Barbara Ehrenreich is pissed off. Again. I haven’t read her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, but I’ve been reading about it, they way I do all books I’m interested in.* There were two posts about it on my facebook page, one linking Ehrenreich’s interview with Democracy Now http://staging.democracynow.org/2009/10/13/author_barbara_ehrenreich_on_bright_sided
and another one from L.A. Observed http://www.laobserved.com/biz/2009/10/enough_smiling.php
I was incensed by my friend’s typically curmudgeonly facebook comment about how grateful he was that someone was finally blowing the lid off of Positive Thinking. Listen, I’m a born pessimist and an atheist to boot, but these kinds of decontextualized dismissals get my knickers in a knot. Especially now, when my new religion is the Power of Positive Thinking and The Law of Attraction. I’m one of the millions who have lost a job in this economic shitstorm and it’s all I can do to keep my head from exploding. But thanks to the miracles of modern science, along with the constant practice of practicing positive thinking, I’m able to put one foot in front of the other and get on with it.
One of Ehrenreich’s objections is the profit making of the self-help industry. I think she’s missing the obvious. People want help to become more positive. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible or meaningless. It means it’s hard. So as for requiring people to keep coming back and paying up, well that’s a spending decision that people have to make for themselves, but clearly, the positive attitude doesn’t come naturally. That’s why the religious attend weekly (or daily) services. You need what I call “a booster shot” with regularity to antidote our natural inclination to be frightened, defensive, selfish, all highly valuable qualities when you’re living in a cave or a twig lean-to and there isn’t enough mastodon to go around but not so productive when you’re trying to develop a new career or find a way to live on zero dollars a week.
My rabbis have been talking about faith all month, a hard concept for me to follow. What does faith mean without God? Rabbi Stan says, Faith in the Future, Faith in your ability to “make it.” This is more challenging than it sounds. But it’s a choice we each can make. Look, the universe rains down all kinds of hardships and heartache. You have to decide how to deal with them. So you can choose to be buried by a rain of frogs or you can choose to open your arms to a rain of those tiny multicolored chicklets like in that commercial from 1962 with the girl with the weird braids.
There’s lots of research on happiness and positivity and some of it can be found in this commentary about the book on Forbes.com http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/14/positive-thinking-myths-lifestyle-health-happiness.html
*I have been collecting books for at least 15 years. It’s a reaction the impoverished feeling of childhood trips to the library. I was never allowed to buy anything. Now I still don’t ever pay retail for a book but I accumulate books relentlessly. Who has time to read all that when there’s so much tv to watch? I heard a story on my This American Life podcast last night about a construction worker who amassed the largest private collection of books about the Lewis and Clark expedition without ever reading any of them... until he did. And then he sold the collection to Lewis and Clark College. http://legacy.lclark.edu/~public/CHRONICLE/Spring1999/wendlick.html
Oh god, I just spent an hour finding out more about Roger Wendlick and his Lewis and Clark collection…
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