Toxic Positivity
Kafka “In a battle between you and the world, hold the world’s coat.”
Having to face a bad situation is bad enough. Being told you have to keep positive about it is even worse. Picture this: you are hurled against an awful calamity, hanging, much like Jonathan Edward’s famous sinner, by a slender thread over some bottomless pit, driven to your wit’s end by desperately trying to claw your way out of it. And the last thing you need is some good natured soul telling you it is you and your thinking and not the situation itself (a veritable disaster by any cognitive stretch) that is a problem. Think positive, stay positive, that same soul says, wondering what lesson will eventually be gleaned from your horror. To which I say, nothing and repeat nothing, and what a tired, fabled cliche this naive belief in a revelation of some future moral is. In case of trouble, reader, I instead propose the following: steer negative and stay negative, because, sometimes, the negative is just the right way to go.
Or at least keep neutral, surely at a safe distance from some rushed promise of a silver lining that comes with a zero guarantee of a delivery. Ah, the silver lining, your well wisher insists, as she pseudo mindfully gazes with an imagined wisdom at some distant unimaginable good. My own disposition is such that I can only gaze dumbly at the peril at hand and disregard all the rest as a quasi prophetic crap, a mere place holder in the-angry-God-knows what future course of things.
Reader, bear this in mind though it will puzzle it: sometimes, the positive is the negative and the negative is the positive; sometimes, too much of a good thing is a bad thing; sometimes, hopelessness is more hopeful than hope that stalls the insight and comes in the way of understanding.
Take this from a person who should be the last one to claim it. A natural born coward, I am quick to shy away from reality whenever a good opportunity presents itself. When peril strikes, out of thousands of people, I will be the first one to flee. But even a consummate wimp like me cannot stand a lie.
Which all this positivity mongering -- the gratitude platitudes, the cognitive behaviorist tricks of reframing reality according to your timid, ever reality receding self’s desires -- is. Forms of telling ourselves everything will be alright, when maybe it won’t. Modes of extracting meaning out of suffering, where there may be none.
For a good measure of just how silly we have become in squishing our contemporary, fiercely domesticated discomforts, imagine Hamlet being advised to relax a little and try practicing mindfulness techniques. Or to adopt a more positive mindset. Or to hope for a silver lining, nine deaths at the play’s end of which is Shakespeare’s own slant on it. Hamlet’s struggle to make sense of reality, to approximate and assess it from every angle, breeds uncertainty and therefore creativity, of both thought and insight. It also gives him an emotional range he (and the play) would otherwise have lacked. By urging the mind to go on a dumbed down auto-correct every time the traces of the tiniest struggle are at sight, we are buying a temporary respite from stress -- optimizing for a stolid placidity -- at the cost of the rich range of human insight and experience.
Also at the dear cost of our cleverness.
But there is another reason why it is good to stick with the bad when bad is at an obvious hand. It is because when you see something truly good, something silverishly splendid that will exhilarate the heart and elevate the mind, you won’t be able to experience it because you had seen the bad and had failed to acknowledge it.
