Social media is spreading 'toxic positivity'
glamourmagazine.co.uk
glamourmagazine.co.uk
My kids are hard to deal with. I honestly don't know how she does it. I have to remind her of that when she gets mad at herself for having started a business that failed quickly, and other things that haven't worked out.
Nothing wrong with being an ambitious mom but you need to pick the right support group and it's probably not instagram.
Though sometimes it feels that if you are not working at one of the FAANGs making $400k/year that you are a total loser.
I suspect there's a deeper lesson about what we permit to be the bases for our self-esteems, and what we see as our proper calling in life.
Then I consider the conversations that we have. He's always having to learn something new (not exploratory learn, but forced to learn due to someone with clout shoehorning some ill-fitting tech into the project) or rewrite a steaming pile of crap left by someone who thought they had all the answers. He works with greener tools and tech stacks, and sometimes he gets to write kick ass proofs-of-concept. Yet he always feels like it's time to look for another job after about a year.
I have a stable job where I'm appreciated. It's not perfect. I absolutely have my complaints, but I know that a fair share of those complaints are shallow gripes. My tech stack is a bit more mature, but it's modern enough that I can keep pace in discussion. I put in my 40 hours, and I'm done. I put in time for vacation, and management just says, "Alright, have fun."
When I stop to think about our ever diverging career paths, I always realize that his career is not the type that I want.
That's the socially acceptable thing to brag about, but it's absolutely not "everyone" here. A lot of people downplay it if they don't fit that narrative.
But it's kind of a skin deep thing. HN is vastly more diverse than that.
It's a "vocal minority" because this is the virtual water cooler for Y Combinator. They aren't even trying to brag in such cases. They are just trying to make their life work.
Want to impress me? Continue to make $400k a year whilst giving everything you do away for free. Otherwise you are merely exploiting the workers and making things worse for everyone, and the more astonishing your 'score' at capitalism the worse you are :D
For all that folks like that spout on about 'making the world a better place', often that means 'cashing out on a software patent for an obscure relational database interfacing protocol'… very better, much wow. That really did a lot, and was unequivocally helpful to humanity ;P :)
To the extent each of those companies is working against the public interest (which you can decide for yourself or debate with someone), their employees are all traitors against the people. And buying a traitor always costs a lot of money. Even Judas got 30 pieces of silver. (And even if that story is a work of fiction, that detail is still a masterful touch, no?)
So maybe you have less money, but maybe you're also slightly less fucked-up inside, less cut-off from yourself, less prone to attack people for trivial reasons, and less plagued by thought patterns cluttered with convoluted self-justifications. Think about it and... [silly comment about anticipated downvotes redacted]
30 silver pieces actually wasn’t much money. These are commonly thought to refer to a silver shekel. If so, it’d be 30x11.4g or 342g of silver total, about $164 at today’s prices.
30 shekels was also the price of a slave according to Exodus 21:32. So, the fact that the Pharisees paid Judas only the price of a slave shows their immense disrespect for the Christ.
[0] Sorry for the reddit link, but https://www.reddit.com/r/antiMLM is instructive on this score
A "Salesperson" attitude is great when talking to the public or customers, but when your employees hear one thing from you and see the opposite happening, it doesn't exactly lend you credibility.
Fortunately, where I work now the leadership is much more objectively-minded. It probably helps we're building enterprise products and not pushing social-media hype.
The spectrum is 'true', 'optimistic', 'possibly true', 'not quite', 'probably lying', 'lying', 'lying to themselves'. During any company meeting I would keep a mental tally of how each statement measured up and used that to decide when I should leave.
In my twenties, I concluded that most people lying to me were actually lying to themselves. They weren't trying to make my life harder or deceive me per se. It was simply not possible to state the truth to someone else and keep lying to themselves.
It made social BS vastly easier for me to cope with.
Perhaps one of the greatest sinners in this regard actively profiting from content that leads to covetousness, jealousy, etc. leading to mental health issues and what not.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-to-keep-your-internet-hi...
