Creeping dread of the positivity cult

The author suggests that relentless optimism of the kind propagated today can harm our state of mind and culture.

I’ll admit I’m a tiny bit embarrassed writing about a self-help book this time around. Every time I found myself telling someone about the Oliver Burkeman book I was reading—The Antidote — I noticed how quickly and urgently I added the subheading of the book: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. I didn’t want to be thought of as the self-help type (sorry, no offence to those who thrive on it).

The reason I picked up The Antidote is possibly because I’ve mentally been in a strange state for the last few years — coping with anxiety, and figuring out what kind of work will keep me happy in the long run, but also pay my bills. The hustle culture, for instance, is something that I’ve come to deeply resent, and as I grow older, I’m exhausted with all the usual spiel around becoming an inspiring leader at work. As you may have guessed by now, positive thinking has hardly ever worked for me.

In the book, Burkeman takes us along while he examines different philosophies and ways of thinking — from attending Get Motivated!, a crowd-pulling business motivation seminar in Texas, to chatting with a professor of Stoicism in London who is battling chronic fatigue syndrome. The book wasn’t exactly an easy read for me, also because I’m more of a fiction reader, but what helped was Burkeman’s voice — sharp, incisive, and sceptical. One of the central themes of the book is the obsession with positive thinking — something authors like Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret, have popularized. Burkeman suggests that this kind of relentless optimism can harm our state of mind and culture. Turning to several techniques that accept ‘negative’ emotions, he looks at how, to be happy, we need to learn to accept these emotions, instead of running away from them. One of the chapters I didn’t feel much like reading, called Goal Crazy, eventually turned out to be a fascinating one. In it, he refers to the mysterious deaths of 15 mountain climbers in Nepal in 1996, written about in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. While there are several theories about the incident, he speaks of a specific one — of how they had been “lured into destruction by their passion for goals.”

Trust the uncertainty

It’s hard to escape goal-setting in today’s culture. But what Burkeman gets into is the blind commitment and pursuit of these goals and our discomfort with uncertainty. Instead, he asks — could we learn to trust the uncertainties?

Now, for someone like me, this has always been a struggle. I’m hardly a ‘go with the flow’ person. But at the same time, it is something that I want for myself, to be able to let go sometimes, to not be frightened of the unknown, and at the very least, to surrender to curiosity.

One of the other reasons that I wanted to read the book was because I knew it would contemplate death — something that I find terrifying, especially the loss of loved ones. I vividly remember lying in bed as a child, wide awake and worrying about the death of my parents. Not much has changed, and so I’m always looking to be less afraid of the inevitable.

Burkeman begins the chapter on death with a verse from The Mahabharata, and brings in various perspectives on death, from Freud and Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death to the Greek philosophers. A lot of that rolled off my brain, but I loved hearing about his trip to Mexico City, to get a sense of The Day of the Dead — not limited to people dressing up as vampires and skeletons, but also their approach to remembering the dead. There’s a lot that’s packed into The Antidote, and it can sometimes seem a bit abstract. And yet, as someone with big feelings and an annoyance for the cult of positive thinking, I feel grateful to Burkeman who has done the hard work of gathering such diverse perspectives, and in such a persuasive manner.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and editor who believes in the power of daily naps. Find her on Instagram @yaminivijayan

Unbound is a monthly column for anyone who likes to take shelter in books, and briefly forget the dreariness of adult life.