Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.
Smile or Die
Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.
Related media
-
Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson on How Social Status Affects our Self-Worth
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett follow up their seminal work The Spirit Level with new insights into how inequality impacts us as individuals.
-
Johann Hari on The Rising Depression and Anxiety Crisis
Bestselling author Johann Hari discovered that, in reality, depression and anxiety are caused largely by crucial changes in the way we are living.
-
Matthew Walker on The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic
Award-winning professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker visits the RSA to explain why the sleep deprivation epidemic is one of the greatest public health crises of the 21st century.
Join the discussion
Comments
Please login to post a comment or reply
Don't have an account? Click here to register.
This has been one of my favourite talks of the last five years. Ms Ehrenreich has a lot of courage to not try to efface the just human-nature fact that some things are awful (I applaud Brené Brown pretty sincerely on that point too) and that smiling, putting up a socially acceptable positivist façade is not a solution ... No matter how one thinks 'lovely sunny day' or 'how dry I am' whilst standing in the rain, one can still very easily catch pneumonia. This goes well with Alain de Botton's clever essay on 'pessimism'.
Furthermore, in terms of Eastern Philosophy, it ties in with the 'mutual arising' (emptiness).
It is true also that the push for "optimism" in education - in preparations of the corporate domain mask ? - is also frighteningly reminiscent of Orwellian "new-speak". Being cheerful in circumstances which permit one to be cheerful is sound emotional health ; being cheerful when anyone would half-a-mind would concede that the circumstances simply suck, that is insanity.