Positivity: Overrated
Positive emotions feel great; pleasure, excitement, and happiness are some fundamentals of what makes life enjoyable. That goes without saying. However, my main stifle with this well known fact is the “Positivity Approach” for everything. This prioritization of maintaining a positive attitude above all else. Among the myriad of Self improvement books, Modern Psychology, hell every part of our culture: encourages us to be positive no matter what comes our way. And it’s wrong. Particularly because it’s a very misconstrued approach and has had damaging lasting effects on our society. Yes, I do believe we should have a war on positive thinking.
Positivity Thinking was originally a new psychological approach to handling depression. A way to deal with the unpleasant events and people in our life. For the most part, it worked. “Worked” as well as a bandaid does for a gunshot wound. The thing about depression is that it always comes back. What’s sadistic about the positivity approach on matters in your life that cause depression, is that it leads to avoiding your problems or plainly engorging yourself with pleasure. Not only is does this create unhealthy habits but it’s counterproductive in coping with depression, The worst part of it all, it’s addicting.
Here’s a personal example: Raving. I know I know, Why raving? Of course being a part of the Rave community the last year and a half was something I definitely was missing from my life. Within this community, I was fortunate to find myself among a remarkable group of friends. Some are already like family to me. They taught me in a lot of ways how to enjoy myself and have a good experience partying again for the first time in years. However, this was an experience I abused. At first, I began to use raving as my means of disregarding facts and memories in my life I didn’t want to come to terms of dealing with. I prioritized the time I spent with my friends and events instead of what really mattered. This was my “Positive Approach” if you will. Funnily enough, I came to this realization in the midst of a drive-in rave during the height of the Pandemic in 2020. When the thought finally hit me, it hit hard, but frankly I couldn’t have been more glad to have found out sooner rather than later. Because how do I expect to be there for my friends if they need me if I couldn’t even be here for myself?
It is a numb physical sensation to be depressed. Depression can be described as being enraptured with thoughts of heartache and loss; to ultimately feeling nothing. No drive and no desire, and the happiness from anything is gone. It’s an emotion that’s only felt when you involuntarily cannot feel anything anymore and it could last a lifetime for some. Even in describing the severity of depression and its inevitability to avoid once you have it, it is all more preferable of an experience for me than a constant necessity for positivity. Now why am I making such an outlandish claim? Well, I’m certainly not outright encouraging to experience depression nor am I downplaying it for the damage it causes. But as controversial as this statement is, I think positivity is ironically counterintuitive to getting over depression. I’d actually go as far as to say pain is a necessity in the process of healing and overcoming any challenges that come across someone. It’s a hard price to pay for anyone, but this is primarily my focus here; if we choose to take a “positive approach” on every matter, we never deal with pain and if we never deal with pain, we avoid it in every retrospect and never grow as people.
Once again, positivity isn’t a bad quality to have by any means. However, if you use it as a means of denial and avoidance from what really matters, it could lead to a terrible fate. It’s important to accept your emotions and deal with it in a healthy way. Maybe we’ll never secure the proper path to resolving depression or sadness, as we shouldn’t;
To be willing to choose pain in the short term to build yourself back up and live another day to reminisce on it, for me, that’s a part of the human experience that makes life worth living.