20 ms·

Toxic positivity does more harm than good

397 points by prostoalex 6y ago

fastball 6y ago
I think Toxic Positivity is a bit of a misnomer, I'd probably call it "False Positivity". It's not some subset of real positivity that is toxic, it's just... not actual positivity. It's an act.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity. I can get behind that notion. I've had friends who were chronically positive. It gelded our friendship because they hoarded all the negative stuff in their life.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    Is gelded a typo or is this an expression I wasn't aware of? I kind of like it, without sincere emotions something was missing (like when a horse is gelded).
    - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      You read it like I meant it. eg:neutered, typical interactions aren't happening here
    - aminozuur 6y ago
      You got it right: https://wor.do/geld https://wor.do/geld
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity. Yes. The article started out with the psychologist explaining how the client was looking for fake doctor's notes just to avoid going to work because the client didn't feel "totally positive" that day. That's toxic positivity, the feeling that you can't outwardly display anything less than complete cheerfulness, that you have to bottle up any problem inside and not let it out.
- op03 6y ago
  Next up True Negativity or Positive Toxicity. Take your pick. “Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” - Wendell Johnson
  - jdsalaro 6y ago
    "Makes broad, meaningless and demeaning generalizations about language and its creators by alluding to their inability to capture the world's complex nature while doing that very same thing by means of rigid categorizations and stark remarks all in the interest of sounding edgy" - Wendell Johnson Nice, albeit terribly useless, soundbite.
  - rimiform 6y ago
    Johnson sounds like he just finished reading Deleuze and Guattari.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    The word toxic and the derived toxicity are starting to grate. > And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem Hegel and his merry-band of psuedo-intellectuals like this clown (Johnson) are the reason philosophy isn't taken seriously as it used to.
- beefman 6y ago
  It's more than just phony positivity. It includes supression of criticism.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  I 100% agree with this.
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  No, there is toxic positivity, but I don't think this article is talking about it. I'll give you an example. "Don't worry, it'll get better." People genuinely believe that and for many things, it's true. For someone with a chronic and severe mental illness with no known cure? We're sick of hearing it. There is no better for me. I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand. Does that make me unhappy? Frequently but I'm used to hurting all the time and I try to make the best of it. For more: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-5093958 https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395...
  - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
    Speaking as someone with mental health issues and as someone who has been the shoulder for others who are the same, no, saying it'll get better doesn't help because almost nothing that could be said will. But being lead in circles of doom talk and complaining by someone who is inconsolable naturally leads to vacuous sayings like it is what it is, it's not as bad as it seems, or count your blessings, only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers.
    - kayodelycaon 6y ago
      > only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers I completely understand and my reply comes out of very hard experiences from decades of helping people. Humans are emotional beings. We want to help. We hurt when we can’t. We feel guilty. The natural response is to say or do anything to make that guilt go away. This is a deep, hardwired response. It is a natural response and a good one. I consider this to be one of humanity’s best traits. But it is not a good response in this situation. My goal is to help people. If I am to do that, nothing I say should said out of my own feelings of guilt or helplessness. I’ve learned to embrace guilt and acknowledge it’s there but also tell it it is not helpful in that moment. I need to do what I know is right, not what I feel is right. Hand and hand with this is letting go of the belief we have control. We can not save people who don’t want to be saved. There is only so much we can do. And we will fail. I’ve lost friends I’ve wished I could have saved but I know there were no words. Therefore, I have no responsibility for their actions. As a very wise person once said, It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
cma 6y ago
Apparently Bloomberg is now breaking the back button on mobile.
reedf1 6y ago
I've got friends that suffer something like this but I have never been able to put it to words. The danger is when these fastidiously benevolent people implode without warning or giving any signal they may do so.
Trasmatta 6y ago
This has kind of been a problem at my workplace. Everything from the company's marketing material to its recruiting practices exudes an almost overwhelming amount of positivity. They put a huge emphasis on hiring "the nicest people in the world". Disagreements or arguments at the company are almost non-existent, because everyone tries their hardest to be positive and nice at all times. Every other sentence in Slack ends with an emphatic exclamation point (or two or three) and / or a smiley face. I like my job, and I will gladly take it over a workplace with toxic negativity, but it's still been somewhat exhausting. There's that underlying anxiety that if you're somehow not seen as exuding the correct level of positivity, that you might get let go. Everyone at the company is constantly patting themselves on the back about how it's "the greatest place to work in the world" and that they have "the most incredible co-workers". This makes it hard to disagree with things or point out things that aren't working, because everyone is so afraid to hurt somebody's feelings.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  It's hilarious during interviews when everyone says "I've never worked at a company like this", "I've never worked with a team like this, truly the best"...I roll my eyes...
  - Trasmatta 6y ago
    I've worked at multiple companies where the interviewers will say stuff like "we have the best engineering team in the world!", and then you get hired and look at their codebase...
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    It’s often a facade too! I’ve heard privately at one employer the statement “We all outwardly sing Kum-ba-ya and hold each other’s hands but everyone has razor blades in their palms and they hold hands pretty hard...”
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > Everything from the company's marketing material to its recruiting practices exudes an almost overwhelming amount of positivity. I don't know if it's because I'm french but that kind of thing makes me throw up in my mouth and is a super big turn-off. Some things sucks, it's fine, accept it and move on or try to make them better through actions. Words don't make things better.
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrived and artificial. They're given when we're just doing normal, expected work. I've mentioned this to colleagues and friends and there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reenforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect, an annoyance. I guess I fall into the latter.
- PointyFluff 6y ago
  They should just dole out cryptocurrency every time they say that. The words would have meaning again.
  - arkitaip 6y ago
    They would just launch their own crypto, allowing them to gamify their teams for all eternity.
  - pietrovismara 6y ago
    Put your money where your mouth is, or something like that
  - bavent 6y ago
    My work effectively does. "Points" we can redeem for physical goods or trips.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - alexchamberlain 6y ago
      Isn't that a little patronising?
Jakobeha 6y ago
