The Positive Thinking Racket

I don’t know when the relentless optimism ethic took over the world but it needs to stop.

Maybe it first got traction with “How To Win Friends And Influence People” by Dale Carnegie in 1936.

Or perhaps it was Norman Vincent Peale in 1952 with “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

Today, Instagram and TikTok are filled with self-help gurus promoting the same ideas, “You get what you think about, what you believe in,” hence if you think positive thoughts, positive reality will follow. The underlying premise is we are in control of our destiny and so if good things happen we should pat ourselves on the back because we willed them to happen. Obversely, if bad things happen it is because we weren’t positive, or at least not positive enough.

All of which is, demonstrably, bullshit.

Most of what happens in our lives has nothing to do with our attitudes or beliefs. The foundations of success and failure, as currently defined, is a combination of innumerable factors, most of which we have no control over. None. We have no control over where we were born and the attendant opportunities that resulted. We have no control over who our parents were and their significant influence on our genetic intelligence and natural talents, perceived self worth, or the dysfunctional childhood patterns some carry into adulthood. We have no control over our luck, many diseases, whether someone loves us, time, aging, the economy, and, of course, death, just to name a few.

So, why does the enforced optimism scam retain popularity after all these years? I believe it is because positive thinking as a way of life eliminates or minimizes that about which we are most afraid: uncertainty. If we can be convinced, all evidence to the contrary, that everything that happens is in our control, then nothing is uncertain. Or, it doesn’t have to be. This is where self-importance and guilt enter the picture. If you succeed, it is because you believed you could. You got what you deserved. You are superior. If you failed, it is your fault. You clearly didn’t believe in yourself. Success or failure, positive thinking instructs you to ignore the hundreds of external influences that happened to line up with you or against you in a given situation and allows you to walk past the homeless and other disadvantaged without a tinge of guilt. After all, they are responsible for their plight.

The idiot cousin of positive thinking is relentless optimism, the idea that while we may not be control of our lives, someone else is, e.g., God, the Universe, karma, the list is endless, and he/she/it knows what is best for us and it is up to us to find the good in everything that happens no matter how horrible or unfair it may be.

Like positive thinking, trying to find the good in what is obviously bad is nonsense.

Some things that happen are demonstrably horrible, unjustified, unfair, cause immense pain, physical or emotional, or both, from which there is no complete recovery.

Positive thinking and relentless optimism are partners in the magical thinking racket.

In neither maxim is the light worth the candle. Thinking positive about the clearly negative or looking for the light when life deals the total darkness card is not only ignorant, it is dangerous. Some things that happen are bad, plain and simple. And some of those events will affect your life for the rest of your life. Painting a smiley face on tragedy substitutes fiction for fact.

The argument here is not for eternal pessimism. It suffers the same fatal weaknesses as forced optimism.

What we can know, and take comfort in, is that we humans adapt, we habituate, to both good and bad. Win the lottery? Happy, happy, happy. But in a year or two the lottery winner is about as happy as he was the day before he won the lottery. The same happens if you wake up in a hospital bed as a quadriplegic after an accident. That day you beg to die. A year or two later, you have habituated to reality and find a reason to continue living. But it doesn’t mean the lottery winner wants to give back the money or the paralyzed would get on that motorcycle again. Our ability to habituate is a two-sided coin. We don’t live forever in ecstasy or agony. What habituation doesn’t do is make bad good or good bad.

It is what it is and should be labeled as such.

When life projectile vomits in your face, calling it good is magical thinking. When the love of my life died suddenly, some good-intentioned people suggested, “You need to move on,” code words for “you need to ignore or forget what happened, pretend it didn’t, and find someone else.” Others suggested that I look for the “good” in what happened, most often verbalized as “Look on the bright side.” What? What did you say? There is no bright side to death of anyone, especially not the person on this rock you loved the most. None at all. And there never will be.

Bad things happen. Things over which we have no control. And some of those things will change life forever, and not for the better. Some events are dark and frightening and will remain so. We may eventually habituate, but the nature of the event never changes.

If it is bad, say it.

Then, do what we all must do: Keep wiping your tears and put one foot in front of the other.

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