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I very much agree that so-called "toxic positivity" can be a problem, but I found this article greatly lacking in any sort of substance. There are no specific e

I very much agree that so-called "toxic positivity" can be a problem, but I found this article greatly lacking in any sort of substance. There are no specific examples of toxic positivity, no explanation as to why its bad other than vacuous general terms repeated ad nauseam (did she mention toxic positivity invalidates lived experiences?), and no in depth explanation as to the alternatives other than what is essentially a dictionary definition of "empathy".

groceryheist 4y ago
Completely agree! This was disjointed and didn't have a point. Wish I could downvote.
- Veen 4y ago
  Part of the disjointedness comes from the writer's apparent obsession with over-simple language and very short sentences made by chopping up longer sentences. It's a good example of what happens when inexperienced writers rely on readability tools like Readable (it's on the Readable blog).
  - stavros 4y ago
    > It’s natural to emulate what we see online. But, going overboard on the ‘positive vibes’ may affect your content. Agreed, come on, splitting the sentence there just made it worse. Unlike many people, I'm not opposed to sentences that start with "but", but here it serves no purpose. It's not like we have an attention span of six words.
  - samhw 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't want to be cruel, in case the author is reading this, but it really is uniquely egregious writing (no toxic positivity here!). The broken-up sentences you mention are. Awkward and mostly grammatically inco. Rrect as a result. They seem weirdly unaware of the incredibly basic writer's injunction to vary your sentence length. There's no rhythm or cadence to it. You can literally feel the author grimly trudging toward the target word count. It feels completely disconnected from anything real, full of unevocative abstract nouns connected with unevocative abstract verbs. "Don't be too hard on yourself if you're struggling with negative thoughts" - well, what the fuck do you think 'negative thoughts' are? Reading this felt like having my teeth pulled. I think the biggest problem, though, is that they really just do not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn't be surprised if it were written at gunpoint. We used to write essays on random subjects instead of lines as a punishment at school, and I think those essays were more enthusiastic and insightful than this one. It just meanders along, with no overarching direction or purpose, from useless bromide to useless bromide, until they get to the word count and stop, and that's it.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    I hate this. I admit I often get carried about by combining my thoughts into massive complex sentences, but the reverse is even worse. I feel like I have to write like I’m Dr Suess. I get why they want you to simplify your righting, but iirc they tend to want you to target a 9th grade level and if I remember correctly when I was a senior half the people in that class could barely fucking read. One thing I could use is an autocorrect that works. My phone things it’s appropriate to randomly change worlds like die->sue but is helpless when some other word is a single character off.
- throw__away7391 4y ago
  That's because the author seems to be firmly anchored in a coastal elite bubble. In particular this phrase: > invalidate someone's lived experience ...is particularly cringe-inducing. These are code words. This is not how any normal human in the English speaking world has ever spoken prior to exposure to a particular brand of (most often quite expensive) education, and let's be clear--that's the whole point. People train themselves to use this language as a way to demonstrate their membership or desired membership in the current socio-economic elite. It is not really any different from learning to use the "correct" fork at a 19th century dinner party, even to the point where watered-down versions of both trickling into middle class. So let's say now you've gone and learned these phrases and weaponized your speech in this manner, great on you right? Wrong! You've lost your voice, everything you say is now constrained without the confines of this language and carries connotations set by someone else that overshadow whatever you may wish to express, but more importantly, your speech is now a constant performance. Just as how nourishment was not the point of dinner, what's being discussed is not the point of conversation when using this language. People who talk this way occasionally slip up and deviate slightly and you can hear in their voice how much anxiety this causes them, usually some small nervous joke follows. Crippling anxiety is perhaps the defining trait of these folks, to the point that many many of them, a far higher percentage than you'd expect naturally, are on some kind of anti-anxiety drugs. This risk of saying something that puts you out of step with the tastemakers grows enormously as your investment increases, better to say nothing of substance at all while using lots and lots of this language and drop in as many of these code words as possible.
  - Kaze404 4y ago
    What? That's a completely normal sentence. I don't understand what in particular triggered this rant full of strawmen.
    - samhw 4y ago
      I think you're illustrating that person's point. I'm a liberal, with-the-times person in a liberal, with-the-times city, and I cringe at the thought of ever uttering the words "invalidate someone's lived experience". Aside from anything else, what the fuck does it even mean? I don't think it's a bad rule of writing to speak in simple, clear, plain words, not glutinous agglomerations of abstract verbiage which evoke nothing. (While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)