(Actually a good article)
I disagree with the writer of the article about how important positive thinking is. I believe the gap is in how we try to help people become more positive: a walk and letting people vent a bit is probably far superior to informing them that they should think positively, and will more quickly lead to that resilience that, I think, improves quality of life.
For some people, it can be easy to be happy, and letting people know that their negative feelings have a good reason for existing, I imagine, is cathartic. Teaching people how to have more emotional resilience would probably also be valuable.
> FROMM: I mean by that, that our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality - or as one says sometimes, our "personality package" - for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual worker. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But, what you might call the "symbol pushers" - that is to say, all of the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better or nicer word - manipulate men and signs and words. All those today have not only to sell their service, but in the bargain, they have to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
-- Erich Fromm, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from...
There is no science (at least none that I know of) that indicates that someone telling you this fact helps you get out of this mode of being.
Therein lies the rub.
With that said, I have a friend who is in a depression rut. He hates his job but believes any other job will be just as bad (he's definitely wrong), and seems to refuse to take steps to improve his situation, because his negativity keeps him from taking action.
So ultimately its just a balance.
eg Billy McFarland, Elizabeth Holmes...
Being happy won't stop your house from burning down. It's fine to acknowledge that your house is burning down. What you can't do is sit on the floor and cry about it. You have to believe you can handle the situation. By getting out, getting the fire department, etc.
Optimism is the belief that no matter what happens, you can handle it. Not that everything is good. Optimism is a "short memory".
> So many people are wearing this Zara blouse on Instagram right now
> All your favourite Instagrammers are wearing this high street range right now
It's as if they're waiting for readers to notice the belabored joke.
Both phenomena taken together create this negative outlook, "the world sucks and I personally suck". But this negativity is also what drives engagement, so there's no incentive to stop it - not in works of fiction, and not in social media.
"...Because Otherness is disappearing, we live in a time that is poor in negativity. And so, the neuronal illnesses of the twenty-first century follow a dialectic: not the dialectic of negativity, but that of positivity. They are pathological conditions deriving from an excess of positivity."
http://theorytuesdays.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Han_Bur...
It's easy to overdo it, though. Negative people are draining.
As the workforce has changed, with more hiring from "high power distance" countries, there are more "yes men" enthusiastically agreeing to anything that any incompetent executive wants.
Of course, the executives like this, and promote those who are "easy to get along with" and who are happy to "implement their vision". But I think history will show that this is one of the things which has contributed to the culture decline in Silicon Valley - from producing useful products to producing maximum profit regardless of any contribution to society. Right now, for example, I'm at yet another company with several incompetent managers who are supported by technical "yes men". They know that we are making idiotic technical decisions, but they would never openly disagree.
We are herd animals. Feelings and attitudes are contagious. If you want to lead, you should always ask: “Does sharing this help the herd?”
Be positive. It is encouraging and inspiring. Don’t be dishonest with your positivity.
Eventually these little hits of positivity aren’t strong enough and some seek out expensive coaching services that give you much larger dosages of the same shit while you pretend to work through your problems.
It sounds harsh, but there are so many counter productive behaviors people engage in while meaning well with regard to mental health issues on social media. One I see often is that people are effectively embracing catastrophizing as some sort of rebellious act of defiant need for other people to acknowledge their distorted view of reality.
Don't get me wrong either. I'm not looking at this from an outsider perspective. I've been there. I've been dealing with on and off depression and anxiety for the past several years. I've managed to claw myself out of it, but am able to accept that how I acted while there was not healthy for me. I have to take full responsibility for my behaviors and the bridges I've burnt.
All that being said, this article reads like someone waist deep in the throes of "Acknowledge my depressed reality!"
Her Facebook life looked perfect. How social media masks mental illness (2015)
-- Bettina Wegner, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZpIjg0UhxE
Yes, I know the sky is rainy grey today. It does nothing for either of us if you point that out for the fifteenth time. On the other hand, if you compare the sky to a giant peeing elephant, then we're now engaged intellectually at least a little bit.
Personally, I don't complain unless I can come up with an interesting way to spin my complaint.