The article's conclusion makes sense to me. Too much negativity is wrong for kind of obvious reasons. Too much positivity is also wrong, because not everything is positive so it sounds fake. In my experience, the best outlook is to appreciate what is actually good in life (e.g. your qualities, good things that happen), and accept that what is bad (e.g. your flaws, bad things that happen), are bad. Unfortunately if you barely have anything, than your life objectively sucks and no outlook is going to make you happy. But the thing is, I've seen a lot of people who are depressed that don't "barely have anything", they have food and shelter and qualities and things going on in their lives which should make them happy, but they still spend their time thinking about the things they don't have.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
trentnix 6y ago
Or better stated, dishonesty does more harm than good.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Frost1x 6y ago
  Well, you can be honest in the facts but the perspective around those facts is opinionated. Business culture pushes a constant optimistic outlook for perspective, which to me is ridiculous. It suffers from not only being optimistic when you shouldn't be, but also being overly optimistic in situations. I pretty much only experience these behaviors in workplaces.
haunter 6y ago
Prime example is the current Cosmo row about putting obese models on cover ("This is healthy") while Covid is rampaging in the US and killing obese people https://www.rt.com/news/511466-cosmo-fat-healthy-covid-cover/ https://www.rt.com/news/511466-cosmo-fat-healthy-covid-cover...
- arkitaip 6y ago
  That's a terrible example and your biases are showing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    TBH saying that someone with BMI 30 is "healthy" is twisting the meaning of the word beyond recognition. Is smoking healthy? Philip Morris would certainly like it if people believed that. Fortunately, they do not believe it anymore. The false dichotomy of "either you hate fat people or you feed them positive bullshit" definitely looks like toxic positivity to me. No space for "your weight will likely cause you health problems down the line, here is how you can help it" there.
- hntrader 6y ago
  It's a bit different to the intended meaning of toxic positivity in the article, which is about dishonest cheerfulness. Maybe we need a different name for what you're describing. Promoting metabolic disease as healthy, when it's one of the leading causes of early mortality, is certainly some type of toxicity ...
  - rimiform 6y ago
    Per the article: "Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines." It's certainly related.
- 6y ago
lrossi 6y ago
The article is mentioning Instagram as an amplifier of this need to fake being happy. But I think Facebook is responsible for it as well. I was once talking to a colleague who was showing me some old vacation pictures. Some tropical area. I commented that they were looking amazing. He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook. Everybody wants to look perfect online, so much of the appearances are faked. It makes sense, since everything is public, so we feel pressured to make ourselves look good. Repeated, I am not surprised that it can cause harmful psychological effects.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  It certainly hasn't made dating any more easier. Online dating is filled with sugar babies, catfishes, or doctored up photos beyond belief. Also it instigates a relationship to be solely through text. I mean jesus dating is about vetting and days or weeks of texting before actually meeting one another nowadays. Nobody wants to do anything physically anymore unless they've actually met you. It's to the point that it's almost a waste of time. COVID restrictions certainly haven't helped either. I wonder if US culture will ever revert. I think it's gone down a very dangerous path for the middle class. It will be only a matter of a few decades before we adopt the Japanese strategy of paying women to retire and have families instead of advancing their careers because of major population decline.
- sigstoat 6y ago
  > He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook. when your friends used a slide projector to show you their vacation photos, they left the bad slides out of the projector. i'm on board with facebook being a problem, but it's in more subtle ways than folks not showing you their bad photos.
  - croissants 6y ago
    Sure, but I think film made each photograph a bit more dear, making it less likely that somebody'll take a dozen just to pick the best one.
lbblack 6y ago
Personally, having a good attitude will be better over the long run than a bad attitude for mental health but lying to people won't solve anything. An over-excited spirit can be just as weakening as an under-excitied spirit. To each their own, but I find be joyful or humourous during hard times is much better for people to be around than to be someone denying someone else's individual right to be happy.
smitty1e 6y ago
> "usually followed by the hashtag #blessed" Among the oldest portions of the Bible is the Book of Job. Well worth spending some time there to remember that, short of stage 4 cancer, there is generally room for things to worsen.
bickeringyokel 6y ago
I'm sure this is a problem in companies large enough to have a sizable HR department, but don't most of us work with a bunch of cretin engineers that always think everything anyone else does is wrong and a sales team that is never satisfied with the thing they asked for?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pmoriarty 6y ago
There's a great book about this, called The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp/1594485259 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blackearl 6y ago
It's hard when you work with really nice people. I was looking at rolling out a new app to my company and everyone was really positive on it during our testing. It was only after pressing people on whether they ran into any issues that I finally started getting some real feedback and complaints that were dealbreakers. It gives me a bit of anxiety and imposter syndrome when everything is going too well. It's easy to fall into the line of thinking that "I can't be doing a perfect job, so maybe they're keeping up appearances while scouting a replacement?" Critical feedback doesn't have to be cruel to be effective. No feedback or everything being roses can be nearly as bad as angry feedback.
jancsika 6y ago
> That’s where self-doubt and reflection are elbowed aside in favor of a gung-ho, can-do spirit. Honestly, the times I can recall doing this, nothing bad happened as a result. Then again, I didn't follow it up by snorting cocaine or compulsively posting on Instagram. I'm going to rankly speculate it those kinds of follow-up behaviors that turn a natural part of life into a glaringly obvious self-destructive plot the likes of Wonder Woman 1980. Edit: clarification
andreygrehov 6y ago
There are at least two things that annoy the hell out of me: 1 Fake positivity 2 Co-workers that are "happy" to work during PTOs The first one is described in the article. The second one is somewhat related to the first one or could even be the result of fake positivity. Working during a paid time off (PTO) is terrible for culture – makes your co-workers feel guilty if they won't spend a few hours at work during their PTO. I almost feel like an employee's access to Slack/E-mail should be restricted to read-only while they are on vacation. If you are one of those two, stop kissing your manager's ass! Enjoy your vacation–forget about work.
- 458aperta 6y ago
  You pretty much described Vancouver, BC. One of the lowest average salary in North America, expensive housing, and normalized exploitation of labor. Fake positivity is just the cultural fact of life here and I think it hurts productivity. We all know that because housing is so scarce, having a job or not can mean you have a roof over your heads or not. It's really disgusting the way they treat workers here. So of course there is going to be a Stockholm syndrome effect here. Won't pay the market price but want the best. From what I've heard from insiders, they all do "surveys" with each other to fix wages since the 2000 dot come bubble collapse. The Vancouver Model is essentially: underpay your workers, demand the best and increase margins. Then they wonder why we can't be like Silicon Valley. Most startups here get acquired by pre-primary market and very few ever IPO thus rendering stock options worthless. It's no wonder that there is a massive brain drain going on and that startups here consist mostly of immigrant workers. I'm sure in some scale the exact same thing is taking place in SV but at least Indian engineers are making far more than what they would here in the Florida of Canada.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    I found a lot of this behaviour in Victoria BC too. Similar enough and geographically close enough I guess. Funny you should mention Florida though, because I recently was working with a team from there and their culture was also absolutely the "work on weekends and PTO" variety. I wonder if it's a coastal thing.
