These positives and negatives you speak of are only positives and negatives because we as humans have declared such things positives and negatives. Outside of our species there is no such thing as positive or negative there just is.

Suffering is another human born characteristic, ones suffering i.e. my cell phone battery is dead, may be anothers joy i.e i own a cell phone. Cool! Therefore suffering is invalid because it is subjective.

It needs to be considered that in the Eastern philosophies, existence is understood as suffering by those who have gone beyond suffering. The Buddha is called 'tathagata' - one who has 'gone thus' (i.e. 'gone beyond suffering'.)

In this understanding, the Sages have a perspective which we don't have. And we don't really understand 'suffering as suffering', because we have never seen anything beyond suffering, so for us suffering is normal. This is the perspective of the 'First Noble Truth' of Buddhism - that 'existence is dukkha'.

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The Buddha explcitly rejects asceticism (having endured a rigourously intense form of it for some years.) This is one meaning of 'middle path': neither asceticism nor indulgence lead to nirvana.