tmortimerhun 4y ago
Indeed. Was quite excited when I saw the title, but not a great piece. Be interested if anyone's seen any better pieces on the same subject
- tallanvor 4y ago
  There's a new book on this subject - "Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy" https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Positivity-Keeping-World-Obsessed-ebook/dp/B094VCFSZW https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Positivity-Keeping-World-Obsess... I also found these articles/posts to be pretty decent: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-5093958 https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395... https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/ https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-being-told-cheer-up-the-problem-of-toxic-positivity-11635858001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-being-told-cheer-up-th...
  - tmortimerhun 4y ago
    Thank you
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
The most common example I've seen at companies is when higher ups portray everything as a positive, even when a project isn't going well. Some execs have a tendency to cheerlead, rather than to be realistic. In some cases this can amount to gaslighting, as people will be left wondering whether they're being too negative due to their own flaws.
xnorswap 4y ago
This was my reaction too, I didn't want to comment as such earlier when it would be the only comment, but it feels like this has been propelled to the top of the front-page by the title alone.
- d23 4y ago
  I would hope HN would be more immune to this general online phenomenon, but these sorts of articles get ranked highly often enough that it seems like a majority of users rush to vote and opine without taking the time to read.
  - cptnapalm 4y ago
    Ah, reminds me of the slashdot of my youth!
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
The post is also focused on content marketing. Many already are in agreement sales and marketing tends to be more positive because, let's face it, most of them are still coming in cold with products which are meh at best and terrible at worst. For the majority of people, toxic positivity is a far bigger issue by having things invade their life to the point of having to sell themselves or others as far more positive than necessary, for reasons that do not reflect empirical evidence. Some people noted mass media culture of farming likes and internet points. Job interviews, performances and such are another, where negativity in any way is so taboo individuals now have to learn how to navigate a minefield of "give us criticism but don't you dare give us criticism". Most will even dare scapegoat it under "it's unprofessional to be negative". The world sucks in a lot of ways. Yes, we don't have to keep rubbing in how much it sucks. No, we don't need to decorate it ad nauseam at every corner. The last bit will eventually explode into a counterculture where everyone berates the overly positive status quo. It already has online, just waiting for counterculture to catch up to corporate.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  One of the most amusing things, for me, is watching marketing folks struggling to say "no," or disagree[0]. It seems they are trained to never say no. I tend to keep things positive, and rely on good team dynamics (I don't like team members competing against each other). That's not "toxic positivity." It's just common sense. We don't all have to have kum-ba-ya singalongs, but we need to treat each other with respect, and work together. I was a manager for 25 years, and my team seemed to like the environment I fostered. I think a lot of folks are crippled by cynicism, and that can be just as bad as "toxic anything." It can completely destroy a team. Decent managers can help to defuse that. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34UzHo4G5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34UzHo4G5w
  - chrsig 4y ago
    > Decent managers can help to defuse that. Can you share any insights into how it gets defused? I'm a recovering cynic, and so is my manager. Sometimes we get into a feedback loop, which isn't great.
lallysingh 4y ago
Can we call the article an example of toxic filler? All filler in the guise of something genuinely helpful. For toxic positivity, I call it old-fashioned denial, mixed in with a lot of bullshit.
codingdave 4y ago
That is because the article is just an extended ad for their tools which they link in the middle of the article.
trqnw 4y ago
I agree. This paragraph might explain the lack of substance: Readable’s tone and sentiment tools help you to optimise your content for positivity. Using our sliders, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your language. So the article is an ad for sentiment analysis and has probably been "optimized" by that tool. Hence the vacuous tone that ironically is an example of toxic positivity itself.
- lupire 4y ago
  This article seems like an employee slyly attacking her employer with malicious compliance with the Brand Voice -- showing everyone how their product ruins writing.
coffeefirst 4y ago
Yeah, this is an ad one of those SaaS products where a computer scans your writing and tells you you're doing it wrong. There's probably something about excess positivity that's worth talking about. This isn't it.
verisimi 4y ago
Come on, don't be down on it! Cheer up! :)

groceryheist 4y ago

Completely agree! This was disjointed and didn't have a point. Wish I could downvote.