occamrazor 6y ago
What’s wrong with “At least”? What is the implied rest of the sentence?
- rimiform 6y ago
  "At least you still have a job (even if it sucks)"
  - JimTheMan 6y ago
    And further to that, by saying that sentence the person is not acknowledging someone’s pain and suffering. They are dismissing their concerns.
mzan 6y ago
During reading the article, it was impossible not thinking to this famous Italian pop single: https://youtu.be/jx8GhXm-HcA https://youtu.be/jx8GhXm-HcA " I'm out of the tunnel of amusement [...] we live on memories, gentleman, and games sincere embraces, kisses and fires of all those moments, sad and amusing and not on moments that were sadly amusing "
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
breck 6y ago
2 quotes I like : I’d rather be part a-hole than full of sh-t. If you can’t say something nice apologize later.
dshpala 6y ago
I discussed this article with my team, and the responses were very positive!
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
There is a massive region encompassing both Instagram filtered perfection as well as gallows humor. I agree completely that positivity can be forced to toxic levels, but I also see folks drop a plate or get something on their shirt and it’s the worst thing ever and the idea adopting a “whoops, oh well” laughing it off outlook appears to them as forced and toxic positivity. Positivity is great and not letting things get you down is really important if not taken too far. So what’s the measure for too far versus not far enough? I feel like I see too far and not far enough on equal measure in my peer group.
hnarn 6y ago
I vastly prefer honest negativity over dishonest positivity. An example of this is the behavior of service personnel in the US compared to my native country, every time I go there I almost want to tell them to tone down the niceness, but of course there's no point because I realize I'm the odd one out. Of course I appreciate the effort of being "nice" but when you're not doing it out of genuine care for someone I'd much rather just be treated in a neutral way, like you'd treat any human being you encountered that you knew nothing about. I don't much enjoy being treated as an old friend by someone who wouldn't lend me five bucks, and I don't enjoy being asked polite questions that require elaborate answers when you really don't want to listen to the answer and your eyes glaze over within the first seconds. Adults have left their insecurities behind them and should understand they're not, at least initially, the friend of every human being and shouldn't have a problem with being treated in a professionally reserved way.
- Bayart 6y ago
  American in Europe : "Jesus, everyone here is so rude and cold." European in America : "Jesus, everyone here is so fake and annoying."
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    I thought that was about Russians, not Europeans in general. In Russia it's considered a mental illness to smile without a good reason.
    - hnarn 6y ago
      While that's definitely a Russian "thing" it's by no means confined to Russia.
    - sneak 6y ago
      This is one of the reasons I get along so well with slavic and eastern european people. The dynamic range is higher, versus having to figure out the difference between smiling and mega-ultra-smiling (as in the USA).
    - 6y ago
caturopath 6y ago
Sometimes I've wondered if this keeps down ambition -- the only workplace I've been in where this is common, people seem to have a pretty low bar for success. I wonder if part of that is that folks think that they've achieved a lot when they get so much praise, even when they are not achieving a whole lot.
- itronitron 6y ago
  It certainly keeps down quality. It takes hard and thoughtful work to actually think about and evaluate the work product of others to the point that constructive guidance can be offered. It's much easier to just say 'wow, that looks great' and smile.
  - kazen44 6y ago
    also, sometimes hard decisions with severe negative consequences have to be made. not being open about these kind of decisions because they are not "positive" does far more harm then good.
jariel 6y ago
'Emotional Dishonesty'. In a positive direction it's at least more palatable than otherwise, but it's still bad. Orgs. that focus on emotional support and politics more than outcomes will feature this prominently. Oddly - it may not matter. Sometimes pushing the cogs of ABC corp forward is mundane, and everything else that happens is just fluff talk, like the sign on the bathroom door, it doesn't change how many widgest were bought and sold, or like the language on the 'stop sign' in Canada: French or English it doesn't matter, it's just something irrelevant argue about instead of having an actual war about it.
williesleg 6y ago
Needful H1B's are always positive. And I'm positive they're destroying our IT infrastructure, one project at a time. They do the minimum to make it appear it works so they get it off their desk. Just like their home country. What a fucking mess.
netsharc 6y ago
The author sadly throws Seligman under the bus by comparing him to the quack author of "The Secret". Seligman's work is more than just "Pessimism should be avoided", and he didn't say avoid negative feelings, but that there are 2 ways of seeing setbacks; the pessimist usually thinks it's permanent ("it will be bad forever"), pervasive ("everything is fucked") and personal ("it's because of me"). Meanwhile the optimist would see a problem as temporary, specific ("We just need to fix this thing") and not due to the self, but more to do with circumstances (e.g. "I didn't sleep well so I didn't perform that well"). So it's not about how to avoid acknowledging problems, it's about how you shape your mind to see and deal with problems...
11eleven 6y ago
Something that I realized is, negative thoughts and emotions are normal and part of life. It's the counterproductive or hurtful behaviors we may engage in, as a reaction to the negative thoughts or emotions, that we can try to avoid. Feeling bad about having negative thoughts or emotions and being afraid to express them, only makes it more likely we'll engage in counterproductive coping behaviors.
- kazen44 6y ago
  this raises a good point. being negative is almost always culturally seen as a bad thing, especially in the US, while in would argue hiding your negativity is far worse in the long run because it occludes your state of mind to your peers. having moments when life just truly sucks is absolutely normal, but expressing it happens is not.
mpweiher 6y ago
For a long-form examination of this topic, I can heartily recommend Barbarah Ehrenreich's 2009 book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Apparently the solution example is to watch ‘inside out’ (yes I cried). Ecclesiastical stoicism has kept me sane this year simply because my expectations are so incredibly low.
throwaway5752 6y ago
This is one of those cases where I think that a subtle change to fit the headline into HN submission constraints made is a lot worse. The original is, "Trying to Stay Optimistic Is Doing More Harm Than Good" "Toxic positivity" makes more sense in the context of the article, which is much more about personal mental health than general workplace behavior. It is not about other peoples' positivity, it is about accepting your own negative emotions as healthy. It is not about positive feedback in meetings. Anyway, it has reasonable parting advice: Ho, the neuropsychologist, has an unexpected suggestion to help calibrate a Pollyanna perspective: a session watching Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out, which animates and dramatizes human emotions. "One of the best antidotes to toxic positivity is reexamining your value system and understanding that some of the best moments in life, when you truly feel good, are full of mixed emotions," she says. "And that’s what we should be embracing as human beings."
Bayart 6y ago
Give me feedback, not encouragement. I don't care whether you tell me my work is good or bad, but I very much care than you qualify that statement with data points or a new outlook that enable me to improve that work. I think a lot of technical guys see professional interactions that way, with pats on the back being at best an empty ritual, at worst a waste of useful time.
