Fuck Your Good Vibes
Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash
Times are hard and the world feels like it’s on fire. Silver linings are hard to come by and joy is in short supply. Hopelessness, disengagement, anger, and apathy have taken hold and are making it difficult to find kindness, beauty, and hope. And yet, each client session starts with the same polite exchange: “How has the week been?” And, almost to a client, I receive the same response: “I’m good/I’m fine/You know, could be worse.”
I get it, of course. Most of us engage in this daily social convention of polite but disingenuous call and response, so it is hard to drop in the therapy room. But when I push clients to share honestly what they are feeling, the shame of sharing even a whiff of “negativity” is clear. “I don’t want to be negative/I know I should be grateful/There’s no point in focusing on it” leap out because, at some point in the past, their genuine expression of dis-ease was met with some form of platitude (“It’ll pass”), brush off (“You’ll be fine”), invalidation (“It’s not that bad”), or criticism (“You should be grateful for what you have”). Nothing to me encapsulates our cultural inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the harsher emotional realities of life more than the now commercially overused, Instagram-appealing phrase “Good Vibes Only,” which screams at you from t-shirts, travel mugs, gold-foiled pillows, inspirational wall art, and online dating bios.
I am all for boundaries, but this rebuff strikes me as tone deaf, dismissive, naïve, and selfish. Because the coded message underneath “good vibes only,” and any of the other verbal invalidations I listed above, is: “I don’t have the emotional maturity to acknowledge the highs and lows of life on earth nor the self-confidence to know my own self in the face of someone else’s distress, and so I am going to turn my back on anything that could be construed as a ‘negative vibe’ for fear that I might have to stretch my muscles of empathy and compassion.” Cool. Thanks.
The onus is thus placed on the person wrestling with honest and complex emotions resulting from being a human walking on this earth to either squelch their feelings or to plaster over them. The individuals’ expressions of frustration and grief is quieted by the insistence on painting over their feelings with “gratitude.” I’m not knocking gratitude and gratefulness; these are essential elements for enduring the struggles of existence on earth and cultivating a life of meaning and joy. But I take issue when simply telling someone to be “grateful” is used to deafen the voice of those who are rightly expressing sadness, disappointment, frustration, and pain with the current state of the world.
Turns out I am not alone in my frustration in the “good vibes only” culture and the often anxiety-provoking push toward positivity. Scott Barry Kaufman lays out the case against “toxic positivity” in The Atlantic piece titled The Opposite of Toxic Positivity. Kaufman believes that pushes toward gratitude and positivity without acknowledgement of pain and suffering are incomplete and potentially harmful practices. Kaufman is supported in these beliefs by researcher Richard Emmons who stated “to deny that life has its share of disappointments, frustrations, losses, hurts, setbacks, and sadness would be unrealistic and untenable. Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth.” (Kaufman, 2021) We miss a vital step when we don’t allow ourselves or others to feel the pain of our present situation and create space for acceptance of our reality.
Kaufman goes on to make the case that “the antidote to toxic positivity is ‘tragic optimism,’” which allows for the cultivation of something deeper than simple positivity or “gratitude”. Tragic optimism, as introduced by Viktor Frankl, “involves the search for meaning amid the inevitable tragedies of human existence, something far more practical and realistic during these trying times.” (Kaufman, 2021) Kaufman focused his research on gratitude versus gratefulness and understanding “Gratitude as a fleeting emotion can come and go, but gratefulness, or ‘existential gratitude,’ can pervade your entire life, throughout its ups and downs.” But he suggests that to cultivate ‘existential gratitude’ requires a deeper and more nuanced understanding of ourselves and the world, achieved by focusing on tragic optimism. While “one cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope,” (Frankl, 1984) by allowing for suffering, paradoxically it may seem, we allow contentment and gratitude to show up.
The challenge for all of us then is to allow for expressions of sadness, suffering, despair, anger, and grief while cultivating a new relationship with them through a tragically optimistic lens. In drawing on the work of Paul T.P. Wong, I ask you to consider the following as essential elements to cultivating your own tragically optimistic view of the world:
Accept what is. No amount of willing a situation away will make it disappear, and no amount of shaming ourselves for feeling as we do will make us stop feeling. The struggle in accepting the world and the people in it as they are versus how we would like them to be is real. Acceptance can feel like acquiescence, but it isn’t. Accepting the current reality does not absolve us from our responsibility in trying to create a new reality, in so much as we have control to do so. The wisdom is to learn where our ability to control starts and stops, and perhaps to recognize that until we take a measure of the situation as it is, we cannot figure out how to move forward.
Cultivate empathy. Consider that everyone is struggling with something and may be doing the best they can. That does not necessarily mean people are doing the best as you might interpret “best,” but it may be the best they can do at the time. I am consistently reminded of a brilliant and nuanced version of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice; never assume stupidity when ignorance will suffice; never assume ignorance when forgivable error will suffice; never assume error when information you hadn’t adequately accounted for will suffice.” (rwallace, 2010) Yes, genuine malice is possible and bad actors exist, but consider that they may be the exception and not the rule. Most people are just caught up in their own bullshit and are not actively trying to do something to you personally.
Identify your “why.” As we accept the world and the people in it and recognize where our control starts and stops, it becomes clearer that the one thing we can control is our response to the world (that’s Viktor Frankl’s wisdom, not my own). In the face of hardship, we have a choice. We can choose nihilism or we can cultivate hope by focusing on what makes life meaningful. What is your “why” for getting up every morning? What makes you feel passionate or angry or excited or alive? What do you want to contribute while you have the time? For many of us, during the pandemic, art was a way to reconnect with life.
Sitting at a Beth Orton show last week (yes, that reference does age me but my love for her is pure), watching someone create music both beautiful and meaningful, I was reminded that humans can destroy but they can also create extraordinary beauty. We have the potential to be better, kinder, wiser, and more empathetic, and that brings me hope. And it makes me want to continue to strive to create the world I would like rather than fall into the abyss of what I may fear it can become.
So the next time someone tells you to be positive, feel free to tell them “fuck your good vibes and fuck your ‘positivity.’ I choose tragic optimism.” And then watch the confused look wash across their face. That’s fun for everyone.
Liz
References:
7 Reasons Why the New Normal May Be Good for You. (2021, January 1). International Network on Personal Meaning. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from http://www.meaning.ca/article/7-reasons-why-the-new-normal-may-be-good-for-you/
Frankl, Viktor E. “The Case for a Tragic Optimism” (postscript to Man’s Search for Meaning). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Kaufman, S. B. (2021, August 18). The opposite of toxic positivity. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/08/tragic-optimism-opposite-toxic-positivity/619786/
rwallace. (2010, December 1). I think a more complete translation would be something like [Comment on the online forum post Defecting by Accident – A Flaw Common to Analytical People.] Less Wrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GG2rtBReAm6o3mrtn/defecting-by-accident-a-flaw-common-to-analytical-people?commentId=uJYobM8MLWLpM3cAT