"smile or die": the false promises of positive thinking

It's all about being positive:
Jay Doubleyou: positive power and influence
Positive Thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Or is it?
The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking - The New Yorker

Here's a book review from a couple of years ago:

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich

Jenni Murray salutes a long-overdue demolition of the suggestion that positive thinking is the answer to all our problems

The Observer , Sunday 10 January 2010

Some of the 15,000 participants in the 2005 Playtex Moonwalk around Hyde Park, London, to raise money for the breast cancer charity Walk the Walk. Photograph: onEdition

Every so often a book appears that so chimes with your own thinking, yet flies so spectacularly in the face of fashionable philosophy, that it comes as a profoundly reassuring relief. After reading Barbara Ehrenreich'sSmile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, I feel as if I can wallow in grief, gloom, disappointment or whatever negative emotion comes naturally without worrying that I've become that frightful stereotype, the curmudgeonly, grumpy old woman. Instead, I can be merely human: someone who doesn't have to convince herself that every rejection or disaster is a golden opportunity to "move on" in an upbeat manner.

Ehrenreich came to her critique of the multi-billion-dollar positive-thinking industry – a swamp of books, DVDs, life coaches, executive coaches and motivational speakers – in similar misery-making circumstances to those I experienced . She was diagnosed with breast cancer and, like me, found herself increasingly disturbed by the martial parlance and "pink" culture that has come to surround the disease. My response when confronted with the "positive attitude will help you battle and survive this experience" brigade was to rail against the use of militaristic vocabulary and ask how miserable the optimism of the "survivor" would make the poor woman who was dying from her breast cancer. It seemed to me that an "invasion" of cancer cells was a pure lottery. No one knows the cause. As Ehrenreich says: "I had no known risk factors, there was no breast cancer in the family, I'd had my babies relatively young and nursed them both. I ate right, drank sparingly, worked out, and, besides, my breasts were so small that I figured a lump or two would improve my figure." (Mercifully, she hasn't lost her sense of humour.)

I had long suspected that improved survival rates for women who had breast cancer had absolutely nothing to do with the "power" of positive thinking. For women diagnosed between 2001 and 2006, 82% were expected to survive for five years, compared with only 52% diagnosed 30 years earlier. The figures can be directly related to improved detection, better surgical techniques, a greater understanding of the different types of breast cancer and the development of targeted treatments. Ehrenreich presents the evidence of numerous studies demonstrating that positive thinking has no effect on survival rates and she provides the sad testimonies of women who have been devastated by what one researcher has called "an additional burden to an already devastated patient".

As Ehrenreich goes on to explain, exhortations to think positively – to see the glass as half-full even when it lies shattered on the floor – are not restricted to the pink-ribbon culture of breast cancer. She roots America's susceptibility to the philosophy of positive thinking in the country's Calvinist past and demonstrates how, in its early days, a puritanical "demand for perpetual effort and self-examination to the point of self-loathing" terrified small children and reduced "formerly healthy adults to a condition of morbid withdrawal, usually marked by physical maladies as well as inner terror".

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich | Book review | Books | The Observer
Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich: review - Telegraph

Here is Barbara Ehrenreich at the RSA:



Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.
Watch the full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/video/ar...
The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to creating social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information about our research, RSA Animates, free events programme and 27,000 strong fellowship.

RSA Animate - Smile or Die - YouTube
RSA - RSA Animate - Smile or Die

Here she is at a TED talk 'speaking against positive thinking':



Barbara Ehrenreich is an American feminist, democratic socialist, and political activist who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade". She is a widely-read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. In 2006, she founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers. Her last published book is "Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World", and during her talk she shared her views on the topic.

Smile or die: Barbara Ehrenreich at TEDxZaragoza - YouTube
Watch "Smile or die: Barbara Ehrenreich at TEDxZaragoza" Video at TEDxTalks

But Barbara Ehrenreich is not 'miserable':
Barbara Ehrenreich - Dancing in the Streets A History of Collective Joy
Review: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich | Books | The Guardian

On the other hand, we could be ironic:
Jay Doubleyou: a history of irony
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