- khalilravanna 6y ago
  For me this is the key. Positivity and negativity are both harmful if they’re not specific. Saying “the team did a great job” is basically worthless. Cool, let’s all do the exact same thing we did last time with no variation so we can do another “great job”. Versus “the team did a great job communicating changed expectations mid project that meant we didn’t lose a client” can actually lend some insight. Negative feedback is the exact same (keep it specific) though with the nuance of saving negative feedback that’s personal for 1:1 convos.
projectileboy 6y ago
This is the result of a culture where companies will lay you off tomorrow to bump the stock a quarter point. Every single one of us is in a gig economy. You eat what you kill, and you can never, ever project weakness, unless you already have money.
noir_lord 6y ago
As a lead I find the best approach is to just figure out the person on your team and use whatever approach suits their personality well. On that topic, remember to say thank you when someone on your team gets you out of a jam, There are parts of the systems at work that I simply don't understand yet/never will because they are far outside of my team typically so if someone saves me a bunch of time because they happen to know that system, a thank you goes a long way - it's also an admission that as a lead you don't know everything. I find "I don't know either, lets find out" opens a more productive dialogue than pretending you know everything - on top of which seniors (and good juniors) can spot a bluff anyway and you just lose credibility. Almost any management style works if you are genuine, open and authentic.
bryzaguy 6y ago
You know what’s more toxic than toxic positivity? Diagnosing your coworkers with a writer invented, empathy devoid term because they annoy you. Is this opinion piece helpful?
29athrowaway 6y ago
Psychological safety is being able to speak your mind without negative repercusions. Toxic positivity is not psychological safety. Personally, I think psychological safety leads to another phenomenon: groupthink. By emphasizing harmony over everything else, groups suffering from groupthink apply self-censorship, silence is seen as agreement, and the ability to make rational decisions is lost. Not only that, but the group develops a strong identity and anyone who doesn't agree is seen as disloyal. For a software engineering team, groupthink usually means becoming a death march towards failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
pawelduda 6y ago
Too much positivity at the workplace and at one point, it feels so empty and cringy. Especially when it's just words, as opposed to actions. Or a facade like other commenters have mentioned. The worst part is when you don't feel like playing along but have to or else risk being seen as the "party breaker".
aritmo 6y ago
That's not "positivity". That's 'gratuitous praise'.
civilized 6y ago
For those getting paywalled https://outline.com/YpT9Eb https://outline.com/YpT9Eb
kofejnik 6y ago
Interestingly, I have this link open in another tab: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/do-elder-goths-hold-the-secret-to-aging-successfully/2021/01/11/a565b2de-3b04-11eb-9276-ae0ca72729be_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/do-elder-g... where they argue that Goths subculture manages to deal with aging very well precisely because they eschew fake positivity and eternal youth and concentrate on deeper emotions and themes instead
taurath 6y ago
Toxic positivity often comes from the idea that seeking happiness is the right goal always. If you believe that then you believe anyone who is not happy is somehow failing and you can give them a hand up. The right word I think should be contentment. Happiness is impossible to have all the time. You can have contentment pretty much all the time.
- kazen44 6y ago
  thank you for this comment. it has described the kind of thinking that is important very well.
snthd 6y ago
I can recommend Oliver Burkeman's book "The Antidote" "Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking". https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16681873W/The_antidote https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16681873W/The_antidote https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865478015 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865478015
variable11 6y ago
Because you linked to a site that brutally punishes users who browse in private mode, I had to search for alternate articles.
rubyist5eva 6y ago
Being disingenuous is bad. In other news: water is wet. More at 11.
everdrive 6y ago
Toxic positivity seems to be a major method of communication for human resources.
danieltillett 6y ago
As a manager what every report wants is to be genuinely listened to by their manager. If you make the effort to really listen to what your report has to say you don’t need to worry about praise or other feedback. The downside is real listening is incredibly time consuming - I struggle to get under 60 min per person per day (not all at once of course) without compromising its effectiveness.
mactyler 6y ago
No it doesn't.
arendtio 6y ago
Pretty opinionated and preachy while mixing different things. I think a can-do attitude is something one should have within oneself, but it is something completely different from the emotions a person emits to the outside world. Having a critical but positive look at the world is most likely very healthy, in the spirit of 'Change what you can and accept what you can not'. Constantly emitting a positive image, on the other hand, leads to the problems described in the article. But the problem is not the positivity, but the need to express it even it is not coming from within. Don't be afraid, to share your true feelings, but try to view the world in a balanced way (now I was preachy myself...).
indymike 6y ago
I'm not a big Jack Welch (former GE CEO) fan. But I did catch an interview on a news program where they asked him how to succeed in business, and the answer was awesome: "Know the facts and act on them." Seems being artificially positive (or negative) is a great way to become detached from reality, and eventually, make a lot of very bad decisions.
karaterobot 6y ago
The qualifier "toxic" makes this a meaningless statement. You wouldn't call it toxic positivity if it were a good thing. The question is whether positivity in general is better than negativity in general, and it sure seems like it is.
patcon 6y ago
Wow, this comment section is like a flame for all the type-A moths (straight feedback; boo to "false encouragement" etc etc). Please understand, readers, that you are participating in a VERY misrepresentative subset. I believe this title really hit a nerve with y'all, and seems you swarmed in here.
alisausaaaaa 6y ago
Wanna have hot-lovin' conversations? You’re on the right way! - https://adultlove.life https://adultlove.life
totemandtoken 6y ago
Thanks god some else hates this as much as I do. As someone who probably is intellectualizing some latent mental illness, I find a lot more value in just adopting a pessimistic view on life. I get that I'm extreme in this regard, but honestly I'd rather have a cultural shift towards a slightly gloomier view than this sugar-coating. A somewhat relevant TED talk that hits many of the reasons why I think it's better to be hopeless and/or pessimistic than be positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LlWufvZLxI&fbclid=IwAR0QeEq86KW2OmyzKyvPqkmNObbyofiGcibWdAMWM36AjRKpfamBSGBfOHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LlWufvZLxI&fbclid=IwAR0QeEq...
permille42 6y ago
When I was a kid, I read somewhere that if you smile all the time it will make you feel happier. I decided to try it. I smiled all the time whether I was feeling happy or not. It worked. It made me feel better. Say what you want, but I enjoy feeling happy, and if I have to engage in a bit of mental convolution to achieve it I'm all for it whether it is a lie or not.
dade_ 6y ago
As this is HN.... "An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be." Oscar Wilde
hda2 6y ago
This reminds me of the Rust "community". They exhibit a lot of this toxic positivity, often to the determent of the discussion. I wonder what drives people to harm themselves and others like this.
the_resistence 6y ago
This is profound. It's a horrible extension of the participation medals mentality which drags down average performance and effort expended.

