Smile or die

I love this quote I found in an article about Leonard Cohen.
W. B. Yeats said about one of his friends:


"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."


That quote makes me smile for some reason. It also relates to Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-Sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. I admit I like the British title better: Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America and the world.


I hate 'positive thinking.' And so does Ehrenreich. She traces the history of the Positive Thinking movement back through Mary Baker Eddy's invention of Christian Science, along with Phineas Quimby's New Thought movement; and on to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking; and on to Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, who blames the poor, the unhappy, the diseased and the unemployed for not thinking the right thoughts.


Ehrenreich points out that data shows that optimism does not prolong life. Support groups do not affect the course of cancer. And among older people who lose a loved one, pessimists are less likely to become depressed than optimists.


I like Ehrenreich's approach to life. Personally, proponents of positive thinking make me sick. They are arrogant psychological elitists who don't understand me and thousands like me. All is not light. The darkness cannot be denied without lying. Too much light hurts the eyes. And my "I" has been hurt by thoughtless preachers of optimism and purveyors of 'smile or die' drivel. 


Don't get me wrong. I believe that hope springs eternal in the human breast. But even at the human breast, life sucks.