Veen 4y ago
Part of the disjointedness comes from the writer's apparent obsession with over-simple language and very short sentences made by chopping up longer sentences. It's a good example of what happens when inexperienced writers rely on readability tools like Readable (it's on the Readable blog).
- stavros 4y ago
  > It’s natural to emulate what we see online. But, going overboard on the ‘positive vibes’ may affect your content. Agreed, come on, splitting the sentence there just made it worse. Unlike many people, I'm not opposed to sentences that start with "but", but here it serves no purpose. It's not like we have an attention span of six words.
- samhw 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't want to be cruel, in case the author is reading this, but it really is uniquely egregious writing (no toxic positivity here!). The broken-up sentences you mention are. Awkward and mostly grammatically inco. Rrect as a result. They seem weirdly unaware of the incredibly basic writer's injunction to vary your sentence length. There's no rhythm or cadence to it. You can literally feel the author grimly trudging toward the target word count. It feels completely disconnected from anything real, full of unevocative abstract nouns connected with unevocative abstract verbs. "Don't be too hard on yourself if you're struggling with negative thoughts" - well, what the fuck do you think 'negative thoughts' are? Reading this felt like having my teeth pulled. I think the biggest problem, though, is that they really just do not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn't be surprised if it were written at gunpoint. We used to write essays on random subjects instead of lines as a punishment at school, and I think those essays were more enthusiastic and insightful than this one. It just meanders along, with no overarching direction or purpose, from useless bromide to useless bromide, until they get to the word count and stop, and that's it.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I hate this. I admit I often get carried about by combining my thoughts into massive complex sentences, but the reverse is even worse. I feel like I have to write like I’m Dr Suess. I get why they want you to simplify your righting, but iirc they tend to want you to target a 9th grade level and if I remember correctly when I was a senior half the people in that class could barely fucking read. One thing I could use is an autocorrect that works. My phone things it’s appropriate to randomly change worlds like die->sue but is helpless when some other word is a single character off.
throw__away7391 4y ago
That's because the author seems to be firmly anchored in a coastal elite bubble. In particular this phrase: > invalidate someone's lived experience ...is particularly cringe-inducing. These are code words. This is not how any normal human in the English speaking world has ever spoken prior to exposure to a particular brand of (most often quite expensive) education, and let's be clear--that's the whole point. People train themselves to use this language as a way to demonstrate their membership or desired membership in the current socio-economic elite. It is not really any different from learning to use the "correct" fork at a 19th century dinner party, even to the point where watered-down versions of both trickling into middle class. So let's say now you've gone and learned these phrases and weaponized your speech in this manner, great on you right? Wrong! You've lost your voice, everything you say is now constrained without the confines of this language and carries connotations set by someone else that overshadow whatever you may wish to express, but more importantly, your speech is now a constant performance. Just as how nourishment was not the point of dinner, what's being discussed is not the point of conversation when using this language. People who talk this way occasionally slip up and deviate slightly and you can hear in their voice how much anxiety this causes them, usually some small nervous joke follows. Crippling anxiety is perhaps the defining trait of these folks, to the point that many many of them, a far higher percentage than you'd expect naturally, are on some kind of anti-anxiety drugs. This risk of saying something that puts you out of step with the tastemakers grows enormously as your investment increases, better to say nothing of substance at all while using lots and lots of this language and drop in as many of these code words as possible.
- Kaze404 4y ago
  What? That's a completely normal sentence. I don't understand what in particular triggered this rant full of strawmen.
  - samhw 4y ago
    I think you're illustrating that person's point. I'm a liberal, with-the-times person in a liberal, with-the-times city, and I cringe at the thought of ever uttering the words "invalidate someone's lived experience". Aside from anything else, what the fuck does it even mean? I don't think it's a bad rule of writing to speak in simple, clear, plain words, not glutinous agglomerations of abstract verbiage which evoke nothing. (While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)