397 points by prostoalex 6y ago

I think Toxic Positivity is a bit of a misnomer, I'd probably call it "False Positivity". It's not some subset of real positivity that is toxic, it's just... not actual positivity. It's an act.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity. I can get behind that notion. I've had friends who were chronically positive. It gelded our friendship because they hoarded all the negative stuff in their life.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  Is gelded a typo or is this an expression I wasn't aware of? I kind of like it, without sincere emotions something was missing (like when a horse is gelded).
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    You read it like I meant it. eg:neutered, typical interactions aren't happening here
  - aminozuur 6y ago
    You got it right: https://wor.do/geld https://wor.do/geld
- _qulr 6y ago
  > The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity. Yes. The article started out with the psychologist explaining how the client was looking for fake doctor's notes just to avoid going to work because the client didn't feel "totally positive" that day. That's toxic positivity, the feeling that you can't outwardly display anything less than complete cheerfulness, that you have to bottle up any problem inside and not let it out.
op03 6y ago
Next up True Negativity or Positive Toxicity. Take your pick. “Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” - Wendell Johnson
- jdsalaro 6y ago
  "Makes broad, meaningless and demeaning generalizations about language and its creators by alluding to their inability to capture the world's complex nature while doing that very same thing by means of rigid categorizations and stark remarks all in the interest of sounding edgy" - Wendell Johnson Nice, albeit terribly useless, soundbite.
- rimiform 6y ago
  Johnson sounds like he just finished reading Deleuze and Guattari.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  The word toxic and the derived toxicity are starting to grate. > And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem Hegel and his merry-band of psuedo-intellectuals like this clown (Johnson) are the reason philosophy isn't taken seriously as it used to.
beefman 6y ago
It's more than just phony positivity. It includes supression of criticism.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
I 100% agree with this.
kayodelycaon 6y ago
No, there is toxic positivity, but I don't think this article is talking about it. I'll give you an example. "Don't worry, it'll get better." People genuinely believe that and for many things, it's true. For someone with a chronic and severe mental illness with no known cure? We're sick of hearing it. There is no better for me. I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand. Does that make me unhappy? Frequently but I'm used to hurting all the time and I try to make the best of it. For more: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-5093958 https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395...
- NoSorryCannot 6y ago
  Speaking as someone with mental health issues and as someone who has been the shoulder for others who are the same, no, saying it'll get better doesn't help because almost nothing that could be said will. But being lead in circles of doom talk and complaining by someone who is inconsolable naturally leads to vacuous sayings like it is what it is, it's not as bad as it seems, or count your blessings, only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers.
  - kayodelycaon 6y ago
    > only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers I completely understand and my reply comes out of very hard experiences from decades of helping people. Humans are emotional beings. We want to help. We hurt when we can’t. We feel guilty. The natural response is to say or do anything to make that guilt go away. This is a deep, hardwired response. It is a natural response and a good one. I consider this to be one of humanity’s best traits. But it is not a good response in this situation. My goal is to help people. If I am to do that, nothing I say should said out of my own feelings of guilt or helplessness. I’ve learned to embrace guilt and acknowledge it’s there but also tell it it is not helpful in that moment. I need to do what I know is right, not what I feel is right. Hand and hand with this is letting go of the belief we have control. We can not save people who don’t want to be saved. There is only so much we can do. And we will fail. I’ve lost friends I’ve wished I could have saved but I know there were no words. Therefore, I have no responsibility for their actions. As a very wise person once said, It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

cma 6y ago

Apparently Bloomberg is now breaking the back button on mobile.

reedf1 6y ago

I've got friends that suffer something like this but I have never been able to put it to words. The danger is when these fastidiously benevolent people implode without warning or giving any signal they may do so.

Trasmatta 6y ago

This has kind of been a problem at my workplace. Everything from the company's marketing material to its recruiting practices exudes an almost overwhelming amount of positivity. They put a huge emphasis on hiring "the nicest people in the world". Disagreements or arguments at the company are almost non-existent, because everyone tries their hardest to be positive and nice at all times. Every other sentence in Slack ends with an emphatic exclamation point (or two or three) and / or a smiley face. I like my job, and I will gladly take it over a workplace with toxic negativity, but it's still been somewhat exhausting. There's that underlying anxiety that if you're somehow not seen as exuding the correct level of positivity, that you might get let go. Everyone at the company is constantly patting themselves on the back about how it's "the greatest place to work in the world" and that they have "the most incredible co-workers". This makes it hard to disagree with things or point out things that aren't working, because everyone is so afraid to hurt somebody's feelings.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
It's hilarious during interviews when everyone says "I've never worked at a company like this", "I've never worked with a team like this, truly the best"...I roll my eyes...
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  I've worked at multiple companies where the interviewers will say stuff like "we have the best engineering team in the world!", and then you get hired and look at their codebase...
- ryandrake 6y ago
  It’s often a facade too! I’ve heard privately at one employer the statement “We all outwardly sing Kum-ba-ya and hold each other’s hands but everyone has razor blades in their palms and they hold hands pretty hard...”
jcelerier 6y ago
> Everything from the company's marketing material to its recruiting practices exudes an almost overwhelming amount of positivity. I don't know if it's because I'm french but that kind of thing makes me throw up in my mouth and is a super big turn-off. Some things sucks, it's fine, accept it and move on or try to make them better through actions. Words don't make things better.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago

I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies. Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc. These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrived and artificial. They're given when we're just doing normal, expected work. I've mentioned this to colleagues and friends and there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reenforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect, an annoyance. I guess I fall into the latter.

PointyFluff 6y ago
They should just dole out cryptocurrency every time they say that. The words would have meaning again.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  They would just launch their own crypto, allowing them to gamify their teams for all eternity.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Put your money where your mouth is, or something like that
- bavent 6y ago
  My work effectively does. "Points" we can redeem for physical goods or trips.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - alexchamberlain 6y ago
    Isn't that a little patronising?

