The Myth of Positivity: Why positivity is nonsense.

I stumbled accross a job ad the other day which made me thinking: 'You do not need any experience in coffee-making. But you do need to bring your smile with you and your pleasant personality. Well, what if I am in pain? What if I don't want to smile? Does that mean I can't get a job? Isn't that a form of racism? Of course it is.

What's the first advice you get from people when you go for an interview: Maintain eye-contact, smile and look happy. People like to watch smiley faces, a smiling waiter, a receptionist, to the point of making it as if it is compulsory. Actually, this is one of the most overrated myths propagated by a money-greedy society: The myth of positivity and happiness. Its all over the place; pop-psychology pseudoscience is thriving from it and profiting from it. I can't stress how unhealthy this is and what a bunch of nonsense. If interviewees and employers and all of us are implicity biased about someone's personality, work ethic and performance based on appearance, then we have problem. And yes, most people are implictly biased when it comes to smiley faces. Its an evolutionary left-over perhaps and it signalls a lot of information. But we need to overcome this as much as difficult it might seem.

'Remain positive and positive things will happen'.' smile and good thinks will happen 'enough with the negativity already' 'I don't want you to be sad' 'You look sad, talk to me, what's wrong 'Go out, go for a walk, meet a few friends'. Sounds familar right? In other words, avoid the pain and reinforce the avoidance. But if people are conditioned to be unfamiliar and uncomfortable with their pain, and pain becomes so alien and stranger to them, with the slightest discofmort they feel they 'baptise' it as clinical depression when it's not. Its no wonder that all people think that they suffer from depression these days even though they are not.

Although positive thinking has a lot of benefits I can't strees enough how abnormal it is to ignore negative feelings and not to accept negativity it in our lives. A major reason people suffer is because of an almost compulsive need and a fixation to positivity. We are creating societies based on 'hypocricy' and smiling robots where people smile in social gatherings but then empty a box of xanax when they are alone. And this is becoming annoying. Even among close friends. If we ignore negative feelings and thoughts, they will probably go away right? Bullshit. Negative emotions and feelings are usually signs that there is something wrong and something needs to change. Pretty much like (healthy) anxiety where you get a signal that something is threatful in the environment and you need to do something about it. No different than physical pain which is again a sign that your homeostasis is threatened.

If you are in emotional pain or if you are negative people assume that there is something unnatural with you.

'Be sad' that is my advice. Don't be afraid to be sad or process sadness. Its your organism reacting and this is actually a friend not a foe, a gift that evolution gave us in order to survive.

People have enough reasons to be sad about and it not hard to realize and appresiate this unless you open the TV or scroll-down the news and appreciate the human hellish condition. Thus, how can sadness be unnatural or toxic?

'The purpose of pain is transformation and the price of transformation is pain'. Emotions should not have a label, positive or negative; they are what they are, natural.