[Daviey]

In most teams, the manager's raison d'être is simply to make you more productive. This means unblocking problems when you are stuck, aligning vision (to avoid wasted work), to motivate and prioritise work when overloaded.

The advice of avoiding bringing "negative" things and using the session as almost a celebration of your success is massively missing the potential usefulness of these sessions!

If your boss doesn't know about impedance to your productivity, how can they possibly help you?

[echelon]

The OP has a point, though. Perpetual complainers are such a drain. I hate being around them. They drag everything down.

Everything doesn't suck all the time.

There are pockets of good and bad. Be pragmatic. Don't nucleate a culture of defeatism and make everyone think you only care about your paycheck and not your coworkers and their own struggles.

Not everyone is like this. But I can point to a number of examples of this.