Jakobeha 6y ago

The article's conclusion makes sense to me. Too much negativity is wrong for kind of obvious reasons. Too much positivity is also wrong, because not everything is positive so it sounds fake. In my experience, the best outlook is to appreciate what is actually good in life (e.g. your qualities, good things that happen), and accept that what is bad (e.g. your flaws, bad things that happen), are bad. Unfortunately if you barely have anything, than your life objectively sucks and no outlook is going to make you happy. But the thing is, I've seen a lot of people who are depressed that don't "barely have anything", they have food and shelter and qualities and things going on in their lives which should make them happy, but they still spend their time thinking about the things they don't have.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

trentnix 6y ago

Or better stated, dishonesty does more harm than good.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Frost1x 6y ago
Well, you can be honest in the facts but the perspective around those facts is opinionated. Business culture pushes a constant optimistic outlook for perspective, which to me is ridiculous. It suffers from not only being optimistic when you shouldn't be, but also being overly optimistic in situations. I pretty much only experience these behaviors in workplaces.

haunter 6y ago

Prime example is the current Cosmo row about putting obese models on cover ("This is healthy") while Covid is rampaging in the US and killing obese people https://www.rt.com/news/511466-cosmo-fat-healthy-covid-cover/ https://www.rt.com/news/511466-cosmo-fat-healthy-covid-cover...

arkitaip 6y ago
That's a terrible example and your biases are showing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  TBH saying that someone with BMI 30 is "healthy" is twisting the meaning of the word beyond recognition. Is smoking healthy? Philip Morris would certainly like it if people believed that. Fortunately, they do not believe it anymore. The false dichotomy of "either you hate fat people or you feed them positive bullshit" definitely looks like toxic positivity to me. No space for "your weight will likely cause you health problems down the line, here is how you can help it" there.
hntrader 6y ago
It's a bit different to the intended meaning of toxic positivity in the article, which is about dishonest cheerfulness. Maybe we need a different name for what you're describing. Promoting metabolic disease as healthy, when it's one of the leading causes of early mortality, is certainly some type of toxicity ...
- rimiform 6y ago
  Per the article: "Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines." It's certainly related.
6y ago

lrossi 6y ago

The article is mentioning Instagram as an amplifier of this need to fake being happy. But I think Facebook is responsible for it as well. I was once talking to a colleague who was showing me some old vacation pictures. Some tropical area. I commented that they were looking amazing. He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook. Everybody wants to look perfect online, so much of the appearances are faked. It makes sense, since everything is public, so we feel pressured to make ourselves look good. Repeated, I am not surprised that it can cause harmful psychological effects.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
It certainly hasn't made dating any more easier. Online dating is filled with sugar babies, catfishes, or doctored up photos beyond belief. Also it instigates a relationship to be solely through text. I mean jesus dating is about vetting and days or weeks of texting before actually meeting one another nowadays. Nobody wants to do anything physically anymore unless they've actually met you. It's to the point that it's almost a waste of time. COVID restrictions certainly haven't helped either. I wonder if US culture will ever revert. I think it's gone down a very dangerous path for the middle class. It will be only a matter of a few decades before we adopt the Japanese strategy of paying women to retire and have families instead of advancing their careers because of major population decline.
sigstoat 6y ago
> He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook. when your friends used a slide projector to show you their vacation photos, they left the bad slides out of the projector. i'm on board with facebook being a problem, but it's in more subtle ways than folks not showing you their bad photos.
- croissants 6y ago
  Sure, but I think film made each photograph a bit more dear, making it less likely that somebody'll take a dozen just to pick the best one.

lbblack 6y ago

Personally, having a good attitude will be better over the long run than a bad attitude for mental health but lying to people won't solve anything. An over-excited spirit can be just as weakening as an under-excitied spirit. To each their own, but I find be joyful or humourous during hard times is much better for people to be around than to be someone denying someone else's individual right to be happy.

smitty1e 6y ago

> "usually followed by the hashtag #blessed" Among the oldest portions of the Bible is the Book of Job. Well worth spending some time there to remember that, short of stage 4 cancer, there is generally room for things to worsen.

bickeringyokel 6y ago

I'm sure this is a problem in companies large enough to have a sizable HR department, but don't most of us work with a bunch of cretin engineers that always think everything anyone else does is wrong and a sales team that is never satisfied with the thing they asked for?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pmoriarty 6y ago

There's a great book about this, called The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp/1594485259 https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

blackearl 6y ago

It's hard when you work with really nice people. I was looking at rolling out a new app to my company and everyone was really positive on it during our testing. It was only after pressing people on whether they ran into any issues that I finally started getting some real feedback and complaints that were dealbreakers. It gives me a bit of anxiety and imposter syndrome when everything is going too well. It's easy to fall into the line of thinking that "I can't be doing a perfect job, so maybe they're keeping up appearances while scouting a replacement?" Critical feedback doesn't have to be cruel to be effective. No feedback or everything being roses can be nearly as bad as angry feedback.

jancsika 6y ago

> That’s where self-doubt and reflection are elbowed aside in favor of a gung-ho, can-do spirit. Honestly, the times I can recall doing this, nothing bad happened as a result. Then again, I didn't follow it up by snorting cocaine or compulsively posting on Instagram. I'm going to rankly speculate it those kinds of follow-up behaviors that turn a natural part of life into a glaringly obvious self-destructive plot the likes of Wonder Woman 1980. Edit: clarification

andreygrehov 6y ago

There are at least two things that annoy the hell out of me: 1 Fake positivity 2 Co-workers that are "happy" to work during PTOs The first one is described in the article. The second one is somewhat related to the first one or could even be the result of fake positivity. Working during a paid time off (PTO) is terrible for culture – makes your co-workers feel guilty if they won't spend a few hours at work during their PTO. I almost feel like an employee's access to Slack/E-mail should be restricted to read-only while they are on vacation. If you are one of those two, stop kissing your manager's ass! Enjoy your vacation–forget about work.

458aperta 6y ago
You pretty much described Vancouver, BC. One of the lowest average salary in North America, expensive housing, and normalized exploitation of labor. Fake positivity is just the cultural fact of life here and I think it hurts productivity. We all know that because housing is so scarce, having a job or not can mean you have a roof over your heads or not. It's really disgusting the way they treat workers here. So of course there is going to be a Stockholm syndrome effect here. Won't pay the market price but want the best. From what I've heard from insiders, they all do "surveys" with each other to fix wages since the 2000 dot come bubble collapse. The Vancouver Model is essentially: underpay your workers, demand the best and increase margins. Then they wonder why we can't be like Silicon Valley. Most startups here get acquired by pre-primary market and very few ever IPO thus rendering stock options worthless. It's no wonder that there is a massive brain drain going on and that startups here consist mostly of immigrant workers. I'm sure in some scale the exact same thing is taking place in SV but at least Indian engineers are making far more than what they would here in the Florida of Canada.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  I found a lot of this behaviour in Victoria BC too. Similar enough and geographically close enough I guess. Funny you should mention Florida though, because I recently was working with a team from there and their culture was also absolutely the "work on weekends and PTO" variety. I wonder if it's a coastal thing.

occamrazor 6y ago

What’s wrong with “At least”? What is the implied rest of the sentence?

rimiform 6y ago
"At least you still have a job (even if it sucks)"
- JimTheMan 6y ago
  And further to that, by saying that sentence the person is not acknowledging someone’s pain and suffering. They are dismissing their concerns.

mzan 6y ago

During reading the article, it was impossible not thinking to this famous Italian pop single: https://youtu.be/jx8GhXm-HcA https://youtu.be/jx8GhXm-HcA " I'm out of the tunnel of amusement [...] we live on memories, gentleman, and games sincere embraces, kisses and fires of all those moments, sad and amusing and not on moments that were sadly amusing "

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

breck 6y ago

2 quotes I like : I’d rather be part a-hole than full of sh-t. If you can’t say something nice apologize later.

dshpala 6y ago

I discussed this article with my team, and the responses were very positive!

