For the majority of people, toxic positivity is a far bigger issue by having things invade their life to the point of having to sell themselves or others as far more positive than necessary, for reasons that do not reflect empirical evidence. Some people noted mass media culture of farming likes and internet points. Job interviews, performances and such are another, where negativity in any way is so taboo individuals now have to learn how to navigate a minefield of "give us criticism but don't you dare give us criticism". Most will even dare scapegoat it under "it's unprofessional to be negative".
The world sucks in a lot of ways. Yes, we don't have to keep rubbing in how much it sucks. No, we don't need to decorate it ad nauseam at every corner. The last bit will eventually explode into a counterculture where everyone berates the overly positive status quo. It already has online, just waiting for counterculture to catch up to corporate.
It seems they are trained to never say no.
I tend to keep things positive, and rely on good team dynamics (I don't like team members competing against each other).
That's not "toxic positivity." It's just common sense. We don't all have to have kum-ba-ya singalongs, but we need to treat each other with respect, and work together. I was a manager for 25 years, and my team seemed to like the environment I fostered.
I think a lot of folks are crippled by cynicism, and that can be just as bad as "toxic anything." It can completely destroy a team. Decent managers can help to defuse that.
Can you share any insights into how it gets defused? I'm a recovering cynic, and so is my manager. Sometimes we get into a feedback loop, which isn't great.
I stressed that we respect each other, and I also managed each as an individual. When there was conflict, I generally looked for common goals, and stressed them. I treated them as family. I made sure they all understood that the company's goals were always foremost to me, but that they came second; even before my own needs. I gave them whatever time they needed for family and/or personal reasons. I supported them through life crises, and had their back.
I also -and this is important- acted as a buffer between my team and my company's rather rapacious HR. This actually got me in trouble, a couple of times, but was really appreciated by my team (and also by some very highly-placed managers, in Japan).
No ridiculous team-building exercises. I used to take my team out for a nice dinner, every holiday season, and my own expense (the company would not cover that kind of thing). This was very much appreciated, and my team did not abuse it. We still get together, once a year (if possible), but these days, it's dutch.
The team stayed together and highly functional, for over 25 years. When they finally rolled it up, the engineer with the least tenure had ten years.
I'm fully expecting a deluge of fairly nasty and abusive posts about this, but that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.
I appreciate you being straightforward with priorities/goals (company’s THEN the individuals’). I think an awful lot of managers fail because they try to act like friends with their team and then get hit by the reality of whats expected of them and it gets real awkward at best.
Rigorous Honesty is critical in my management. I need to be honest with myself, my superiors, my coworkers, and my employees.
It's quite possible to keep things confidential without lying. I've done it for many years.
Another drawback of my style, is the employees become loyal to me, not the company. If I had left, they probably would have lost the whole team, fairly quickly. The company didn't seem to mind that.
Readable’s tone and sentiment tools help you to optimise your content for positivity. Using our sliders, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your language.
So the article is an ad for sentiment analysis and has probably been "optimized" by that tool. Hence the vacuous tone that ironically is an example of toxic positivity itself.
In some cases this can amount to gaslighting, as people will be left wondering whether they're being too negative due to their own flaws.
> invalidate someone's lived experience
...is particularly cringe-inducing. These are code words. This is not how any normal human in the English speaking world has ever spoken prior to exposure to a particular brand of (most often quite expensive) education, and let's be clear--that's the whole point. People train themselves to use this language as a way to demonstrate their membership or desired membership in the current socio-economic elite. It is not really any different from learning to use the "correct" fork at a 19th century dinner party, even to the point where watered-down versions of both trickling into middle class.
So let's say now you've gone and learned these phrases and weaponized your speech in this manner, great on you right? Wrong! You've lost your voice, everything you say is now constrained without the confines of this language and carries connotations set by someone else that overshadow whatever you may wish to express, but more importantly, your speech is now a constant performance. Just as how nourishment was not the point of dinner, what's being discussed is not the point of conversation when using this language. People who talk this way occasionally slip up and deviate slightly and you can hear in their voice how much anxiety this causes them, usually some small nervous joke follows. Crippling anxiety is perhaps the defining trait of these folks, to the point that many many of them, a far higher percentage than you'd expect naturally, are on some kind of anti-anxiety drugs. This risk of saying something that puts you out of step with the tastemakers grows enormously as your investment increases, better to say nothing of substance at all while using lots and lots of this language and drop in as many of these code words as possible.
