The Saturday Exhale Episode. 11: Why Toxic Positivity Makes You Fragile

Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.

VG: It was Carl Jung who stated, “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” In previous installments of The Saturday Exhale, you, Alex, have pointed out that the purpose of life is not to be happy. Rather, the purpose of life is purpose: what Aristotle roughly calls eudaimonia, the self-satisfaction one receives from doing a job well with others, usually in silence. Jung and you do not agree on many things, but one thing you do agree upon is this: that whatever there is “to” life, owning material possessions is not necessarily the end of it.

In a reading from StressHacked: The Mind, where you recount your entire chapter “The Optimism Trap: Why Blind Optimism Makes You Fragile,” you take on the cult of toxic positivity: the belief that thinking things are good will make them good, or that visualizing good things coming will make them come to pass. You have already addressed philosophical pessimists, like Arthur Schopenhauer (who I quoted in your last newsletter), in your works; they also disagree with positivity as being a vector to anything approaching happiness. I want to take a slightly different tack with them, namely Schopenhauer. I do this because of the overlap between your advice in StressHacked and his life philosophy (rather than his pessimism, though the two are related). I hope that, in requesting you respond to these quotes, you can clarify even further what makes your strategic pessimism a counter to both the toxic positivity trap and philosophical pessimism. Schopenhauer writes (bold emphasis is italics in original),

The main reason why misfortune falls less heavily upon us, if we have looked upon its occurrence as not impossible, and, as the saying is, prepared ourselves for it, may be this: if, before the misfortune comes, we have quietly thought over it as something which may or may not happen, the whole of its extent and range is known to us, and we can, at least determine how far it will affect us; so that, if it really arrives, it does not depress us unduly—its weight is not felt to be greater than it actually is. But if no preparation has been made to meet it, and it comes unexpectedly, the mind is in a state of terror for the moment and unable to measure the full extent of the calamity; it seems so far-reaching in its effects that the victim might well think there was no limit to them; in any case, its range is exaggerated. In the same way, darkness and uncertainty always increase the sense of danger. And, of course, if we have thought over the possibility of misfortune, we have also at the same time considered the sources to which we shall look for help and consolation; or, at any rate, we have accustomed ourselves to the idea of it. … There is nothing that better fits us to endure the misfortunes of life with composure, than to know for certain that everything that happens—from the smallest up to the greatest facts of existence—happens of necessity. A man soon accommodates himself to the inevitable—to something that must be; and if he knows that nothing can happen except of necessity, he will see that things cannot be other than they are, and that even the strangest chances in the world are just as much a product of necessity as phenomena which obey well-known rules and turn out exactly in accordance with expectation. … If a man is steeped in the knowledge of this truth, he will, first of all, do what he can, and then readily endure what he must …. A man should be a Siegfried, armed cap-à-pie, towards the small troubles of every day–those little differences we have with our fellow men, insignificant disputes, unbecoming conduct in other people, petty gossip, and many other similar annoyances of life; he should not feel them at all, much less take them to heart and brood over them, but hold them at arm’s length and push them out of his way, like stones that lie in the road, and upon no account think about them and give them a place in his reflections.

Schopenhauer outlines his philosophical pessimism, rather than his life philosophy, in the following quote:

If we were to conduct the most hardened and callous optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theatres, through prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it shuns the gaze of cold curiosity, and finally were to allow him to glance into the dungeon of Ugolino where prisoners starved to death, he too would certainly see in the end what kind of a world is this meilleur des mondes possibles [best of all possible worlds].

The “positivity trap” that you address in your chapter, wherein a positive attitude is adopted by an individual to presumably get them through hard times (and usually unsuccessfully), seems to be predicated on two, perhaps mutually exclusive, tendencies: 1) A complete detachment to reality, like the kind of optimists Schopenhauer insists on touring through torture chambers, who have not suffered sufficiently enough to jade them, and 2) A hyper-attachement to reality, wherein the positivity is a mask for deep insecurity over a lack of control over the things we can’t control in our lives.

You have mused about seeing yogis collapse into fits of debilitating anxiety when the challenges of the world catch up to them in a way they did not prepare for with meditation. As a yogi myself, I see this tendency of yogis to be in their beliefs wholly positive (adopting ‘manifestation’ or magical thinking) or wholly negative (a belief in the Vedic hierarchy, the Maya hypothesis wherein the world is fake, and Schopenhauer’s life-as-suffering); few adapt strategic pessimism, which you defined for us in your first newsletter. Here are my questions: first, what problems do you have with Schopenhauer’s life philosophy (rather than his pessimism); how does your advice in StressHacked differ? Second, to psychologize briefly, where did the individuals in the ‘positivity trap’ emerge from (as they are trapped in this construct like flies in a honey trap)? Are the individuals in this trap there because we are weak, used to a world where things legitimately do not go wrong (often)? Or is it because these ‘positivists’ know exactly what the world is, and their delusional Leibnizian conception that this hell-realm we call home is the ‘best of all possible worlds’ is a mask for a deep insecurity about themselves and their place in this world of great suffering?

