Maybe it started in 1952 when Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking hit the shelves. More than five million copies have been sold since then, and in the decades since its first publishing, hordes of motivational speakers and writers and prosperity preachers have profited from sharing the gospel of positivity. Or maybe Peale just poured gasoline on a fire started by Napoleon Hill, whose book Think and Grow Rich published 15 years earlier in 1937.
Regardless, we—and perhaps especially we Americans—have turned positivity and blind optimism into an idol. We have elevated these mindsets and their emotional counterparts to such a level that when people ask “How are you?” saying anything less than “I’m fine” can suck the air out of the room at many social gatherings.
Such devotion to positivity ill-equips us for the harsh realities of life. Life is hard. In contrast to what carefully curated social media profiles and superficial conversations might imply, real life is both beautiful and ugly. It’s a bag of dream jobs and layoffs, 26.2 stickers and paralyzing accidents, birthday parties and funerals.
Everything is Awesome! When Positivity is Toxic
Positive thinking has redeeming qualities, of course. The related idea of hope, for example, is particularly important amid suffering. But the idea that we can simply use blind optimism to get through tough times hits me like a hollow promise. Like Think and Grow Rich, it has a get-rich-quick-scheme aura.
Perhaps what’s tricky is that we do need positive thinking and optimism, but like many things, we can take them too far. When people worship positivity, they can make it toxic; they can suppress their valid negative emotions and those of others. In so doing, they ignore the truth of what’s staring them in the face. It’s something like the “Everything is Awesome” anthem in The Lego Movie, which blares throughout the fictional city despite $37 cups of coffee and impending doom from an evil overlord.
Such a flavor of positivity, in my experience, has little value during the trials of life. And it can make those crucibles even worse to navigate for those directly involved. Imagine, for instance, yourself as a grieving widow or widower and being told, “You know, everything always works out for the best.” Or imagine that your child has terminal brain cancer and someone tells you, “Don’t worry, he will soon be in a better place.” Such optimism, however well-intentioned, likely won’t help you much in your pain and suffering.
Toxic positivity can invalidate our rational indignation at the unfairness of tragedy or of life’s many challenges, and it can create unrealistic expectations about the future. Those unrealistic expectations can then set us up for additional psychological turmoil as whatever we’re facing pummels us with disappointment after disappointment.
Tragic Optimism as an Antidote to Toxic Positivity
As I’ve written elsewhere, Holocaust survivor and Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl coined a term and shaped an approach that I’ve come to view as highly valuable: “tragic optimism.” As he wrote in reference to remaining hopeful about the future despite experiencing pain, guilt, and death:
… I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in the view of human potential which at its best allows for (1) turning suffering in to a human achievement and accomplishment, (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.
Writing in The Atlantic, cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman referred to tragic optimism as “the antidote to toxic positivity” because tragic optimism offers the option of searching for deep meaning amid adversity. It also reveals the value of that option. Whereas toxic positivity privileges a focus on optimism at the expense of reality, tragic optimism fully acknowledges the suffering of life while refusing to allow that acknowledgement to rob life of its inherent value.
Life, despite our suffering, remains worth living—and perhaps our suffering brings such worth into focus more than anything else. Sunshine, after all, has little meaning if it never rains.
“Who didn’t make it out?” “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists.”
A classic example of tragic optimism comes from a story that began as it were on Sept. 9, 1965, when U.S. Navy fighter pilot James B. Stockdale was flying a combat mission over North Vietnam. Enemy fire completely disabled his aircraft, forcing him to eject. After parachuting to the ground, he was severely beaten and taken captive. Unbeknown to him at the time, he would remain a prisoner of war for the next nearly seven and half years until his release on Feb. 12, 1973.
Stockdale, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1976 and retired from the Navy as a vice admiral in 1979, credited his prior education in Stoic philosophy as the key to his survival. Reflecting some of those philosophical tenets, he once shared a perspective with the author Jim Collins, who described it in his book Good to Great, calling it “The Stockdale Paradox.”
Reflecting on the horror that Stockdale endured for years at the hands of his captors, Collins found himself wondering, “ … how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?” According to Collins, Stockdale said, “I never lost faith in the end of the story … I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Still thinking about Stockdale’s years in captivity, Collins went on to ask Stockdale, “Who didn’t make it out?” Stockdale’s response: “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists … they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Stockdale then shared with Collins what I consider to be the crux of The Stockdale Paradox:
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
The story of humanity is one of adversity, struggle, beauty, and redemption. It’s a complex story, one that I won’t fully understand in my lifetime, particularly when it comes to suffering.
Yet I do know, deep in the marrow of my bones, that suffering gives us opportunities for courage, unanswerable questions allow us to exercise our faith, and uncertainty makes room for hope. Ignoring those realities, as toxic positivity and blind optimism would have us do, presents a dishonest view of life.
Instead, traversing the bumpy road of real life requires staring straight into the abyss of one’s circumstances even if doing so makes you shudder. It requires a wise and tragic optimism, one both grounded in what really is and buoyed by what can be.
References and for further reading
Scott Barry Kaufman, “The Opposite of Toxic Positivity,” The Atlantic, August 18, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/08/tragic-optimism-opposite-toxic-positivity/619786/.
“Toxic Positivity.” Article in Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/toxic-positivity
James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap--and Others Don’t, 1st ed (New York, NY: Harper Business, 2001), 85.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 137–38. Note: His chapter titled, “The Case for a Tragic Optimism,” is based on a lecture he delivered in 1983, so it doesn’t appear in older versions of the book. You can likely find a copy of that chapter easily online.
James B. Stockdale. The Stoic Warrior’s Triad and Master of My Fate
When Dr. Baran refers to the many crucibles of life in his writing, I find myself thinking back to my five years of chemistry education. The crucibles that we used in laboratory experiments was usually very small porcelain containers that can withstand an extreme application of heat - even to the point where the crucible glows red hot. The chemicals contained within the vessel are then purified by removal of any heat sensitive contaminants rendering a purified compound in the crucible. Without the applied heat, purification will not occur. So it is with life. Our character, faith and resilience become a purer product brought about by trauma and the time it takes to allow the trauma to make the transformation manifest itself. There are no shortcuts in the process, just the guarantee of a purer human being. Thank you Dr. Baran for insightful analysis.