I’m not an optimist, and I’m not a pessimist.
I’m a creature that requires both light and dark to survive. I have a dual nature, one side that believes that Santa Clause reads my letters every year and the other that recoils from the sight of angels and little babies like a vampire recoils from a stake.
Is the glass half empty or half full? Doesn’t matter. If I’m thirsty, I’ll drink what’s there. If I’m very thirsty, I’ll complain that there isn’t more.
Sometimes I like to indulge in a little fluffy happiness, reading fairy tales or watching a Disney movie, but I can recognize that life is hardly all sunshine and roses. Sometimes I also like to indulge in dark things, like Emilie Autumn music, horror movies, and Edward Gorey storybooks.
The light and dark naturally balance themselves out, like night and day. They each have their place in the cycles of the year.
Which is why when I find myself confronted with that damned positivity movement, I want to vomit. Too much positivity is maddening, like being locked in a white room with bright lights. It’s more a form of torture than it is a form of therapy.
I don’t think positive psychology is bad. I certainly approve of a deeper approach to mental health besides responding to “illness.”
However, more and more I’m sensing that those who favor positive psychology want to ignore the “negative” altogether. Those who favor “strength-based approaches” want to pretend that weaknesses don’t exist.
It’s an artificial positivity that is annoying as fuck. The only way to sustain that kind of positivity is to either be so naïve that you’ve never experienced tragedy or to be in so much denial that you’re constipated on your own head.
Life doesn’t have to be about the opposition of two mindsets that on their own are unsustainable. I can appreciate the beauty of a tiger, but I also remember that it has teeth with which to chew me. Neither takes away from the reality of the other.
This all-or-nothing trend isn’t new, though. A hundred or so years ago, we were convinced everything was about sex. Jung criticized the idolization of Freud’s theory in his autobiography, musing that “the numinosum [e.g. worship of a theory] is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with a fatal error” (Jung, 1963, p. 154).
Although we’ve since rejected the assumption that everything is motivated by suppressed sexual impulses, admitting that other motivations may come into play as well, it seems we have yet to learn from our actual mistake. We continue to unquestioningly embrace the next in-vogue school of thought as if it were a god.
I can only hope at some point we will swing back more towards the middle on positivity as well, preferably before we’ve turned it into a full-blown religion. In the meantime, I’m going to ward off the “100 days of happiness” dementors with a little intentional darkness.
Reference:
Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
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