A friend recently posted on Facebook that after years of battling two different types of cancer, she was going into hospice care. She is smart, funny and fearless. Her heartbreaking news generated the expected outpouring of love and support, including a series of messages echoing current popular sentiment: You got it.
She got what? She was asking me. Is she supposed to be reassured by that? Congratulations, you are going to rock death! “You got it” is the popular rallying cry for any number of painful scenarios, from “My flight is delayed” to “I’m getting a divorce” and, well, this. sometimes we No I got this. Maybe that’s why several new books on happiness also address the downside of positivity, noting that while the pursuit of happiness is a worthwhile goal, relentless positivity doesn’t actually get us there and In fact, it can end up harming us. Happiness scholar Tal Ben-Shahar compares the relentless pursuit of happiness, happiness as a worth, in sunlight The sun is vital to life on earth, but if you stare directly into it, you can go blind.
“Positivity jargon lacks nuance, compassion and curiosity. It comes in the form of general statements that tell someone how to feel cast the feeling they are currently having is wrong”, writes therapist Whitney Goodman in TOXIC POSITIVITY: Keeping it real in a world obsessed with being happy (TargerPerigee, 304 pp., $26). In other words, if it’s bad to harden someone’s sweetness, sometimes it’s worse to soften someone’s hardness. The book is an invigorating tonic meant to counteract society’s pressure to be a living, breathing smile emoji. “Toxic positivity,” Goodman explains, stems from an understandable desire to fix things, but when we can’t, we become stressed and helpless.
She details the situations where positivity ends up being, as she puts it, “a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound”: when it comes to grief over death or abandonment, job loss, racism and homophobia, or mental health issues. Sometimes all we want is for someone to recognize how terrible a situation is and just sit with us. We don’t need advice or someone to tell us how resilient we are.
Much of Cy Wakeman LIFE IS MESSY, LIVE HAPPY: Things don’t have to be perfect for you to be happy (St. Martin’s, 256 pp., $28.99) it’s conventional talk about happiness, and some of it just seems wrong to me. (“Stress and suffering don’t come from reality, they come from the stories we make up about reality.” Really? Tell that to the poor Mississippi woman who needs an abortion.) She also contradicts herself. At one point denouncing victimhood, she states, “Anything but gratitude is just a tantrum,” and a few chapters later, she tells us to “feel all our feelings.” Hmm. What if I feel like I’m going to punch the next person who tells me to be grateful?
But what’s useful about this book, written by an executive business coach who has faced bankruptcy, homelessness, and loneliness at times, is that it encourages us to let go of the idea that being in control is essential to success. happiness. In fact, says Wakeman, this belief may be one of the biggest impediments to satisfaction.
Wakeman is an excellent storyteller, and her stories are particularly helpful when it comes to how to get through a period of loss and how other cultures are significantly better at dealing with death than we are. She describes a father from Africa whose 6-year-old daughter was killed in a bicycle accident. What could be worse? Social workers who knew him didn’t think he was appropriately sad, but Wakeman writes, “His daughter had a short and blessed life. When he thought of her, he told me, he could only feel grateful and happy. “She tasted the sweetest part of life,” she said. We may not always want to reframe tragedy, but I will think of this story the next time I hear about the death of a loved child.
HAPPY PEOPLE ARE ANNOYING (HarperOne, 256 pp., $26.99) it is not, as I thought when I picked it up, a traditional self-help book on how to tame the pathologically cheerful among us. It’s, rather, a funny and clever memoir from Nickelodeon actor and YouTube star Josh Peck, whose life checks all the boxes for how comedians feed on sadness. But it does offer some interesting insights into the role of misery as a motivator.
After a childhood without a father (or rather, a childhood knowing that he had a father somewhere, a great father to other children), simply no interest in meeting him. to the), Peck spent years filling that void with food, drugs and alcohol. That pursuit of happiness resulted first in obesity and then, cleverly substituting one substance for another, in years of drug addiction. When he stopped chasing the pretense of happiness and started spending time in AA, he began to get his life back. Here, Peck learned to “be in the effort business, not the results business,” because as you put in the effort, the results will follow. While he doesn’t give us precise GPS directions to change our lives, the changes he made in his own life, the focus on others and not on himself, suggest a map we can follow.
Judith Newman is the author of “To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son and the Kindness of Machines.”