AT: I’ll address point by point. I talk often about how money isn’t the purpose, it’s a tool to use towards purpose. I also agree that using this tool solely for the pursuit of material items is a recipe for unhappiness and despair, as they will never be “enough,” providing very little long-term meaning, value, or appreciation. There is a song by Typhoon I am reminded of:

I was lost out in the mountains
And I had run out of provisions
I had one drop left in my deerskin
And I had come to my last decision
Should I lie down
Oh, should I lie down
Or should I be laid down

I had set out in the first place
From what I gathered from rumored hearsay
I heard of treasure in a high cave
On the northern slopes of the coast range
So I climbed up
Oh, so I climbed up
But I didn’t know how to climb down

So I wandered through the foliage
I came across my own tracks and I became discouraged
And then at long last I found a cavern
I crawled inside and I lit my lantern
And it was all there
Oh, it was all there
Just like they told me it would be there

I was lost out in the mountains
I had no water nothing to eat
So I drank the soil from a golden chalice
I gritted precious stones between my teeth
And I regretted my lonesome palace
I should have never listened to others’ tales
All I had left was a priceless ballast
To hold me down from the howling gales

We are driven towards a life of consumerism, pursuing riches for the sake of riches, and once we set on this path very few of us know how to deviate from it. The path traps us in a march towards the destination: a destination that brings us nothing but emptiness, contempt, bitterness, and loneliness. Now, onto your second question. These passages remind me of why I find Schopenhauer worse than useless in many regards. Schopenhauer alludes to the utilization of premeditatio malorum, yet transitions to a position of determinism, removing personal agency. Everything bad that happens, happens out of necessity. This singular shift in position becomes crushing to the psyche, and under his framework the universe is undoubtedly evil, us having no ability to take action to make it worthwhile. Rather than creating a “life worth living,” as Aristotle taught, Schopenhauer advocates for a life of suffering we accept as inevitable. The second quote you shared of his speaks to this: for Schopenhauer, if one opens their eyes, they will inevitably realize life is horrific and existence is not worth it. No wonder so many of his students killed themselves.

My strategic pessimism utilizes a different framework. Rather than presuming that every action that happened, happened out of necessity, we presume that every action that occurred occurred based on cause and effect; yet, future actions on our end can alter this cause and effect dynamic in manners that either create more misery, or more contentment and purpose. I don’t teach that we accept the misery of our past because it was “necessary” in the general sense, I implore each of us to ask ourselves: “Do you like who you are today?” If the answer is yes, then you must accept that who you are is a culmination of the good and the bad of your past, and let go the pain the bad caused. Then, one must ask themselves “Who do you want to be tomorrow?” with the understanding that just because the failures and pain of your past molded you to be who you are now, that doesn’t mean you need to repeat them again. We are capable of learning, growth, and adaptation. The universe may be cause and effect, but to us it appears chaotic. We must build our capacity so that we can adjust in real time, protecting ourselves from, or even utilizing the chaos of each moment in order to propel ourselves to the future vision of who and where we want to be. Toxic positivity removes this capacity, and turns a blind eye to the realities, destining the individual to collapse in the moments when chaos arrives. Toxic pessimism, meaning Schopenhauer’s, removes agency and action, resigning to failure and misery.

For your second question, I think the answer is more complex. Positivity feels good, it gives us a certain warmth in the moment, a feeling of security. Often, those we idolize as successful, happy, prosperous, and more exude this type of positivity as a public face, perhaps as a means to profit off of others. It is hammered on us when we are young, when we enter new careers and new fields. For most, there is no reason to ever question the potential benefits, or harms, of this mental framework until we face collapse. When facing collapse, due to the cult of toxic positivity, we are left alone in our confusion and sorrow, where it is presumed we simply were not positive enough, didn’t try hard enough. So, most in this situation try to either stand and pursue the very ideology that led them to collapse previously, or allow themselves to shift to a state of philosophical pessimism. My writing is done to get the message out that there are other options: fusions of ancient and modern wisdom that can be synthesized in a manner to allow the individual to accept the harsh realities, simultaneously reframing them into positives, while also acknowledging their repetition as a negative future—this paradox working as motivation and fuel for action and growth.

VG: Thank you for clarifying your differences with Schopenhauer. I, too, am not taken by this concept of “everything that happens…happens out of necessity,” for the reason that I think we can change the future with our free will. So what becomes ‘necessary’ ultimately changes. But that is a can of worms that is probably best left unopened until another newsletter.

I ponder this question of yours, “Do I like how I am today?” from time to time. I suppose, if one answers ‘no,’ the answer is to change what you are doing, and make yourself into someone you do like. Do you think acting in the present retroactively changes the meaning of the past? Let me give you an example: a mathematician cheats on his wife (with women and men), destroys his family, leading to divorce, and does not financially support one of his dependents from a previous marriage. Yet, he makes profound contributions to economics and he is given a Nobel Prize for it. Then, they make a movie about him, starring Russell Crowe: A Beautiful Mind. I am of course talking about John Nash.

If everything doesn’t happen by necessity—if we have agency to change the future and re-write the meaning of the past—what does redemption look like? What are the steps we take if we don’t like who we are today?

AT: Exactly, if the answer is “no,” the question becomes “what must I change about myself to become someone I like?” followed by “what actions must I take to work towards this change?” This is a trick question, as it presumes a certain morality. Without being morally presumptuous, or assuming knowledge of all of the situational and contextual issues at play, I would ask John Nash (or anyone in this situation) if they truly like who they are, and can live with their behavior. Some may say yes; others may need to repress their actions, fragmenting their self. Redemption, I do not believe, exists in the manner in which the movies portray it. A singular act of heroism that wipes the slate and alters the collective perception of the individual. Redemption can, of course, occur, but only through slow, intentional efforts to become who one wants to be, and the positive ramifications that reverberate to others during this steady march into becoming. Throughout it all, the past cannot be hidden, repressed, or forgotten, for if it is, and if it rears its dirty head into frame for all to see, the entire conception of who the individual is will be shattered. When the past is owned, deeply regretted in the moment, learned from, and the individual moves forward fully reconciled with who they are, who they were, and who they wish to be, the past holds no power to destroy their evolving self. Of course, based on one’s crimes in the past, their severity and the stigma attached, the “starting line” on the quest to becoming something new will change—as will the ceiling on how others perceive the redemption arc. As for how each individual feels about themselves, and if they view themselves as redeemed, that is not for me to speak on.