Positive Thinking is Overrated

Positive thinking is perhaps the most popular mantra of our century. The idea is rather simple; we should only allow positive thoughts and feelings to enter our reality and actively ignore, suppress or avoid negative ones.

Try to stay positive though when you are diagnosed with cancer or when a war breaks up. Maintaining a constant positive attitude in one’s life is a modern delusion, carefully marketed to exploit those who are most vulnerable to life’s hurdles.

You Are Not Your Thoughts

Humans are just another species on this planet. We are not by any means special. Our thoughts are the result of neurons firing electrical signals as a response to environmental stimuli. Positive thinking advocates try to give a deeper meaning to this process in order to supporttheir theories but fail to present any convincing evidence.

The process of electrical signaling takes place in plants and animals alike in order for them to remains alive. We are not our thoughts. We are the result of a complicated interaction between nature and our physiology. Sometimes, some of us who happen to think about positive thoughts in respect to some random natural events, get a bit luckier in life. This is not a result of positive thinking but of statistical variation.

Statistics Laugh At Positivity

Most people on this planet have no food, water and shelter on a daily basis. It is extremely arrogant (and naive) to assume that billions of people are thinking “wrong” while the positive thinker has found the answer. 16.000 children dying every day from hunger. Having positive thoughts about finding food in a desolate and violent environment cannot magically feed anyone. Humans are largely the product of their respective environment. Westerners who advocate positive thinking are mostly the outcome of a comfortable and healthy environment. The more welcoming one’s environment is, the more likely success will occur.

Titles such as “10 things you should do in order to be as successful” are the new snake oil infestations taking over the internet. A self proclaimed positive thinker might follow advice and indeed become successful within a couple of years in their particular endeavour. He might even open a “spiritualist” studio, write his own book or open a Steemit account to talk about how awesome positivity is. Thing is, the people who do this are statistically the exception to the rule, not the rule. It is as absurd to a lottery ticket winner preaching to everybody else about their successful system in picking random numbers.

The vast majority of people will fail in their positive thinking endeavour—not because they didn’t do it right, not because they didn’t have perseverance in their actions but simply because in life only a few can win. All humans are passionate with at least one thing in their life. Nonetheless, the vast majority sees their dreams wither away when unforeseen circumstances take place. Most of us work as best as we can but life can throw many challenges; with a different weight to each and every one of us.

You Can’t Beat Randomness

Disease, death, misfortune, friends, connections, inheritance, ethnicity or even our very own random set of genes, all play a distinct role in our success. One simple handshake can change everything. One simple fortunate accident in our work can transform one’s life forever. The opposite is also true. One mistake can destroy an individual whether that is a career mistake or a simple random event. The world is a vastly random place and you only realise it once it bitchslaps you really hard leaving you wondering “why me?”

A person can do everything right and still not become successful. This is a statistical reality observed in every single path of life. Observing the end result of an event and then justifying it with seaming causality, is a logical fallacy. Positive thinkers are the biggest victims of post-hoc fallacies. If something goes well it is because of their own effort. If something goes wrong it is because of their bad luck. How convenient, huh?

 

Where Are All The Losers?

We rarely hear about people failing in life—and if we do, we rarely notice. We do not see failures being advertised because as human beings we make sure to promote only success. Steve Jobs, one of the most prolific and cherished positive thinkers, was more or less a stubborn asshole that enjoyed huge success. Many people took by heart his stance as a guide to success and they just ended up being average asshole employers. Upon facing his death, Steve even refused chemotherapy, adhering to his own blind beliefs about alternative therapies and positive energy. All the positive energy and money in the world still weren’t enough when he came face to face with reality. I wonder how many positive thinkers took a notice of his failing example and objectively evaluated their beliefs.

It makes you wonder. So many hundreds of millions of biographies from succesful people were published, why those reading them haven't become succesful after following the author's example?

If we investigate carefully the rest of high risk takers who didn’t make it we observe a rather discouraging statistic whether the area concerns business, travel or sports. Most of these people are either dead, broke or severely injured. We never hear or even think about them because of our selective attention. We are extremely naive and superficial when it comes to those who make vs those who don’t. This is also the reason most elderly die alone forgotten from their own children. The only way to get a wider perspective about the factual state of success and selective attention is to experience tragedy ourselves and observe how those around us treat us. Only when we taste our our medicine we become aware of our own fallacies.

The next time you see someone bragging about risks and success remember that millions like him did the exact same thing and out sheer statistical luck didn’t make it. The amount of pioneers and successful people you observe around you are what you would expect in a statistical normal distribution.

Every single entrepreneur I have met so far, at some point, gave an opening speech on how they made it through difficulties—as if anybody has ever stood up and said that had everything spoon fed to them. Nobody talks about statistical distributions or that one special lucky moment in their life that gave them a snowball effect to success. We tend to undermine the small things that made it all happen—the moment that really gave us the advantage. Instead, when we make it, we give too much emphasis on our “hard work” —as if everybody else's efforts are so insignificant in respect to ours.

