I think one of the healthiest and most comforting trends I’m seeing, online and IRL, is the ability for people to just say “I’m so sorry that is happening/happened to you, it must be/have been very painful” without immediately coopting the discomfort or trying to chirpily ameliorate it. The ability to simply hold space and acknowledge another person’s pain is a good one to cultivate and it seems a larger swath is embracing it. I approve!
I think the tone-deafness of empty platitudes is more obvious in print. In print, a person going through problems can really lay out all the sordid details of their pain without holding back. It would take a very socially inept person to post “Look on the bright side!” to someone who shares all those sad, potentially embarrassing details. It is also easier to scold a person who would post something like that. If you are in meatspace and someone says a platitude in response to someone else’s pathos, it is too much trouble to set them straight. But it is easy to say something like “That is unhelpful, bro! Stop talking like a freakin’ Hallmark card!” on an anonymous message board.
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Gah, I hate that too! It just adds guilt on top of the suffering. For a long time I was stuck in the “feeling bad for feeling bad” spiral. I finally got a counselor who was like, “Uh, yeah, these are chemical reactions in your brain. You can get better with practice and medication, but it’s going to take a while.”
This is closely related to the phenomenon of “Nothing is impossible” in the workplace, whereby some bosses (perhaps having read too many inspirational can-do books or biographies) refuse to take “It can’t be done” for an answer even when something is provably un-doable.
I’ve been seeing this a lot recently (the past week or so) in social media. It seems like other things of its ilk where “the dose makes the poison.” So “positivity,” great - but when it’s taken too far, you end up with something that is no longer great and could be actively harmful.
Unfortunately, many people will deliberately misunderstand this idea.
[quote=“Velocity, post:1, topic:847167”]
[li]Positive gaslighting: Telling yourself, or others, that “it’s going to be all right” when in fact things clearly are not, or will not, be all right; denying unpleasant reality - for instance, telling ugly people that they are in fact “beautiful” and face no looks-ism disadvantage when they complain about facing a looks-ism disadvantage.[/li][/QUOTE]
Just like there’s different kinds of intelligence, there’s different kinds of beauty. Some people who have beautiful faces have incredibly ugly attitudes, and vice versa. My grandma used to say that it’s far more important to be beautiful on the inside than on the outside.
I had never heard the expression before, but as soon as I read it in the thread title I knew exactly what it meant. It fits nicely with my life’s motto: I have never met a smart optimist.
Every visionary is an optimistist. MLK, Ghandi, Susan B. Anthony, George Washington…if these folks hadn’t had any hope for a better future, then we wouldn’t know their names or their respective movements.
I have never met a smart peddler of positvity, however. A positivist doesn’t use their brainpower to effect change. They rely solely on “thoughts and prayers”. They don’t come up with backup plans. They don’t course-correct. Because all they can see is the fantasy in their mind. Not reality. So those people truly are dumb.
Someone who has hope that tomorrow may be less crappy than today isn’t dumb. They are just trying to stay sane and focus on an end goal.
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I absolutely disagree, the optimists were sitting home saying everything will be alright while the people listed above and got to work then the optimists said “see, it all worked out.”
I don’t feel the first two are a problem. More like they’re inevitable when you’re listening to someone or struggling yourself, and you simply don’t know what to say. Kind of like when you’re at a funeral and say, “at least he’s in a better place,” to someone who is religious. Does it help? Probably not - they’re still going to grieve. Is it harmful? No. It’s just someone not knowing what they’re supposed to say, because there isn’t anything you CAN say that’ll make anything better.
The latter ones though I can see being more harmful, although I don’t see telling someone to try and have a positive attitude is terribly harmful (not helpful, but I’ve been told this before and I just sigh and nod). Telling depressed people they just need to snap out of it IS harmful, and it’s also a good idea to just let people vent if that’s what they’re looking to do.
So what term would you use to describe someone like MLK?
There are cynics, realists, optimists, and positivists. The first and last are the extremes to avoid. The realists and optimists are in the middle, working hand in hand. Realists need optimists for inspiration. And optimists need realists to vote for and carry out their ideas.
No one needs cynics or positivists.