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

There is a massive region encompassing both Instagram filtered perfection as well as gallows humor. I agree completely that positivity can be forced to toxic levels, but I also see folks drop a plate or get something on their shirt and it’s the worst thing ever and the idea adopting a “whoops, oh well” laughing it off outlook appears to them as forced and toxic positivity. Positivity is great and not letting things get you down is really important if not taken too far. So what’s the measure for too far versus not far enough? I feel like I see too far and not far enough on equal measure in my peer group.

hnarn 6y ago

I vastly prefer honest negativity over dishonest positivity. An example of this is the behavior of service personnel in the US compared to my native country, every time I go there I almost want to tell them to tone down the niceness, but of course there's no point because I realize I'm the odd one out. Of course I appreciate the effort of being "nice" but when you're not doing it out of genuine care for someone I'd much rather just be treated in a neutral way, like you'd treat any human being you encountered that you knew nothing about. I don't much enjoy being treated as an old friend by someone who wouldn't lend me five bucks, and I don't enjoy being asked polite questions that require elaborate answers when you really don't want to listen to the answer and your eyes glaze over within the first seconds. Adults have left their insecurities behind them and should understand they're not, at least initially, the friend of every human being and shouldn't have a problem with being treated in a professionally reserved way.

Bayart 6y ago
American in Europe : "Jesus, everyone here is so rude and cold." European in America : "Jesus, everyone here is so fake and annoying."
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  I thought that was about Russians, not Europeans in general. In Russia it's considered a mental illness to smile without a good reason.
  - hnarn 6y ago
    While that's definitely a Russian "thing" it's by no means confined to Russia.
  - sneak 6y ago
    This is one of the reasons I get along so well with slavic and eastern european people. The dynamic range is higher, versus having to figure out the difference between smiling and mega-ultra-smiling (as in the USA).
  - 6y ago

caturopath 6y ago

Sometimes I've wondered if this keeps down ambition -- the only workplace I've been in where this is common, people seem to have a pretty low bar for success. I wonder if part of that is that folks think that they've achieved a lot when they get so much praise, even when they are not achieving a whole lot.

itronitron 6y ago
It certainly keeps down quality. It takes hard and thoughtful work to actually think about and evaluate the work product of others to the point that constructive guidance can be offered. It's much easier to just say 'wow, that looks great' and smile.
- kazen44 6y ago
  also, sometimes hard decisions with severe negative consequences have to be made. not being open about these kind of decisions because they are not "positive" does far more harm then good.

jariel 6y ago

'Emotional Dishonesty'. In a positive direction it's at least more palatable than otherwise, but it's still bad. Orgs. that focus on emotional support and politics more than outcomes will feature this prominently. Oddly - it may not matter. Sometimes pushing the cogs of ABC corp forward is mundane, and everything else that happens is just fluff talk, like the sign on the bathroom door, it doesn't change how many widgest were bought and sold, or like the language on the 'stop sign' in Canada: French or English it doesn't matter, it's just something irrelevant argue about instead of having an actual war about it.

williesleg 6y ago

Needful H1B's are always positive. And I'm positive they're destroying our IT infrastructure, one project at a time. They do the minimum to make it appear it works so they get it off their desk. Just like their home country. What a fucking mess.

netsharc 6y ago

The author sadly throws Seligman under the bus by comparing him to the quack author of "The Secret". Seligman's work is more than just "Pessimism should be avoided", and he didn't say avoid negative feelings, but that there are 2 ways of seeing setbacks; the pessimist usually thinks it's permanent ("it will be bad forever"), pervasive ("everything is fucked") and personal ("it's because of me"). Meanwhile the optimist would see a problem as temporary, specific ("We just need to fix this thing") and not due to the self, but more to do with circumstances (e.g. "I didn't sleep well so I didn't perform that well"). So it's not about how to avoid acknowledging problems, it's about how you shape your mind to see and deal with problems...

11eleven 6y ago

Something that I realized is, negative thoughts and emotions are normal and part of life. It's the counterproductive or hurtful behaviors we may engage in, as a reaction to the negative thoughts or emotions, that we can try to avoid. Feeling bad about having negative thoughts or emotions and being afraid to express them, only makes it more likely we'll engage in counterproductive coping behaviors.

kazen44 6y ago
this raises a good point. being negative is almost always culturally seen as a bad thing, especially in the US, while in would argue hiding your negativity is far worse in the long run because it occludes your state of mind to your peers. having moments when life just truly sucks is absolutely normal, but expressing it happens is not.

mpweiher 6y ago

For a long-form examination of this topic, I can heartily recommend Barbarah Ehrenreich's 2009 book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Apparently the solution example is to watch ‘inside out’ (yes I cried). Ecclesiastical stoicism has kept me sane this year simply because my expectations are so incredibly low.

throwaway5752 6y ago

This is one of those cases where I think that a subtle change to fit the headline into HN submission constraints made is a lot worse. The original is, "Trying to Stay Optimistic Is Doing More Harm Than Good" "Toxic positivity" makes more sense in the context of the article, which is much more about personal mental health than general workplace behavior. It is not about other peoples' positivity, it is about accepting your own negative emotions as healthy. It is not about positive feedback in meetings. Anyway, it has reasonable parting advice: Ho, the neuropsychologist, has an unexpected suggestion to help calibrate a Pollyanna perspective: a session watching Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out, which animates and dramatizes human emotions. "One of the best antidotes to toxic positivity is reexamining your value system and understanding that some of the best moments in life, when you truly feel good, are full of mixed emotions," she says. "And that’s what we should be embracing as human beings."