(While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)
I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding. Invalidating someone's lived experience is the process by which someone more or less says, "that didn't happen to you", or "your interpretation of events that happened to you is wrong." Before we start to find edge cases like "they clearly left the door unlocked and believed it to be locked," no that's not what invalidating lived experiences pertains to. Invalidating lived experience pertains to social knowledge and interpretations usually of harmful events. Or in other words, overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them. Broad categories include, "no, that wasn't racism/sexism/bigotry that you experienced", or "no that really wasn't abusive." You might think of it as a certain kind of gaslighting.
Could there be a better name for it? Maybe? Signifiers are often detached from what they signify- it doesn't matter much to me at this point that this is the case. Let me be clear. I'm not here to discuss that this is or isn't a problem in discourse. Moving from, obtuse wording to, not-actually-a-problem is a kettle logic I don't wish to engage in.
It is a linguistic tactic that attempts to bypass debate through appeal to emotion. "You can't tell me I don't feel this way!" Correct, you feel that way, but your feelings don't magically turn assertions into fact. The objection of "invalidating lived experience" is the notion that one's feeling are facts when they are not. They are subjective impressions unsuitable as the sole grounds for action.
The mechanism behind invalidating lived experience is fundamentally a reality construction mechanism. It's goal is to construct a reality, namely by the person doing the invalidating. The reality being constructed is absent bigotry and abuse as a way of avoiding the task of confronting them directly. In short it says, "My reality is objectively true and yours is not" when the person doing the constructing hasn't the same personal encounters as the person being invalidated.
Could the element of "personal experiences" be the cause? Limiting proof points to established facts rather than subjective experience helps tremendously. Someone claiming whatever has a much more powerful voice (and is less likely to be silenced as a vocal one-off) when citing research. Similar to how academic papers don't reference the author exclusively, but rather peer papers.
Everyone has a unique and relevant perspective - lived reality is reality! But with so much noise, its far easier to dismiss individual voices than reporting on the aggregated voices of others. This filters out confounding variables and roots the hypothesis in fact (e.g. Consider an individual reporting of a nearby road keeping them awake at night. It could be they have an uncomfortable mattress, a light on in the room, or any other factor. Only when other neighbors report the same issue is the proposed cause worth a serious look).
Obviously this is more difficult in lower incident / harder to measure areas - e.g. bias, harassment, etc. Don't have a good answer here other than the burden of hard proof is unfortunately on the accuser, which leads to so many of the troubles society is grappling with today. Things like police bodycams seem to help, but resolving all disputes based on 'lived experience' doesn't seem like the best outcome.
Invalidating lived experience is overwhelmingly used to describe a pattern of behavior which occurs in the realm of bias, harassment, and interpersonal conflict, not arriving at scientific or universal truths through debate.
This is much more about "Your Dad didn't hit you. That never happened," than "In my experience the Earth is flat." The suggested change in behavior also isn't "You're never wrong." It's merely the suggestion to get genuinely curious, and pausing to listen before framing someone's experience. Maybe the body cam shows otherwise, great. Getting curious tends to have a humanizing effect - the body cam evidence can wait 15 minutes.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/mind-games-the-tortured-lives-of...
> Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit.
Agreed. Veiled-skepticism is, however in the case of invalidating lived experience, a powerful gaslighting tool. Discerning between the two is an additional hurdle targets of bigotry and abuse see layered on top of them.
There's no bright line between the two. Someone claims some experiences, and someone else disputes the claims. Bigotry isn't necessarily a factor, or, there might be disagreement on whether it is. "Invalidating lived experience" seems like a thought-stopping cliche, rather than any sort of argument at all. It is a fancy way of saying "you're wrong, and I'm right!" or "you're not allowed to say that I'm wrong."
As an aside, the inability to draw a clear line between abuse and other topics isn't so much of a problem for me. It is a form of Sorites paradox that we deal with in other topics all the time.
Personally, I am liable to refrain from such discussions because they are universally fruitless, but not because of delicacy.
> I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you?
As a member of a group subject to bigotry, I see exaggerated stories deliberately weaponized, and legitimate critical thought silenced with thought-terminating cliches that include the one under discussion.
I also see folks boast "I listen to People of X!", but only paying attention to the most lurid stories, totally ignoring those who report the absence of bigotry. They're motivated by something other than the search for objective truth.
I encourage skepticism and independence of thought for all. Your curiosity should include the possibility that they're experiencing something you've never considered, but also the possibility that they're really mistaken, or exaggerating for any number of reasons.