tmortimerhun 4y ago

Indeed. Was quite excited when I saw the title, but not a great piece. Be interested if anyone's seen any better pieces on the same subject

tallanvor 4y ago
There's a new book on this subject - "Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy" https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Positivity-Keeping-World-Obsessed-ebook/dp/B094VCFSZW https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Positivity-Keeping-World-Obsess... I also found these articles/posts to be pretty decent: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-5093958 https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395... https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/ https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-being-told-cheer-up-the-problem-of-toxic-positivity-11635858001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-being-told-cheer-up-th...
- tmortimerhun 4y ago
  Thank you

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

The most common example I've seen at companies is when higher ups portray everything as a positive, even when a project isn't going well. Some execs have a tendency to cheerlead, rather than to be realistic. In some cases this can amount to gaslighting, as people will be left wondering whether they're being too negative due to their own flaws.

xnorswap 4y ago

This was my reaction too, I didn't want to comment as such earlier when it would be the only comment, but it feels like this has been propelled to the top of the front-page by the title alone.

d23 4y ago
I would hope HN would be more immune to this general online phenomenon, but these sorts of articles get ranked highly often enough that it seems like a majority of users rush to vote and opine without taking the time to read.
- cptnapalm 4y ago
  Ah, reminds me of the slashdot of my youth!

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

The post is also focused on content marketing. Many already are in agreement sales and marketing tends to be more positive because, let's face it, most of them are still coming in cold with products which are meh at best and terrible at worst. For the majority of people, toxic positivity is a far bigger issue by having things invade their life to the point of having to sell themselves or others as far more positive than necessary, for reasons that do not reflect empirical evidence. Some people noted mass media culture of farming likes and internet points. Job interviews, performances and such are another, where negativity in any way is so taboo individuals now have to learn how to navigate a minefield of "give us criticism but don't you dare give us criticism". Most will even dare scapegoat it under "it's unprofessional to be negative". The world sucks in a lot of ways. Yes, we don't have to keep rubbing in how much it sucks. No, we don't need to decorate it ad nauseam at every corner. The last bit will eventually explode into a counterculture where everyone berates the overly positive status quo. It already has online, just waiting for counterculture to catch up to corporate.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
One of the most amusing things, for me, is watching marketing folks struggling to say "no," or disagree[0]. It seems they are trained to never say no. I tend to keep things positive, and rely on good team dynamics (I don't like team members competing against each other). That's not "toxic positivity." It's just common sense. We don't all have to have kum-ba-ya singalongs, but we need to treat each other with respect, and work together. I was a manager for 25 years, and my team seemed to like the environment I fostered. I think a lot of folks are crippled by cynicism, and that can be just as bad as "toxic anything." It can completely destroy a team. Decent managers can help to defuse that. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34UzHo4G5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34UzHo4G5w
- chrsig 4y ago
  > Decent managers can help to defuse that. Can you share any insights into how it gets defused? I'm a recovering cynic, and so is my manager. Sometimes we get into a feedback loop, which isn't great.

lallysingh 4y ago

Can we call the article an example of toxic filler? All filler in the guise of something genuinely helpful. For toxic positivity, I call it old-fashioned denial, mixed in with a lot of bullshit.

codingdave 4y ago

That is because the article is just an extended ad for their tools which they link in the middle of the article.

trqnw 4y ago

I agree. This paragraph might explain the lack of substance: Readable’s tone and sentiment tools help you to optimise your content for positivity. Using our sliders, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your language. So the article is an ad for sentiment analysis and has probably been "optimized" by that tool. Hence the vacuous tone that ironically is an example of toxic positivity itself.

lupire 4y ago
This article seems like an employee slyly attacking her employer with malicious compliance with the Brand Voice -- showing everyone how their product ruins writing.

coffeefirst 4y ago

Yeah, this is an ad one of those SaaS products where a computer scans your writing and tells you you're doing it wrong. There's probably something about excess positivity that's worth talking about. This isn't it.

verisimi 4y ago

Come on, don't be down on it! Cheer up! :)