"... Americans did not start out as deluded optimists. The original ethos, at least of white Protestant settlers and their descendants, was a grim Calvinism that offered wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at all. You might work hard and still fail; ..."
Sounds familiar.
It's also BS. The population and economic centers of colonial America were always Pennsylvania and Virginia. New England was a side show. How we got this popular genesis legend about the Pilgrims is a mystery to me.
with all these positive and negative thinkings ... will they converge to ZERO thinking?
I've seen the observation that antidepressant usage is now so common in the professional classes that it has probably affected important organizational decisions. In a meeting of management level types as many as a fifth of them are likely to be on drugs!