Bright-Sided (28 page)

Yet, as the cover story of the January 2009 issue of
Psychology Today
acknowledges, the American infatuation with positive thinking has not made us happier. Lumping academic positive psychology and the ever-growing host of “self-appointed experts” together into what he calls the “happiness movement,” the writer notes that, “according to some measures, as a nation we’ve grown sadder and more anxious during the same years that the happiness movement has flourished; perhaps that’s why we’ve eagerly bought up its offerings.”
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This finding should hardly come as a surprise: positive thinking did not abolish the need for constant vigilance; it only turned that vigilance inward. Instead of worrying that one’s roof might collapse or one’s job be terminated, positive thinking encourages us to worry about the negative expectations themselves and subject them to continual revision. It ends up imposing a mental discipline as exacting as that of the Calvinism it replaced—the endless work of self-examination and self-control or, in the case of positive thinking, self-hypnosis. It requires, as historian Donald Meyer puts it, “constant repetition of its spirit lifters, constant alertness against impossibility perspectives, constant monitoring of rebellions of body and mind against control.”
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This is a burden that we can finally, in good conscience, put down. The effort of positive “thought control,” which is always presented as such a life preserver, has become a potentially deadly weight—obscuring judgment and shielding us from vital information. Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining
the views of “negative” people. As we should have learned by now, it is dangerous not to.

A vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness; in fact, it makes it possible. How can we expect to improve our situation without addressing the actual circumstances we find ourselves in? Positive thinking seeks to convince us that such external factors are incidental compared with one’s internal state or attitude or mood. We have seen how the coaches and gurus dismiss real-world problems as “excuses” for failure and how positive psychologists have tended to minimize the “C,” for circumstances, in their happiness equation. It’s true that subjective factors like determination are critical to survival and that individuals sometimes triumph over nightmarish levels of adversity. But mind does not automatically prevail over matter, and to ignore the role of difficult circumstances—or worse, attribute them to our own thoughts—is to slide toward the kind of depraved smugness Rhonda Byrne expressed when confronted with the tsunami of 2006. Citing the law of attraction, she stated that disasters like tsunamis can happen only to people who are “on the same frequency as the event.”
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Worldwide, the most routine obstacle to human happiness is poverty. To the extent that happiness surveys can be believed, they consistently show that the world’s happiest countries tend also to be among the richest. While the United States ranks 23rd and the United Kingdom 41st, for example, India comes in a gloomy 125th out of 178 nations.
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Some recent studies find furthermore that, within countries, richer people tend to be happier, with about 90 percent of Americans in households earning at least $250,000 a year reporting being “very happy,” compared with only 42 percent of people in households earning less than $30,000.
13
When the
New York Times
surveyed New York neighborhoods in 2009, it found that the happiest areas were also the most affluent and, not coincidentally, the most thickly supplied
with cafés, civic associations, theaters, and opportunities for social interaction. The least happy neighborhood was a part of the Bronx characterized by abandoned buildings, mounds of uncollected garbage, and the highest unemployment rate in the city.
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For centuries, or at least since the Protestant Reformation, Western economic elites have flattered themselves with the idea that poverty is a voluntary condition. The Calvinist saw it as a result of sloth and other bad habits; the positive thinker blamed it on a willful failure to embrace abundance. This victim-blaming approach meshed neatly with the prevailing economic conservatism of the last two decades. Welfare recipients were pushed out into low-wage jobs, supposedly, in part, to boost their self-esteem; laid-off and soon-to-be-laid-off workers were subjected to motivational speakers and exercises. But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food include strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

Happiness is not, of course, guaranteed even to those who are affluent, successful, and well loved. But that happiness is not the inevitable outcome of happy circumstances does not mean we can find it by journeying inward to revise our thoughts and feelings. The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world. Build up the levees, get food to the hungry, find the cure, strengthen the “first responders”! We will not succeed at all these things, certainly not all at once, but—if I may end with my own personal secret of happiness—we can have a good time trying.

1
. “Happiness Is ‘Infectious’ in Network of Friends: Collective—Not Just Individual—Phenomenon,”
ScienceDaily
, Dec. 5, 2008, [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081205094506.htm] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081205094506.htm.

2
. Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger, “Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
20 (2006): 3–24.

3
. “Psychologist Produces the First-Ever ‘World Map of Happiness,’ ”
ScienceDaily
, Nov. 14, 2006, [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.htm] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.htm.

4
. [http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/the-us-ranks-150th-in-planet-happiness/] http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/the-us-ranks-150th-in-planet-happiness/, Jan. 11, 2009.

5
. Godfrey Hodgson,
The Myth of American Exceptionalism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 113; Paul Krugman, “America the Boastful,”
Foreign Affairs,
May–June 1998.

6
. 2000 State of the Union Address, Jan. 27, 2000, [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/states/docs/sou00.htm] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/states/docs/sou00.htm; Geoff Elliott, “Dubya’s 60th Takes the Cake,”
Weekend Australian,
July 8, 2006; Woodward, quoting
Rice,
Meet the Press
transcript, Dec. 21, 2008, [http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/28337897/] http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/28337897/.

7
. Quoted in Karen A. Cerulo,
Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 18.

8
. Cerulo,
Never Saw It Coming
, 239.

9
. Hope Yen, “Death in Streets Took a Back Seat to Dinner,”
Seattle Times,
Oct. 25, 2005.

1
. Susan M. Love, with Karen Lindsey,
Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book
(Cambridge: Perseus, 2000), 380–81.

2
. Gina Kolata, “In Long Drive to Cure Cancer, Advances Have Been Elusive,”
New York Times,
April 24, 2009.

3
. Stephen C. Fehr, “Cheerfully Fighting a Killer; Upbeat Race for Cure Nets $3 Million for Cancer Research,”
Washington Post
, June 4, 2000.

4
. Charla Hudson Honea,
The First Year of the Rest of Your Life: Reflections for Survivors of Breast Cancer
(Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1997), 6.

5
. Jane E. Brody, “Thriving after Life’s Bum Rap,”
New York Times
, Aug. 14, 2007.

6
. Ann McNerney,
The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening
(Baltimore: Resonant Publishing, n.d.), 183, vii.

7
. Honea,
The First Year
, 25, 36, 81.

8
. [http://www.cfah.org/hbns/newsrelease/women3-07-01.cfm] http://www.cfah.org/hbns/newsrelease/women3-07-01.cfm.

9
. [http://www.nugget.ca/webapp/sitepages/content.asp?contentid=537743&catname=Local+News] http://www.nugget.ca/webapp/sitepages/content.asp?contentid=537743&catname=Local+News.

1
. Joseph Anzack,
CNN American Morning
, May 16, 2007.

2
. Barry Corbet, “Embedded: A No-Holds-Barred Report from Inside a Nursing Home,”
AARP: The Magazine
, Jan.–Feb. 2007, [http://www.aarpmagazine.org/health/embedded.html] http://www.aarpmagazine.org/health/embedded.html.

3
. Scott McLemee, “Motivation and Its Discontents,” [http://www.insidehighered.com] www.insidehighered.com, Feb. 28, 2007.

4
. Dale Carnegie,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
(New York: Pocket Books, 1982), 70, 61, 64.

5
. Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).