What I’ve Read: Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich

I love Ehrenreich’s other books and went into this one expecting the same. I did love it, but found it more uneven (in content and in pace) than I was used to from her. Ehrenreich comes from an interesting place when discussing the “positivity movement” that has taken a front seat in American psychology over the past few decades. After a bout with breast cancer, Ehrenreich found the “cure yourself through positivity!” message prevalent in the community to be off-putting…even disgusting. After reading her points (some of which are surprisingly dense), I have to agree that there are limits to how far positivity can take a person before rational, common sense should take over.

I’ve noticed instances of the rampant positivity campaign in my personal life over the past few years too. It’s becoming less and less common for people to criticize or complain without feeling the need to qualify the statement with something more upbeat or to explain away the negative with a positive. (“I’m sure it’s just because I’m doing such a good job and he/she is threatened!”) Then you take positivity one step further to the law of attraction, as made popular by The Secret. I’ve had people tell me earnestly that they expect certain things to happen in their lives because they have a positive outlook and believe that that positivity will produce a certain outcome for them.

Alas, as Ehrenreich points out, that type of thinking is a fallacy. As for me personally, I see no harm in someone preferring a glass half-full approach as long as they are grounded in the knowledge that positivity alone does not change outcomes and they recognize some rational truths about things sometimes discarded in place of positivity alone. Hard work, for example. Tenacity is another.

Ehrenreich touches on how Oprah has really manifested the “believe in yourself and it will happen” mentality among women (and men, but mostly women) in America. Her Life Class series currently airing on OWN is almost entirely about manifesting things in ones life through “intention.” Of course, it’s easy for someone worth billions to lecture on about how “intention” has made such a difference in her life. What about the single mom struggling to pay bills? What about the family with a foreclosed home? Intention and positivity aren’t bad in and of themselves, but they are not a cure and they are not life-changers. They are just helpful tools alongside the assortment of other tools that people have at their disposal in life: education, upbringing, personal ambition, intelligence, socioeconomic status. Factor in positivity and intention alongside a good education and hard work and you may be on to something. But! You can’t have “it all” without acknowledging that a lot more goes into the end result than a mere positive outlook.

Of course, if the powers of mind were truly “infinite,” one would not have to eliminate negative people from one’s life either; one could, for example, simply choose to interpret their behavior in a positive way—maybe he’s criticizing me for my own good, maybe she’s being sullen because she likes me so much and I haven’t been attentive, and so on. The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.

[…]

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?

It’s a fascinating book and particularly insightful when you put it in the context of what’s happening around us in the world now.

Have you read this book? What do you think of the whole positivity/law of attraction movement?