Bright-sided

Just when I think I'm making progress toward the new Optimistic Me (!) along comes Barbara Ehrenreich with Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. And suddenly I'm sliding sweetly backwards to my old self.
Ehrenreich says it's okay to be a pessimist and a complainer. In fact it's preferable. She dedicates her book with this message. "To complainers everywhere: Turn up the volume!"
And then, inside, I'm allowed to baste myself in the delicious pan juices of--oh, excuse me. Mike just came back from the eye doctor and told me a story. Apparently our insurer charges $5 extra on our co-pay if you ask the insurer to do it's contractual duty and pay the covered procedure. It's cheaper if you pay it yourself, but then of course, it doesn't get counted toward your deductible.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yes, the book. Ehrenreich takes us through several aspects of the optimism movement, from her experiences with positive thinking and cancer (one of my foundational reasons to become an optimist. See my mission statement.) through the magical thinking embraced by top business executives, who, like George W. Bush, prefer instinct and gut feelings to hard facts.
She also touched on religions' "gospel of prosperity" evangelists and the movement by psychologists to push positivism as a science.
I found myself thinking "Yes, yes. That's what I've always thought, too!" most of the way through the book. But there were a few things she pointed out that struck me:
*The modern popularity of positive thinking is Calvinism in a rose-colored mirror. The Calvinists spent dreary hours pondering their own sins and unworthiness. Positive thinkers of today spend hours (and lots of money) examining their own attitudes as well. Why did I fail? Why did I get laid off? Is it because I'm not positive enough? Is my bad attitude attracting negative energy?
The result is the same, though. You can actually make yourself unhappy by twisting into knots over every perceived lapse in attitude.
*Positivism had a lot to do with the bubble economies and their crashes the past two decades. Home prices go down? What's wrong with your attitude? Home prices will never go down! We'll never have another Great Depression. Let us purge ourselves of these negative people who warn us of the coming apocalypse.
*The constant insistence on positivity has a lot in common with communists in totalitarian states who insist on happy platitudes from the people. Look at North Korea, then compare it with the insistent sloganeering about "Our country, the best in the world."
I must admit, this last one hadn't occurred to me. This is probably because in those states, it's the governments enforcing the happy talk. Here, it's employers, large and small. But, then, there isn't more than a dime's worth of difference between the two these days. Business pulls the strings of government, after all.
*Ehrenreich also reminds us of a 2006 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research that shows people in the US have less chance than many European countries of moving up and out of the lower social classes. Here's part of the conclusion. (Read the whole study here.)

The data also appear to contradict the belief that greater economic mobility in the United States can somehow compensate for greater levels of inequality and "social exclusion." Despite popular prejudices to the contrary, the U.S. economy consistently affords a lower level of economic mobility, both in the short-term (from one year to the next) and in the longer-term (across generations), than all the continental European countries for which data are available

Bright-sided, despite everything, was one of the most positive experiences I've had for a while. It was a nice break from all my failings to obtain optimism. Yeah, things are crappy. It's okay to go ahead and admit it.
Maybe I don't really have to become a top-to-bottom positive thinker. Maybe I should just focus on having just enough optimism to keep getting up in the morning.