We’ve Got Positivity All Wrong

There is a constant pressure to be positive all the time. To just miraculously transform a bad day into being good. And if we don’t, it feels like we’ve failed. We strive for a perfectly positive outlook and we have foolishly believed it is possible. It is not. It is the stuff of fictional fairytales. Our lives will indefinitely be full of struggles, bad days and mistakes. That's the harsh reality of life. But, true positivity is to act despite this, to experience hardship but to move forwards, to experience pain and to accept it.

Our Cultures Incorrect Ideas About Positivity

The word positivity squeezes into all areas of our life. It is like the blood of the self-development world, running through gurus veins. It is supposedly the foundation for a good life. If only we could be more positive life would be so much better, we think to ourselves. Thousands of books believe they have 'the secret', the information you need to be more positive, the solution to all of our problems.

Whether it be through visualisation; the manifestation of dreams; the law of attraction aligning you to the universe; self-care apps with incessant notifications; Instagram quotes on our timelines; books telling us the seven ways to be more positive, this positivity culture is always around us but it is doing more harm than good.

The usual advice is trying to sugarcoat problems and make issues appear fluffy like a little bunny with floppy ears playing in the grass. Our culture desperately wants us to feel good and happy all the time. To not experience any pain. To just spin everything that happens in our lives full of fake positivity and by changing our mindset.

In my words, society’s current definition of positivity is: through a change in our mindset, transforming a supposed bad experience into a better one.

Bad Things Are Actually Good

But we experience heartache and struggle and we fail to feel happy, to feel good about it. We believe that we just need to be a little bit more positive. To change our attitude a little more. To be more optimistic. To continue practicing gratitude for everything we have. We think that by being more positive in our outlook, life will be all happy and perfect, and we can be like the little fluffy bunny.

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.” - Mark Manson

But this act of trying to turn a bad situation into a good one is harmful. It puts us on a never-ending treadmill of trying to be more positive which just perpetuates the suffering. It makes us feel inadequate or a failure for not being able to conjure this positive mindset we hear so much about. This wishing and desiring for something in the future that in reality can never be fully achieved is psychology lesson 101, but it is far too often forgotten when applied to positive thinking.

We think we want ease, comfort and joy. But true meaning in life, truth growth, true purpose lies behind the pain and the struggle. You have to lose something in order to gain something better. And, without the pain of loss or potential loss, it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all.

But current thinking has meant that our aversion to pain and struggle is so strongly engrained in us, it is now limiting our potential to learn and grow. We grow resilience by learning how to live with our insecurities and our unpleasant feelings, not by believing we and the world should be perfectly happy at all times.

Our culture of desperately wanting to feel good all the time is making us fragile and weak.

A Perfectly Positive World Doesn't Exist

The perfect world we imagine doesn't exist. We are likely to never find ourselves in this unrealistic picture we painted, of the tropical island and the peace that comes with it. Not because it isn’t possible, but because what happens after that. This imagined dream life is essentially just a mental snapshot in time.

There will always be another struggle to face, more pain to endure, further hurdles to climb over. No amount of visualisation or fantasy dreaming will ignore this harsh truth of life.

This constant act of believing there is better elsewhere, that you will magically be more positive in the next time you encounter a hardship in the future means you miss out on everything that is great right now.

What is True Positivity

So hopefully you are on the same page as me- and believe that maybe we do have everything about positivity all wrong. I propose a new way of thinking about positivity.

True positivity is to act despite everything. To move forwards even if there are hardships. To calmly acknowledge the pain even when it hurts. The solution is not sugar-coating it, ignoring it, covering it up, wishfully occupying our minds with any other thought we can. In fact, it is to embrace the situation as it is.

But it is also appreciating that this seemingly negative moment is actually creating meaning, creating a moment for growth, creating a moment for something genuinely better. We should pay more attention to that in the grand landscape of life; that this difficult moment will lead to a better moment.

True positivity is not about transforming a supposed negative moment into a better one, it is to act knowing that it will lead to a better one.