Who hasn’t been sent by their employer to courses, training and workshops year after year to learn to think even more positively? The New York Times of August 4, 2012 contained a refreshing article by Oliver Burkeman about the positive power of negative thinking. A few months later, a Dutch translation of one of his books was published (translated by Patty Adelaar): ‘Antidote: happiness for people who hate positive thinking’ (Ambo Publishers). It seems to be the long-awaited answer to Anthony Robbins’ bestseller Your Unprecedented Powers. Yet he was not the first to dare to question the limits of modern positive thinking. Barbara Ehrenreich published her book ‘Bright-Sided’ in 2009 in which she fights the tyranny of unfounded positivism and argues for realistic thinking.
View setbacks positively
There is no doubt that positive thinking can lead to great results in a number of cases. But the question is whether positive thinking is in all cases the best attitude towards serious problems such as getting cancer or losing a job.
The delusion of cancer as a blessing
When Barbara Ehrenreich heard that she had breast cancer, she was told again and again, from other patients and even from nursing staff, that cancer is not a problem or a disease, but a gift, even a blessing. She wholeheartedly disagrees with this. Approaching this condition in this way ignores the fact that breast cancer is a more important cause of death than, for example, AIDS, heart disease, lung cancer or stroke.Nevertheless, websites about breast cancer generally adopt a positive tone. Unlike the past, when many women suffered from this disease in lonely silence, many women now write on cancer forums and on their sites about their experiences and insights. And they usually do so in a cheerful tone.Nowadays there is also a variety of cheerful shirts, brooches, scarves, earrings, bracelets, coffee mugs and many more items for sale. Usually part of the proceeds from these cheerful and pink items is intended for the fight against breast cancer. But the articles also seem expressly intended to give cancer a more positive image.When listening to or listening to all those cheerful stories about having breast cancer, Barbara Ehrenreich started to feel increasingly lonely. Almost all of the information shared with her by fellow patients had a cheerful undertone that was difficult to reconcile with the reality of this devastating disease.
The lack of righteous anger about the disease
What Ehrenreich especially missed was outright anger about the disease and the limitations of available treatments. And also the absence of the question of why breast cancer is so common in the industrialized world and why there is so little discussion about possible environmental factors.Apart from patients with late-stage cancer, it is not the disease itself that makes people feel bad or in pain, but it is the treatments that cause the severe discomfort. For Barbara Ehrenreich it was striking that this fact is hardly discussed in patient circles.In general, the tone on websites she visited was almost everywhere cheerful. As with AIDS, the words ‘patient’ and ‘victim’ were avoided wherever possible, as they conveyed self-pity and passivity. Instead, she saw verbs such as fight and fight sometimes combined with brave, brave’ or fierce. After the treatments, women often called themselves ‘survivors’. Of others it was said that they ‘lost their battle’, as if they had fallen like brave soldiers in war. Cancer didn’t seem to be so much about illness, but primarily about courage, sisterhood and perseverance.Even outside the world of breast cancer patients, there is a positive tone about having cancer. For example, cyclist Lance Armstrong, who survived testicular cancer, said cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him.
A social obligation to think positively
Instead of seeing cancer as a disease to be fought, cancer is often seen as a rite of passage or an initiation. Barbara Ehrenreich heard again and again that after the mutilating treatment you can be even more beautiful, sexier and more feminine than before. She also heard that chemotherapy gives you smooth and tight skin, that it makes you lose weight and that when your hair starts growing again, it is fuller and softer and perhaps a surprising new color. All this was not her own experience.Anyone who goes against this world in which breast cancer is seen as an opportunity for creative self-transformation, as a chance to start over, is seen as a traitor to the cause. They are told that a negative attitude does not help, on the contrary, or that it is so important to focus all energy on a peaceful or even happy existence. That’s what happened to Barbara Ehrenreich. And when she published her book Bright-Sided in 2009, which is essentially a plea to think realistically rather than positively, it was considered controversial.
Lost job? Be happy this opportunity! What else!
Even outside the world of cancer, positive thinking seems to be a must. People who have lost their jobs due to mass layoffs and who are sliding towards the poverty line are told at training courses for the unemployed that they must renounce their anger and ‘negativity’. They must learn to see their situation as an opportunity that they can happily embrace. The underlying idea is that they will not only feel better when looking for work, but that they will also find it faster. Here too, positive thinking is considered a kind of beneficial approach.Barbara Ehrenreich’s objection to this ‘everything will be fine because I think so’ way of thinking is that it simply doesn’t work. What does work is determination, even when everything seems to be going wrong, to continue looking for a new job.
Earn money with positive thinking
There are hundreds of self-help books that promote positive thinking as a means to get rich. With positive thoughts you could attract a lot of money. In fact, this method is said to be so reliable that you can already start spending the money you still have to earn. A low income or unemployment on the books is seen as an excuse. The real problem would lie in your mind.Those who think positively are not concerned about social inequality, because anyone can become rich by adjusting their thoughts. So if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. At least, if you believe the information in these self-help books.Barbara Ehrenreich sees the culture of positive thinking to get rich as a major factor in the great economic crisis that started on Wall Street in 2008. According to her, other factors that played a role in the emergence of the crisis are greed, the current speed of transactions and the new financial products.The problem with positive thinking was that it made ordinary people willing to go deeply into debt and even gamble on their homes to have more money in their hands. In their opinion, at least some of Wall Street’s top executives have taken too big risks with positive thinking.
The real problem with positive thinking
If you are more or less obliged to think positively in very difficult situations, you have to deny your understandable feelings of fear and anger. You then cover those feelings with a veneer of cheerfulness. That is easy for the environment, but not for the person directly involved.In the case of cancer, positive thinking is sometimes thought to be beneficial for long-term survival. But this tyranny of positive thinking can lead to a patient’s pessimistic feelings being viewed as unreasonable or even unacceptable. Many psychologists are convinced that suppressing negative feelings is harmful to health.And what if the treatment does not have the desired result? Then the patient accuses himself of not having thought positively enough and that he has only himself to blame for this disease and its tragic course.Ehrenreich is not fighting against the stimulation of positive thinking per se, but against the fact that people are expected to suppress their fears and doubts during a very difficult period in their lives. This can make patients feel lonely, because the culture is that they have to deny their true feelings. People who are diagnosed with cancer or who are fired from their jobs through no fault of their own are repeatedly told that it all happened because they weren’t thinking positively enough. This grotesque nonsense is cruel and Barbara Ehrenreich wants to expose it. She therefore advocates a change from positive thinking to realistic thinking.
read more
- Burkeman and the positive power of negative thinking
- Give up? Thinking realistically will get you further