Optimism sneaks into my reading list

Piano recitals, Keyboard Merit, gardening emergencies, job applications, end-of-school events. They all add up to one thing: Not enough time to post about my optimism efforts. (And, evidently, not enough time to ruminate on worries and bad people.)
So I find myself on an even keel for a week running. Read a depressing story in the New York Times about how many jobs will never come back and how baby boomers laid off will be replaced by younger workers, resulting in a destruction of personal wealth beyond all imagining. Well, actually, the story was only about the jobs never coming back. My imagination skills added the rest.
Looked out my window at a garden full of food growing (notable exception: Sugar Snap peas.)
Applied for a job and wasn't ruled out immediately (still waiting for that call, though).
But although I have been too busy to think about my thinking, I haven't been completely oblivious. Optimism has walked up and slapped me in the face a couple of times, in places I wouldn't have thought to look.
Exhibit A: The Coming Population Crash : and Our Planet' Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce (Beacon Press, 2010).
The first pages of this book, before the table of contents, are a world map with countries distorted to reflect how the population is growing or shrinking. At the top left, "How the boom is turning to bust. Half the world's women are having too few babies to sustain present populations."
The inside is filled with stories and statistics about how economics and lack of social support are causing women in many countries to choose to have fewer children--to the point that the present population will not be replaced.
Clearly, this is not something I picked up with hopes of finding...hope.
But Pearce is very optimistic. He believes innovation will prevent us from disasters caused by climate change and post-peak oil (not so sure about this myself). And then he makes an interesting prediction about the future. Because fewer children are being born, and because women generally live longer than men, the world of the future may be one in which older women have more power, because of their higher numbers.
I am so completely on board with that! Now, if I can just get to that golden time, where old women will be queens of everything! Bwa-ha-ha.
The second book (yes, I do like to keep up with my reading) is Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, by Ethan Watters (Free Press, 2010). Watters' premise is that US drug companies and psychiatric researchers have held sway over the definitions of mental illness to the point that they've overriden the differences between cultures in how the diseases present themselves. And that this has been, in part, planned by the drug companies to increase their profits.
Again, not the place you'd normally look for something on the effects of "positive thinking." Strangely, I found just that in a chapter on schizophrenia.
Watters quotes studies that have shown that people with schizophrenia in developing countries do better over the long run than people in wealthier countries like the US. Researchers have focused on the reactions of family and society to the disease in each type of country, and they've come up with this: Family members in places like the United States seem to be more critical and anxious about the patient's inability to get better than they do in more "fatalistic" countries of the Third World.
All that hyper, macho "we can do it if we put our minds to it" attitude the positive thinking industry is so fond of? It's actually harmful when it comes to the mentally ill. One researcher quoted said this: "Because our culture so highly values self-control and control of circumstances, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be."
So then, to help these people get better, we need to embrace suffering as an inevitable part of life. Hmmm. Sounds like Buddhism.
I'm not sure if I can draw any grand conclusions from any of this. Except, maybe, that it's time for a trashy summer novel. Where can I find one without a hidden lesson on positive thinking?