, grouches and that is just their way in life. If you respond by shutting them out because it's inconvenient for your short-term feelings, you might miss out on an amazing person who just happens to live life differently.
Once I started to see miserly behavior as "just another way of life" that some people like and some people don't, it really opened my eyes to many more people around me.
In this sense, I think it's very shallow to ask "do they make my life better" (which will almost surely be biased by whatever short term comforts or simple, manageable friendship you want) or "do they make me happy" (sometimes the best thing for us is something that shocks our system, upsets our worldview, challenges us in a non-trivial way, and we might have to endure receiving that in thorny, grumpy packaging).
Obviously there is a limit. With my friend, I know that grumpiness is his way of life. He doesn't mean gruff or callous things to be taken as insults, even though most shallow social interaction he has with people, especially if they don't know him, might come off that way. If I thought he sincerely was putting me down or insulting me purely for the sake of inflicting pain or something, then yeah, I would not want that in my life.
Overall I guess I am just saying I think it's much more complicated than the heuristic you describe. If I followed that heuristic, it would be a lot like indulging confirmation bias and surrounding myself only with people who reinforce the stuff I already think or do. I might miss out on great relationship where a healthy antagonism is a first-order component of the interaction, and it stretches my boundaries.