The “Good”, The “Bad” & The Subjective

Negative or positive thinking have nothing to do with “good” or “bad”. This particularly narrative is not only erroneous but tremendously naive. *Good* and *bad* are subjective terms. For example in WW2, Jews lied about their ethnic identity in order to escape from the Nazis—even though lying is considered a sin in Jewish culture. From the Jews’ part this was justified. For the Nazis’ it was unacceptable, since Jews were considered to be the enemy. Both the Nazi’s and the Jews believed in the same God, had similar views about the ethics of lying but ended up evaluating the situation differently for obvious reasons. Everything else in life plays much the same way whether we talk about business, love or war.

The only way something can be perceived as bad, good, positive or negative is if we convince those around us to believe it is so. Positivity in particular invests tremendously in the subjective perception of positive thinking. It purposely ignores how it can be perceived vastly different from different parties at different situations. Nonetheless the situation quickly corrects itself and the positive thinker is brought back to reality after a harsh fall from cloud no.9. Like Ayn Rand said, “You can avoid reality but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality”.

A modern Invention

The positive thinking movement has been popularised and adopted over the last few decades mainly by the western world. It is a modern invention and in a way it rebrands traditional notions of spiritual beliefs. When one wants something to happen, one prays to their God and power is granted. With the positive thinking movement the power of the cosmos (or God) is furthermore channeled through the individual making them able to bend the world at their own will. This produces an egocentric superficialism.

Now, I am not saying that believing in oneself is in any way bad. This is actually the only true power one can summon. Assuming though that one’s power is greater than the sum of billions of people, events, animals and natural forces around them is naive and dangerous. Such colossal arrogance creates an entitled stagnant society that avoids facing its own problems, waiting for everything to manifest in some magical way. Evidently, this is exactly what we are seeing around us.

Best seller books such as “The Secret” proclaim that the entire universe can be bend down to one’s will if one wants it bad enough. Of course this would apply equally to individuals like Gandhi and Hitler but most people tend to think of Gandhi's positive thinking rather than of Hitler’s due to native superficial attention. People forget that in 1000 years time people will remember revolutionaries (and mass murderers) like Hitler, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great rather than Nikola Tesla or Madam Curie. One can even do a personal experiment. Who is remembered today most from most people? Isaac Newton or Jack the Ripper? If a positive thinker is to accept the positive power of positive thinking one has to at least accept the negative effects. Thankfully people like Alexander Fleming and Stalin arose equally out sequential random events and not because of their “positive thinking.”

 

The America-Fuck-Yeah Mentality

Life demands a rite of passage and this is accepted in almost all cultures in one degree or another. The Japanese and British accept to be a little depressed. The Russians see things almost always negatively as they consider this stance to be more responsible. The French picture the world almost always melancholically.

The perverse positive thinking movement took over the world after the US was left all powerful after successfully screwing over both sides of WWII. Rammstein's song We are living in America captures the narrative that followed perfectly.

After the US domination was established, the rest of the world went insane chasing the marketed “American Dream”, bowing to the superficial success of one’s war endeavours. Many Americans having the plate served to them started advertising their presumed success as “positive thinking”. Most of the world was in ruins and the American propaganda was taking over the losers. Similar to a situation where prospective girlfriend watch a street fight, most people fell in love with the winner, the bad but succesful boy. The US culture spread around the world like herpes. Food, TV, clothes and most importantly ideas such as positive thinking took over every single country in no time.

The end result was the creation of a spoiled Baby Boomers generation that later gave birth to Millennials. Unlike the US local phenomenon of baby boomers, the millennials mentality spread across borders. Hollywood delusions infected the planet with increased positivity, blinding them about almost everything else going on around them. This is how we got to a generation today sitting on their asses doing absolutely nothing, waiting for the positive thinking to do the miracle.

Today, many positive thinkers who do become successful out of hard work and lots of luck are no less delusional. They reinforce the positive thinking movement to the rest by having the exception to the rule, themselves, as an example. None of them would dare to mention that most of their success is due to their country's war mongering over the last two centuries or as we mentioned before their luck. The american capital, and in a greater extent the western world, has been powered by a very bloody colonialism that almost everybody seems to forget. So much for “positive thinking” when 75% of the people on this planet do not have the very basics to live day by day—while we get to wear $1 t-shirts sewed from slave camps in China. [Now I am not saying this necessarily bad since they do have a job afterall and they are not dying of starvation. The important thing though here is to note how an entire planet were elevated to “positive thinkers” by ignoring how they got there to begin with.]

Not Walking The Talk

Positive thinking has created a generation of thinkers and talkers, not doers. Spiritualists, sitting on their asses “ooommming” their troubles away, eating their “organic” snake oil and complaining about "the economy" when we are all living in the best time of human history. More and more are living with their parents because they are too busy in between video games and college tourism. Everybody feels entitled to have a job after college as if someone is obliged to fulfill their fantasy. Rarely people study a major based on demand and supply—the real world. They chase their dreams through “positive thinking” not with hard work and analytical decision making. Too bad for most, the world does not run on dreams but harsh reality.