> frontman1988 7 days ago | on: On Aging Alone
> 40 is the prime age for men. You can easily get a younger gf from
> Thailand/Vietnam/Philippines with minimum effort. And you never know
> you might find true love (if it exists) as well.
> reply
> frontman1988 16 hours ago | on: Can growth
> continue?
> The solution to tackling declining population can be by generating
> Genetically modified babies. This new race of humans will be smarter
> and stronger than the current lot due to eugenics. CRISPR will make it
> possible and it's already happening in China. The west needs to look at
> it instead of ramping up immigration and importing instability from
> third world countries.
> reply
> MockObject 3 months ago | parent | context |
> prev | next [–] | on: The Casio employee
> behind the “Sleng Teng” riddim ...
> This speaks to a fatal flaw with the concept of cultural appropriation.
> Ok, so a "white" person can't "speak for Native Americans", but
> a Native American can? Can any, or just certain ones? Who wins if they
> disagree?
> reply
What's funny here is that these people would be probated or in the case of frontman1988, banned, on SomethingAwful these days. How times have changed!
> MockObject 4 months ago | on: Being black in tech is exhausting
> I am a minority, and I am furious that my advancement is besmirched
> with the asterisk of the possibility of affirmative action. But I am
> powerless and unheard.I'm assuming you're a genuine person and not a weird 8-foot-tall android robot, so I'll bless you with the same provisional magnanimity. Here's my answer in all its glory:
I am very tired of this line, to be perfectly honest. If you think it's not a genuine question, just say so; if you don’t think that, then I don’t need to hear about what you don’t think. Insincere insinuative rhetorical tricks at the start of a comment make me feel that you're not being genuine.
In future, you can just check the question mark at the end of the line. Think of it as a ‘checksum for questions’, if you will, or a bitmask.
> overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them
This is a very artful smooshing-together of "question someone's feelings" and "question the external events which [avowedly] caused them to feel that way". I have to say, I was nearly persuaded by the end of it.
I obviously agree, as anyone would, that questioning someone's feelings is absurd (outside extremely specific edge cases, as you acknowledge, like malingering). I obviously do not agree that questioning the events claimed to have caused them to feel those feelings is in any way unreasonable.
My general impression is that this is slangified verbiage used by people who want to be imprecise about the very straightforward concepts they are discussing, in order not to be pinned down on the dividing line between feelings and facts in these examples. As a wise man said, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity (not necessarily on your part, personally). I think we're unlikely even to have a productive discussion about this, much less to agree, but I figured I had to post some sort of response.
> Signifiers are often detached from what they signify
Signifiers are always detached from what they signify, or else they wouldn't be much use as a signifier.
It's essentially a new form of religious anti-intellectualism, but without identifying itself as such.
In the past, you might not have been allowed to say "no, God didn't appear to you in a vision" or "no, this event wasn't evidence of divine intervention". Today you're allowed to question someone's anecdote about religious experience, but you're not allowed to question their experience of victimization under a certain set of classes.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
> These are code words
Jargon for me, code words for thee.
It feels completely disconnected from anything real, full of unevocative abstract nouns connected with unevocative abstract verbs. "Don't be too hard on yourself if you're struggling with negative thoughts" - well, what the fuck do you think 'negative thoughts' are? Reading this felt like having my teeth pulled.
I think the biggest problem, though, is that they really just do not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn't be surprised if it were written at gunpoint. We used to write essays on random subjects instead of lines as a punishment at school, and I think those essays were more enthusiastic and insightful than this one. It just meanders along, with no overarching direction or purpose, from useless bromide to useless bromide, until they get to the word count and stop, and that's it.
Agreed, come on, splitting the sentence there just made it worse. Unlike many people, I'm not opposed to sentences that start with "but", but here it serves no purpose. It's not like we have an attention span of six words.
I get why they want you to simplify your righting, but iirc they tend to want you to target a 9th grade level and if I remember correctly when I was a senior half the people in that class could barely fucking read.
One thing I could use is an autocorrect that works. My phone things it’s appropriate to randomly change worlds like die->sue but is helpless when some other word is a single character off.
There's probably something about excess positivity that's worth talking about. This isn't it.
For toxic positivity, I call it old-fashioned denial, mixed in with a lot of bullshit.
I also found these articles/posts to be pretty decent: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395... https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-being-told-cheer-up-th...