The Perils of Positive Thinking | Hacker News Reader

The Perils of Positive Thinking

unlimitedmagazine.com

39 pointsphilk20 comments

I think the title is a bit misplaced. The point is not that positive thinking is bad, but that you will likely be happier focusing on your relationship with others and accepting yourself as you are, as opposed to trying to make yourself "better". The title is linkbait that only vaguely references the material in the article.

Still, I thought the article pretty good. A key insight was a quote by Dr. Neel Burton:

"In traditional cultures, people lived in very close knit communities. They knew each other, and they didn’t really focus on themselves so much. The focus on life was on the survival community and not on their own individuality. Modern society is very different from that. There’s a huge emphasis on me; my goals, my life, my death. That puts a lot of pressure on people, and it’s not the kind of pressure that we’re evolved to cope with. That’s the source of many of our problems."

I'd love to see some evidence for that quote. This assertion paints individualism as a social rather than biological construct, and it's not obvious to me that this is true.

The quote is part of a larger work (The Art of Failure: An Anti Self-Help Guide); I'd bet that it's addressed with more depth there.

Even still, there are many pieces of evidence that seem to suggest social rather than individualist roots. We (meaning normal, functional human beings) all have the ability from a young age to sympathize with others. We have a strong desire to be part of a group. We feel guilt when we do something socially wrong. Intimate relationships release endorphins that give us pleasure. Language itself is only necessary in a strongly social species.

Honestly, I can't fathom human society as it is today beginning from small, isolated groups of people who are strong individualists. Only a select few of us can survive happily by ourselves, and I suspect that's been true for millennia. Our ability to cooperate and evolve socially, as opposed to biologically, is what has allowed us to become the most dominant species on Earth.

Looking at primitive society's that survived into the modern day paints a vary different picture. Cooperation won in the end, but primitive society where extremely violent.

For example the earliest traders slid between bandits and merchants largely based on how strong you where. Or consider traditional views on corporal punishment. Violently beating ones family members was considered normal and proper let alone what society at large would do to people.

So in summary: 30th birthday + regret + hangover = pompous treatise on the state of the American psyche from a self righteous Canadian?

How on earth did this get on the front page.

My best guess is that some people are using the upvote as a bookmark for later reading. I sometimes do this as well, ashamedly.

HN probably needs to separate the upvote and the bookmark features.

A lot of HNers are also about 30, have some regret, and some have a hangover?

You see this tendency creeping into larger Christian churches more and more. If you can stop swearing, donate more money, avoid sex outside marriage, and generally focus on your own purity, you'll be happy and enjoy rewards in heaven. It's perfect for mega-churches and those that aspire to be mega-churches because they don't have to figure out how to create a meaningful community out of 5000 attendees. Each attendee is his/her own congregation, perhaps with a "buddy" to help enforce self-discipline.

> Each attendee is his/her own congregation, perhaps with a "buddy" to help enforce self-discipline.

There should be a new fad : Agile 'life'. Work with a partner. Always run tests by validating that what you are doing is aligned with the official "Christian" doctrine.

You mean AA?

Not sure if you needed the sarcasm tag, but the one-on-one discipleship, accountability group, and small group study have been part of Christianity since Jesus gathered his fishermen.

Some religions, like LDS, make these issues official in the sense you are talking about. Eg, a bishop must judge your purity and sign a form before you can do certain religious rites at the temple. I have not seen this in my Protestant experience, and I would be sad to hear about it.

I attend a somewhat large church. I hesitate to call it a megachurch, because it is not focused on production values and the prosperity gospel. But there are four services every week.

There is a problem for every large church in how to shrink the church you regularly interact with to an appropriate size. My church tends to stratify classes and outside groups by stage of life (think the seven ages of man) and geographical barea. There are still opportunities to mix, but the main point is to give church more continuity.

I worry that one-on-one discipleship and small group study can become the be-all and end-all. I don't recall anything in the bible that says, "Get yourself together before you help others," but it seems like that's the main focus of many churches. I guess it's a matter of order... Do you believe you can improve your members and in doing so change the world? Or do you work to change the world and in doing so improve your members?

There is a fair amount of stuff in Paul's first letter to Timothy that talks about who should be leaders in the church, as in deacons or elders. They should be people above reproach and so on.

You can interpret this directive or similar to mean that only the oh-so-holy are the public face of the church. The forgiveness of Peter at the end of John's gospel might be another case. I don't think it's a good interpretation, but it's not so far from the truth.

It could really depend on the group and the church. At least for me, the two things most likely to launch me into ministry (used broadly) are discipleship and small groups.

And it could depend on the church's stance toward the culture and the world. There are many possible positions, as in Niebuhr's "Christ and Culture". If you believe the pop culture is full of filth and you are called to be outside of it, you will get a very different sense of the church's mission toward non-Christian people, or even toward Christians who are closer to the pop culture.

(edit: took an extra h out of Niebuhr)

I love the irony in these lines:

"The answer, Burton believes, lies in the fact that the average self-improvement treatise encourages the belief that personal happiness is the product of sculpted abs, nicer clothes, or more personal wealth. Those are dangerous distractions, he argues, from the true source of human happiness, our relationships with others."

I explored this in a blog post that summarized a research article written by one James Montier:

http://thirtytwothousanddays.com/blog/2010/05/the-things-tha...

I wrote the following:

1. Exercise, connect with friends, have sex, sleep, and be grateful. A lot. Seriously, do all of these things as much as you can! (although perhaps not all at the same time :) )

2. Find work that you love and are good at, or are able to become good at. (This will almost certainly be aligned in some way with your inner purpose.)

3. Live in and enjoy the moment, and make nothing a means to an end. (A regular practice of meditation can you help do this.)

4. Take responsibility for your life, and set achievable goals.

5. Don’t worry too much about getting rich - more income and wealth don’t greatly increase your happiness level, once you have reached a basic level of comfort appropriate to the community around you.

None of it was really "OH MY GOD, I DIDN'T KNOW THAT!" kind of stuff... but the reminder is useful sometimes when doing strategic life planning.

The original paper was found here [pdf] http://www.trendfollowing.com/whitepaper/happiness.pdf

Some people need to engage in self-improvement before they can have friends and lots of sex.

Unfortunately, the apparent conclusion of this piece is as dangerous as the position it opposes.

Yes, we should embrace our imperfections. But not blindly. Doing so makes us fat and lazy, while indeed trying to "bench press them out of existence" makes us gaunt and workaholic.

I think the old cross-stitch on the wall in my parents' house got it right: we need "the courage to change the things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference."

There is no sense of competition anymore in this society, with yourself or others. Everyone just wants to blend into to previously considered notions of normality.

Moreover I believe that the reason for most peoples disdain for life stems from this in that life is utterly boring today because for most Americans anyway there is absolutely no risk of failure. Here you can just coast by and live a normal life.

it was also a reflection of the realization on my part that my thirties would be less about bravely exploring new horizons and more about repairing the damage that I’d done in my twenties. - It is so common, so usual. It is called the crisis of the middle age. And yes, it is time when you come to realize that these strange world 'self-help' and 'self-improvement' (diet, gym, regime) now are somehow related to you.

I have very simple visualization for such moment. Imagine an 'U' turned upside down, or a classic bell curve. Before 30 you're going up and looking up, and see something like a blue sky or other positive illusion. After crossing the ridge, you're starting to go down, but you're looking back and up, trying to push out from consciousness what you just saw ahead. All those activities are mostly about supporting an illusion of remaining at the highest point.

For some people (it depends of your culture) it could be a cross, and that is how they come to realize why religion exist. They just didn't saw it from the opposite side.

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