I am curious what your conceptual framework looks like. If optimists are bad, who is looking for solutions to difficult problems? IMHO, realists don’t do this very well because they adapt so well to shitty circumstances. They think, “Yeah, it sucks being a slave, but what can we do? We just need to cope with it and not complain so much.” I hear lots of people talking like this. Rarely do you hear effective leaders talking like this.
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This reminds me of the story of the husband by his wifes bedside while she was in her last days. He was SURE she would be healed and would pull thru so he was talking about future vacation plans, how they would redecorate the kitchen, asking her what wallpaper she wanted, etc…
Maybe in reality he should have just talked to her about all the good times they had together or reassuring her she was loved and they would be able to carry on. Basically helping her to end things peacefully.
Yeah, what some people are calling “toxic positivity” I think can often be more effectively described as “being in denial”. You can’t help being excessively positive if you’re absolutely determined never to acknowledge the reality of anything bad. (See also: the Ursula K. LeGuin short story “The Road East”.)
Sometimes the best response to gloom and doom types is a hefty dose of toxic positivity.
I think you’re conflating different “optimisms”. There’s “Everything is fine right now”, “Everything will be fine on our present course”, and “Things can improve if we work to change them”. The first one is denial (unless things actually are all bunnies and rainbows), the second one is passive optimism, and the third one is active optimism.
I think despondency and fiascoes pose greater threats than being positive.
I remember I was such an optimistic fellow as a boy. My parents’ marriage wasn’t a very happy one and they divorced when I was still in school. When one has to make ends meet, one has no choice but to mature fast and assume a realistic outlook.
But if I had stuck to grim realism and sheer pragmatism, probably I wouldn’t have managed to handle some of the sharpest vicissitudes of fortune successfully. Because humans are emotional creatures, competence, diligence, and perseverance are not enough in pursuing important goals. Positive thinking is often indispensable.
Well, I once read a (dumbed down synopsis of) a study that showed that optimists were generally a lot happier than pessimists, but pessimists were far more often right.
I know several smart optimists – interestingly all women – who are so often disastrously disappointed that I have to wonder – but it is a fixed pattern. I think they love the feeling of hopefulness more than they hate the crash. It isn’t intelligence, it’s some other thing.
I see where the OP is coming from. But he is conflating different behaviours.
A degree of positivity is necessary to deal with problems, push your boundaries and succeed. However, it needs to be tempered with realism and cynicism.
Unrepentant bullies often fail slowly. Sometimes they have great lives. Sometimes they are successful for a time but end up divorced and never satisfied.
People vary in their physical appearance and are judged on that. But not only on that. Few people are going to be vacuous celebrities. The majority of people look average and get by just fine, since “what is on the inside” counts for a lot too. Anyone can be beautiful, though not if you define beauty as narrowly as the OP.
I agree there is benefit to venting and validating complaints. It is wrong to knowingly offer extreme false hope in severe illness or blame others inappropriately for understandable attitudes - but this doesn’t make it wrong to be somewhat hopeful or optimistic. Telling people to “snap out” of depression is an unhelpful platitude - but it may come from a good place and intentions matter too. Positive attitudes can certainly be overdone and can cause harm; but if mixed with realism and cynicism remains an important skill and coping mechanism.
I’m not sure I agree about new social attitudes to people who manage to be proud of their disabilities or characteristics seen as conventionally bad. You’d have to be more specific.
This behavior is common among sports fans. No matter how many losing seasons they’ve had, it’s always “Next year is our year!” They’re going to win the Super Bowl, or make a deep playoff run, no matter how many times they’ve been wrong. It’s almost as if they *want *to be crushed by disappointment time and time again.
If Martin “I have a dream” Luther King wasn’t an optimist, what was he?
He wasn’t a realist, because a realist would be too focused on the threat of violence to ever let himself be the face of the CR movement. A realist would calculate the odds of success based on the dire evidence to date and conclude fighting oppression was a lost cause. Emigration would be a better bet for ones self-interest than protesting.
He wasn’t a cynic, because a cynic would never think white people could have the empathy needed to ever support CR. A cynic would also never believe the oppressed could find enough spine to see the war through to end.
He certainly wasn’t a pessimist, because a pessimist can’t even dream of positive change. Pessimists actually take comfort in hopelessness; there’s no need to feel shame in your own oppression if you’re convinced it’s as impossible to fight it as it is to destroy the sun.