Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
But the most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work—the constant internal work of self-monitoring.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
America has historically offered space for all sorts of sects, cults, faith healers, and purveyors of snake oil, and those that are profitable, like positive thinking, tend to flourish.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
Everyone in the corporate world, it seems, is in danger of falling into a nonproductive funk unless continually propped up by fresh doses of motivational adrenaline.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
When the gurus advise dropping “negative” people, they are also issuing a warning: smile and be agreeable, go with the flow—or prepare to be ostracized.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
There seems to be an evolutionary paradox at work here: human survival in the face of multiple threats depended on our ability to live in groups, but the imperative of maintaining group cohesion can sometimes override realism and common sense, making us hesitate to challenge the consensus or be the bearer of bad news.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
Today, hardly anyone needs to be reminded of the importance of interpersonal skills. Most of us work with people, on people, and around people. We have become the emotional wallpaper in other people’s lives, less individuals with our own quirks and needs than dependable sources of smiles and optimism.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
if early capitalism was inhospitable to positive thinking, “late” capitalism, or consumer capitalism, is far more congenial, depending as it does on the individual’s hunger for more and the firm’s imperative of growth.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
You might not be saved yourself, but you were part of a social entity set apart by its rigorous spiritual discipline—and set above all those who were unclean, untamed, and unchurched.