Uncomfortable truth: How close is "positivity culture" to delusion and denial?

It was scary to me how fast even my doctor wanted to medicate my grief to put it behind me. I was seeing her six weeks after my sister and nephew had died, only two weeks after I had returned from their hometown 1500 miles away where I had spent a month trying to help my parents not absolutely collapse. I was having trouble working full-time, and a friend had told me a diagnosis of "adjustment disorder non-specified" was basically code for "situational grief" and should be able to get me some FMLA flexibility for a couple months until I could handle full-time reliably again.

I told the doc I thought the grief I was feeling only six weeks after a sudden and devastating loss was entirely appropriate, and that suppressing it seemed like it would make things worse, not better, but I'd let her know if things changed.

When it had been a year and I was still struggling to function (granted that year had been full of other awful things), I finally did ask for help with an antidepressant, which did provide the boost I needed to start exercising agency in my life again, so it's not like it was altogether the wrong suggestion. It was just much, much too early.

I found that the real friends in that situation were the ones who didn't need me to be someone else or somewhere else (emotionally) to love me.

When my dad was in the hospital after having bypass surgery, a lady came around doing aromatherapy. I know in my heart it's a bunch of crap, and I know 100% my dad would think so in better health, but in this beat down state he seemed to take some sort of solace in it so I didn't say a word.

All this is to say, sometimes you just need let people have their placebos, because it can be more cruel not to.

Line will always be different. There's healthy and realistic worrying where it motivates you to think and act if your situation is improvable, and there's the type of worrying where it's just wallowing and it just makes your situation worse.

But overall I think it's better to lean positive, in a similar sense to how overconfident people tend to be more successful.

The current trend for quite some time has been positively in every thing. Prosperity churches, only talk to people that are positive (let’s face it real friends are there when things go bad), … etc

There is a good book about this- Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

Talking through the inevitability of death is a fixture in philosophy and really does make it easier to bear.

One of the most popular works through the middle ages was Boethius's On the Consolation of Philosophy, a treatise on not lamenting death through philosophy. Of course, the author's point about speaking about consolation is often for the speaker, and Boethius was no different.

Formerly one of the most powerful men in Rome, he wrote the work while imprisoned by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great and facing imminent execution on sham charges of treason.

Sure, it's not a terminal illness, but he was rugpulled to death in a very similar manner. It's basically basically Martis cum Moriar and I highly recommend it for anyone concerned about death, dying, the inevitability of decay.

One of the weird things I've come to appreciate about death is it is actually a fairly communal activity in a philosophical sense. We all go through it, vanishingly few people like it and we all approach it with similar prospects of surviving for 150 years (nil, none, nothing, zip, zilch). I don't think these concepts of "positivity culture" and "denial" are really on the same spectrum. Any and every culture can devolve into delusion - in some fairly practical sense the default state of every culture is delusion (riddle me any culture that doesn't boil down to doing what "we do what we do because we can" at its logical root). We're all dying, some faster some slower, and it is possible to deal with death productively at any speed in most cultures.

The issue is more that people honestly don't know how to deal with bad situations and for obvious reasons don't have personal experience with being terminally ill to fall back on to generate instinctive empathy. It transcends the cultural aspects, I expect you can go anywhere and people will be uncomfortable with pain, sickness and suffering. One of the major things that unites humans is they'd much rather that trio of feelings stayed well away from them and this leads to some fairly harsh treatment of the people who are not doing well.

There are 2 approaches that I'm aware of - ignore death or turn to religion (I personally recommend Buddhism). Beyond that and symptom mitigation there isn't a lot that can be done although loosening up the regulations on the medical industry would probably help make life a little more bearable. I can imaging sitting in the medical system and watching it crush the life out of someone through economic inefficiency would be its own journey through hell.

> You lie there for a while and dwell on the fact that, barring technological innovation like the Singularity, you’re going to bite it one day.

The singularity won't save anyone. The maths of "forever" is unforgiving.

The most powerful thing is a negative attitude.

It's pretty easy to ensure that everybody around you is miserable and that nearly all of your outcomes are terrible. However, the opposite is unfortunately not possible: you can't make everything great just by being positive.

Therefore, it is best to be pragmatically positive. Recognize that positivity gives you the best chance to succeed... while recognizing its limitations.

When you cross that line, that's when it becomes "delusion and denial."

I've found there's a dark connection between the positive thinking movement and multilevel marketing. Virtually all of the "teachers" mentioned in The Secret, for instance, serve on the MLM motivational-speaking circuit, and those who don't have side scams of their own.

Motivational speaking as a thing fizzled out except among MLMs, as people realized that the only honest motivational speaker was Chris Farley's character Matt Foley, and the motivational message did not result in the expected productivity gains among legit companies. But for keeping suckers in a pyramid scheme they are effective, because those people have already proven willing to delude themselves into believing in something that won't materialize.

Damn, I have a hard time reading articles like this since it feeds into my health anxiety I have developed over the years after having many issues with my bowels.

I have several issues due to this, reflux being one and I am afraid of getting a diagnosis like this man. Somehow, by reading about it, I can catch myself almost convincing me that I must have something else badly going on even if it is just the same old problems that I have had ever since the symtoms first started appearing.

I sincerely hope that he survives his disease and that researches can develop vaccines against cancer.

Your writing is yet another confirmation for my tentative (yet ca. 20 years old) life phylosophy about that we should seek balance in everything (means: most of things, because the other one is about no absolutes) and the extremes are the devil. Extreme happyness and goodness too. That's actually a blatant - or clulessly idiotic - lie, not good or happy.

Ironically your writing about having less positivity made me feel affirming and good. Sounds like my kind of thinking.

I'm reminded of a tweet by Elon Musk, which struck me as the ultimate in explicit, unapologetic reality denial: "Better to be optimistic and wrong, than pessimistic and right!" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633208268238757888

edit: the assorted "you are misinterpreting them they just mean hello" responses are fundamentally missing the point of this comment. This is an implicit part of the "positivity culture" being discussed here. We have an entire ritual where you have to lie about things being fine.

One thing i hate about our culture right now is the casual "How are you doing?" in service jobs.

"Well, this week i found out i have testicular cancer and my doctor can't seem to get insurance approval for my Crohn's medication" are the things top in my mind.

They are just being friendly in the superficial way. Having talked with folks, they really do mean it and they care, but they are also entirely unequipped for the real answers. The truth would offer me no satisfaction but the cruel catharsis of sharing my pain and they would only be hurt for it.

Lying like this is really hard for me, these people don't deserve infantalized lies, so i have settled on "Horrible, but I'm having fun anyway!" with what is probably a manic smile, it reduces the damage to "mildly unsettled".

Its ok to admit that your role in somebody's life is ephemeral and to act like it. "Good luck" or "I hope you have a good day" go so much further than the superficial simulation of intimacy and connection of asking how somebody's life is going while not expecting a real answer.