A few weeks ago, one of the leading lights of the American left, Barbara Ehrenreich, died of cancer. She would have preferred that wording – “died of cancer,” I suspect, and not the euphemistic “passed away,” as she was a bitter opponent of all forms of bullshit, particularly those delivered with sanctimony. She's probably best known for her masterful journalism about life at minimum wage in Nickel and Dimed, but real heads will also know she coined the term “professional managerial class,” or about the brief fracas after she said about Marie Kondo's heavily accented TV English:
“It’s OK with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American audience but it does suggest that America is in decline as a superpower.”
… precipitating a histrionic response by a purple-haired chick with a mermaid emoji in her name, who then gave us one of the world's silliest copypastas (sing it with me!):
“You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don't even understand the intersectionality of the multiplicity of your offenses.”
But to me, the thing that Barbara Ehrenreich did that resonated the most was not her Wigan Pier-style reportage, it was her writing about the ways in which the American ideology of positivity damages the soul and reflects an atomized society.
To sum up, Ehrenreich got diagnosed with breast cancer, a particularly cruel twist considering that she didn't have any of the major risk factors. However, instead of empathy with suffering, what Ehrenreich found, over and over again, was an attempt to turn rain into liquid sunshine. She was repulsed by the way she wasn't suffering, she was “fighting,” she wasn't a victim, she was a “survivor,” all of which at the end of the day made her feel lonelier, more isolated, and more shushed, discouraged even from feeling panic and grief at the very real chance of her own imminent mortality. It didn't help that with her particular diagnosis of breast cancer, the pink-ribbon capitalists were among the people she had most vigorously criticized.
This is something I'd suspected for a long time, wet blanket that I am. My 7th grade science teacher liked to remind us moody tweens that a frown required us to work more muscles than a smile. I cannot think of a more crystal-clear example of sunny idiocy.
Of course, back then, I didn't know why I felt the way I did. I just knew that something about my teacher's comment seemed very fundamentally wrong-headed.
Yet the examples hit like a barrage, again and again, throughout my adolescence and afterwards. George W. Bush's premature-cumshot mission accomplished? The runaway success of The Secret and the revival of “positive thinking,” more or less a glorification of how four year olds see the world? The 2010s influencers preaching positivity and wellness against a millennial-pink and sage-green background? They all seemed to be indicators of that same sunny idiocy I encountered back in the piss-reek corridors of my town's middle school.
It wasn't just that it was cringe (although cringe it was). But as Ehrenreich elucidated, there really is a dark side to all that positivity – it does preclude empathy, it does gloss over actual problems that may exist in the world and with oneself. And this in turn makes it the handmaiden of a social doctrine whereby every problem one has is one's own fault, whereby any misery is just laziness, an ideology that is, like so many others throughout the Anglo-American world, the descendant of some of the worst parts of Protestantism.
I'm glad the term “toxic positivity” has gained some traction over the past year or two, as shit has seemed more fucked. Because facing down the twists and turns of a global pandemic, the inevitable threat of climate change, spiraling wealth inequality, revanchist nationalism, and other assorted general bad vibes, how can anyone not be experiencing some kind of angst?
And in those moments, if you're anything like me, you don't want someone to say you're looking at the world with tired eyes, or that you can start by going vegan and not using plastic straws, or – and this is truly some hellworld shit – that you need to start practicing mindfulness and (that sickliest of words) gratitude. You want someone to pass you the joint and simply say “I feel you, man.”
Which is what I got when I read Barbara Ehrenreich's books and essays. And to you, dear reader, no matter where you are – I feel you, man.
