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Carrion Luggage #1101043 added November 7, 2025 at 8:19am
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Left in the Dark
"We're doomed."
"Oh, come on, Waltz. Be more positive!"
"Okay. I'm positive we're doomed."
From Psychology Today, back in May:
A hydrogen ion walks into a bar. "I'd like a beer, please."
Bartender goes "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm positive."
Do you get the sense that positivity has become a kind of moral code?
It's certainly a forced social norm.
We're encouraged to focus on the bright side, reframe the negative, and show up with a smile—regardless of how we're actually feeling.
When your paycheck depends on you projecting happiness, you learn to act happy fast. I vaguely remember doing a bit in here, or maybe it was the previous blog, about how no, forcing a smile doesn't make you happy. Can't be arsed to find it again now.
But here's the paradox: In trying to be positive, we often end up disconnected—from ourselves, from others, and from what's really going on.
On the positive side, have you seen what's really going on? Disconnection starts to sound like the key to happiness.
There is, of course, value in finding solutions and making meaning out of difficult experiences.
Assertion without evidence.
Emotions are messy, inconvenient, and at times overwhelming and difficult to interpret. Yet they play a vital role. They're not instructions; they're information. Much like the lights on a car dashboard, emotions signal that something needs our attention. Ignoring them doesn’t solve the problem. It often makes things worse.
You know what that reminds me of? It sounds a lot like how we're supposed to handle physical pain, too. Suck it up. Walk it off. Take another lap.
Emotions often precede cognition. They arise from a deep, non-verbal place—an intuitive knowing that's rooted in the body.
I will give this author points for not making up some off-the-cuff evolutionary psychology "reason" for this.
But why do we do this? Often because feeling what we're actually feeling is uncomfortable. There’s also cultural reinforcement. Social media encourages us to present a life that looks successful, joyful, and ever-improving.
Okay, well, I'm not a shrink, but from personal experience: no one wants to be around the Eeyore. The person who projects loneliness, sadness, melancholy, depression: they are shunned and avoided. We don't want to catch whatever it is they're carrying. So of course people are going to act all happy and fulfilled on social media, because social media is all about generating likes and followers. Or, alternatively, or maybe additionally, there's a lot of negativity out there, but it gets lost in the radiance.
This is the real paradox, by the way: the people who need attention the most can't get it because no one wants to be around them.
This is where the concept of toxic positivity comes in—the idea that positivity becomes harmful when it invalidates real emotional experience.
That may be the clearest definition I've seen of toxic positivity.
And ironically, the more we suppress, the more intense those suppressed emotions tend to become. What we resist doesn't disappear—it builds. And it can show up in unexpected ways: irritability, disconnection, fatigue, even physical symptoms.
The mind-body link is still underexplored (I blame Descartes, who insisted they were different entities). But it's real.
The impacts don’t stop with mental health. There’s emerging evidence suggesting that chronic emotional suppression may also affect the body.
It works the other way around, too. One issue is that people continue to think of the mind as something separate from the body.
Psychological research shows that people who can name and describe their emotions with greater precision (a skill known as emotional granularity) are better able to regulate them, experience fewer symptoms of distress, and recover more quickly from adversity.
Oh, great. Another thing I suck at: naming emotions. Once you get past anger or joy, I'm at a loss.
So perhaps the invitation isn’t to be positive, but to be real. To meet ourselves where we are, without rushing to reframe or override.
And yet, there's a lot of potential humor to be found in looking at the bright side of things. "My house just burned down." "Hey, it lit up the neighborhood for a while!" "My dog died." "Look on the bright side: no more picking up dookie!" "The world is experiencing an unprecedented warming trend." "Not to worry: nuclear winter will counteract global warming!"
Dark humor is like food: Not everyone gets it.
So how do we live with sadness and melancholy and darkness in a world that demands joy and cheer and light? I don't know. Me, I try to remind myself that depression is a wonderful driver of creativity. See? I can look at the bright side. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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