Bayart 6y ago

Give me feedback, not encouragement. I don't care whether you tell me my work is good or bad, but I very much care than you qualify that statement with data points or a new outlook that enable me to improve that work. I think a lot of technical guys see professional interactions that way, with pats on the back being at best an empty ritual, at worst a waste of useful time.

khalilravanna 6y ago
For me this is the key. Positivity and negativity are both harmful if they’re not specific. Saying “the team did a great job” is basically worthless. Cool, let’s all do the exact same thing we did last time with no variation so we can do another “great job”. Versus “the team did a great job communicating changed expectations mid project that meant we didn’t lose a client” can actually lend some insight. Negative feedback is the exact same (keep it specific) though with the nuance of saving negative feedback that’s personal for 1:1 convos.

projectileboy 6y ago

This is the result of a culture where companies will lay you off tomorrow to bump the stock a quarter point. Every single one of us is in a gig economy. You eat what you kill, and you can never, ever project weakness, unless you already have money.

noir_lord 6y ago

As a lead I find the best approach is to just figure out the person on your team and use whatever approach suits their personality well. On that topic, remember to say thank you when someone on your team gets you out of a jam, There are parts of the systems at work that I simply don't understand yet/never will because they are far outside of my team typically so if someone saves me a bunch of time because they happen to know that system, a thank you goes a long way - it's also an admission that as a lead you don't know everything. I find "I don't know either, lets find out" opens a more productive dialogue than pretending you know everything - on top of which seniors (and good juniors) can spot a bluff anyway and you just lose credibility. Almost any management style works if you are genuine, open and authentic.

bryzaguy 6y ago

You know what’s more toxic than toxic positivity? Diagnosing your coworkers with a writer invented, empathy devoid term because they annoy you. Is this opinion piece helpful?

29athrowaway 6y ago

Psychological safety is being able to speak your mind without negative repercusions. Toxic positivity is not psychological safety. Personally, I think psychological safety leads to another phenomenon: groupthink. By emphasizing harmony over everything else, groups suffering from groupthink apply self-censorship, silence is seen as agreement, and the ability to make rational decisions is lost. Not only that, but the group develops a strong identity and anyone who doesn't agree is seen as disloyal. For a software engineering team, groupthink usually means becoming a death march towards failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

pawelduda 6y ago

Too much positivity at the workplace and at one point, it feels so empty and cringy. Especially when it's just words, as opposed to actions. Or a facade like other commenters have mentioned. The worst part is when you don't feel like playing along but have to or else risk being seen as the "party breaker".

aritmo 6y ago

That's not "positivity". That's 'gratuitous praise'.

civilized 6y ago

For those getting paywalled https://outline.com/YpT9Eb https://outline.com/YpT9Eb

kofejnik 6y ago

Interestingly, I have this link open in another tab: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/do-elder-goths-hold-the-secret-to-aging-successfully/2021/01/11/a565b2de-3b04-11eb-9276-ae0ca72729be_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/do-elder-g... where they argue that Goths subculture manages to deal with aging very well precisely because they eschew fake positivity and eternal youth and concentrate on deeper emotions and themes instead

taurath 6y ago

Toxic positivity often comes from the idea that seeking happiness is the right goal always. If you believe that then you believe anyone who is not happy is somehow failing and you can give them a hand up. The right word I think should be contentment. Happiness is impossible to have all the time. You can have contentment pretty much all the time.

kazen44 6y ago
thank you for this comment. it has described the kind of thinking that is important very well.

snthd 6y ago

I can recommend Oliver Burkeman's book "The Antidote" "Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking". https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16681873W/The_antidote https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16681873W/The_antidote https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865478015 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865478015

variable11 6y ago

Because you linked to a site that brutally punishes users who browse in private mode, I had to search for alternate articles.

rubyist5eva 6y ago

Being disingenuous is bad. In other news: water is wet. More at 11.

everdrive 6y ago

Toxic positivity seems to be a major method of communication for human resources.

danieltillett 6y ago

As a manager what every report wants is to be genuinely listened to by their manager. If you make the effort to really listen to what your report has to say you don’t need to worry about praise or other feedback. The downside is real listening is incredibly time consuming - I struggle to get under 60 min per person per day (not all at once of course) without compromising its effectiveness.

mactyler 6y ago

No it doesn't.

arendtio 6y ago

Pretty opinionated and preachy while mixing different things. I think a can-do attitude is something one should have within oneself, but it is something completely different from the emotions a person emits to the outside world. Having a critical but positive look at the world is most likely very healthy, in the spirit of 'Change what you can and accept what you can not'. Constantly emitting a positive image, on the other hand, leads to the problems described in the article. But the problem is not the positivity, but the need to express it even it is not coming from within. Don't be afraid, to share your true feelings, but try to view the world in a balanced way (now I was preachy myself...).

indymike 6y ago

I'm not a big Jack Welch (former GE CEO) fan. But I did catch an interview on a news program where they asked him how to succeed in business, and the answer was awesome: "Know the facts and act on them." Seems being artificially positive (or negative) is a great way to become detached from reality, and eventually, make a lot of very bad decisions.

karaterobot 6y ago

The qualifier "toxic" makes this a meaningless statement. You wouldn't call it toxic positivity if it were a good thing. The question is whether positivity in general is better than negativity in general, and it sure seems like it is.

patcon 6y ago

Wow, this comment section is like a flame for all the type-A moths (straight feedback; boo to "false encouragement" etc etc). Please understand, readers, that you are participating in a VERY misrepresentative subset. I believe this title really hit a nerve with y'all, and seems you swarmed in here.

alisausaaaaa 6y ago

Wanna have hot-lovin' conversations? You’re on the right way! - https://adultlove.life https://adultlove.life

totemandtoken 6y ago

Thanks god some else hates this as much as I do. As someone who probably is intellectualizing some latent mental illness, I find a lot more value in just adopting a pessimistic view on life. I get that I'm extreme in this regard, but honestly I'd rather have a cultural shift towards a slightly gloomier view than this sugar-coating. A somewhat relevant TED talk that hits many of the reasons why I think it's better to be hopeless and/or pessimistic than be positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LlWufvZLxI&fbclid=IwAR0QeEq86KW2OmyzKyvPqkmNObbyofiGcibWdAMWM36AjRKpfamBSGBfOHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LlWufvZLxI&fbclid=IwAR0QeEq...

permille42 6y ago

When I was a kid, I read somewhere that if you smile all the time it will make you feel happier. I decided to try it. I smiled all the time whether I was feeling happy or not. It worked. It made me feel better. Say what you want, but I enjoy feeling happy, and if I have to engage in a bit of mental convolution to achieve it I'm all for it whether it is a lie or not.

dade_ 6y ago

As this is HN.... "An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be." Oscar Wilde

hda2 6y ago

This reminds me of the Rust "community". They exhibit a lot of this toxic positivity, often to the determent of the discussion. I wonder what drives people to harm themselves and others like this.

the_resistence 6y ago

This is profound. It's a horrible extension of the participation medals mentality which drags down average performance and effort expended.