Name: Smile or Die
Rating: 3.6 (80 reviews)
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

What’s in it for me? Discover the drawbacks of positive thinking.

It’s natural to worry. Yet our society is overly concerned that persistent worrying will damage our health or keep us from fulfilling our true potential.

As a result, we feel obliged to be cheery and optimistic. “Lighten up!” your friends might say.

But why did we as a society become so obsessed with positivity? How did we come to believe that everyone can achieve (almost) anything? Are we really better off in the pursuit of happiness?

These blinks help shed light on America’s obsession with positive thinking and the negative aspects of always trying to “be happy.”

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

how positive thinking played into the hands of the 9/11 terrorists;
why a bestselling author says that negative thinking causes tsunamis; and
why human evolution favors pessimists.

The United States today is a land of “positive thinking,” but early settlers were far more pessimistic.

Let’s say God has already determined whether you’re going to heaven or hell, and there’s nothing you can do to about it. If you look deep within yourself, or catch yourself thinking sinful thoughts or acting lazily, you’ll just confirm what you already knew: that you’re doomed.

That’s what early European settlers to America, adherents to Calvinism, believed. Calvinism is a strict, frugal form of Protestantism that stresses the importance of labor and frowns upon leisure, frivolity and excess.

Reacting to their religion’s extremist beliefs, many children raised in Calvinist households eventually rebel, preferring a less forbidding God and developing new, more accepting spiritual attitudes.

Take Mary Baker Eddy, for example. The daughter of strict Calvinists, her spiritual writings helped shaped the New Thought school in nineteenth-century America.

New Thought was a philosophical movement that taught that God’s loving spirit lives within all people. Believers felt that anyone could overcome suffering, even physical illness, by thinking “divine” or positive thoughts.

This marked the beginning of what we now call positive thinking, or the idea that every person is in charge of his or her fate. This mind-set went on to transform America into a place of boundless optimism and opportunity.

Just like Calvinism, New Thought stressed self-analysis, but through a different lens. Positive thinking encourages a person to believe that things can always get better, an assumption that makes one think she can influence fate.

In other words, such an ideology promotes the idea that anyone can do anything as long as they try hard enough.

Since then, a cult of positive thinking has spread and grown to become a national ideology: the idea that every American has the opportunity to succeed.

But there’s a major problem with such logic. If people believe that it’s up to them to change fate, then they’ll hold themselves accountable for everything that happens to them.

And that’s precisely what has happened in America.

Plenty of people subscribe to the “prosperity gospel,” believing that Jesus wants you to be rich, too.

Positive thinking today has become a prominent ideology in American culture at large, touching everything from people’s personal lives to the workplace. It has even taken hold in places of worship.

Many churches in America today have stopped preaching about the weight of sin, guilt and suffering, telling congregations instead that God wants Christians to maintain a positive attitude. What’s more, these churches hold that God will directly help believers succeed and get rich, too.

Positive thinking has become a profitable business, and corporations benefit the most.

Let’s say your friend, an intelligent, hardworking and driven black man, has been passed over for promotion for the fifth year running.

What advice do you offer him? Would you tell him to file a discrimination complaint with human resources, or seek motivational coaching?

Some people claim positive thinking has health benefits, but science does little to support this theory.

Before advances in science, many people believed in magic, witch doctors and other spirits to keep a body healthy. Today, of course, modern society is far more rational. Or is it?

Many health experts even today claim that positive thinking is good for your health. Yet such arguments are seriously flawed.

Positive thinking can turn quickly into delusional and potentially dangerous blind optimism.

While the “cult” of positive thinking has its issues, is it so bad to remain optimistic?

Mainstream culture shuns skeptics and pessimists; nobody wants to be a “downer.” But by insisting that everything will be fine because we believe it will, we’re denying reality.

Key ideas in Smile or Die