The delusion went so far that people today carefully set up entire experiences on social media to justify their own delusions. Each and every one observes the other’s mirage and all get equally miserable. This is perhaps the most depressing mass circle-jerking in the entire history of humankind.

The Positive Thinking Exploiters

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book 'Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America' exposes the whole positive thinking shenanigan, an 11 billion dollar industry rounded up by self-proclaimed self-help gurus, spiritual leaders and every single kind of charlatan that pushes positive thinking at all costs.

Although these “gurus” do not have any scientific evidence to back up their claims they paraphrase studies that do demonstrate that positive thinking might allow someone (under certain circumstances) to live longer. They neglect the fact that hard work and resilience are the main reasons people become happy. Gurus that defend the positive thinking movement believe that repeating certain words day in day out reinforce a particular goal. The truth is far worse. As a recent scientific study demonstrates, repeating the same mantra over and over again might actually leave a low-self-esteemed individual feeling much worse than before.
 

The Power of Negative Thinking

After a serious of studies, Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor found out that defensive pessimists outperformed strategic optimists. The reason is rather simple. Defensive pessimists are more anxious and aware of their environment calculating every possible scenario. Strategic optimists on the other hand only focus on a positive outcome, ignoring the unexpected challenges that will eventually come their way.

“Negative” thinking, on the other hand, provides strength because one can foresee what is ahead. When we are prepared about the negative we can better visualise the positive. This has always been the de-facto stance for all of us. Successful people like Edgar Alan Poe, Salvador Dali, Frida Carlo, Charles Bukowski, Vincent Van Gogh and innumerable others focused almost their entirety of their lives on negative, bleak thinking and pessimism and yet they emerged successful. Negativity is not as negative as one would like to think.

Life is not about chasing all the goodies advertised in our favourite tv shows, books or blogs from people of the likes of “How to be awesome like me”. Life is about struggle and through that hardship and suffering we are be able to find joy and happiness. Light is defined by darkness, pain is defined by joy. Positive thinking negates the nature of life as an enriched experience because it focuses on itself to define its existence.

Negative thinking is the default state of our perception because the world, beyond our comfy western life with daily food, clean water and stable shelter requires massive amounts of effort just to stay alive. Glorifying positivity into a wishful thinking absurdity creates a veil of ignorance that affects negatively every single person on this planet that falls outside our narrow perception—those who suffer the most under our western country’s perpetual exploitation.

Unlike positivists, negative thinkers set lower standards, are more humble and thus they are able to work their way up. Positive thinkers after a first initial disappointment see their motivation drop tremendously. A study discovered that encouragement for a specific task can act as a double-sword and discourage people with low-self esteem. Self encouragement of positivists about a task such as saying “I will” also underperformed negative thinkers who asked “Will I?”

In another study researchers found out that those who fantasized about positive outcomes found themselves discouraged from their future achievements. Keith Hmieleski and Robert Baron also showed in their study that enterpreneurs who were highly optimistic brought in less revenue from those who were thinking about all possible outcomes and considered “negative” by their peers. Another disturbing finding demonstrated that highly optimistic CEOs put their companies in more debt and endanger people’s livelihood. I wonder how many of those put that in their biographies...

One would assume that a perfectly balanced, sweet spot between high optimism and high negativism can be attained but this would be a middle ground logical fallacy. Being a negative thinker is not as bad as it sounds. Negative thinking is something nature empowered us with in order to be aware of our surroundings. It serves as a protective instinct.

There is no Measure for Happiness

Every single study and formula that ever came out about happiness are subjective statement of one’s given mood at a specific time. Happiness is like a butterfly we chase and when we do catch it we are only left with the reward of the pursuit. Even for people who follow formulas for happiness and actually feel better, it can only last that long. The placebo effect and not positive thinking is the culprit.

Unhappiness Is inevitable and this is why everyone is trying constantly to force happiness through positive thinking. Most people forget that anxiety and negative thinking only become poisonous when one tries to avoid them. The problem cannot go away with just positive though and in fact it comes back to bite harder. This is how we have created a western civilisation waving proudly the flag of positivity, while at the same time keep popping happy pills like mentos. Obviously something is not working as envisioned in the positive thinking camp. Like an ancient eastern saying goes “When you pray, move your feet”.

Final Word

Negative thinking is superior because it assumes all the possible results in a much more statistically accurate way. “Bad” things are more likely to happen in any given environment because the world is massively chaotic with trillions of events taking place around us. Positive events are a handful of circumstances that everybody chases, such as money, good opportunities and beauty. These positive things are rare due to the way the market has allocated value to them over long periods of time. Happiness and positivity are craved so much because they have a high value due to their rarity. Everybody can be positive thinkers, not everybody can share the rewards no matter how hard they try.

Negative thinking accepts reality. It heightens the senses and urges the person to take action. Being depressed, stressful or even unhappy is not necessarily bad. It elevates our existence and adds to what it means to be human. It might not allow us to be happy (what is happiness, anyway?) but it can teach us a little something about ourselves. The next time you watch a bleak, dark tv series like Mr Robot or Breaking Bad and you are left with a sense of fulfillment, you will understand exactly what I mean.