The Well of Loneliness

There are few instances in life where you get to peek through someone’s very essence. Most people will act only in ways that correspond to the image that they are trying to portray to their audience, whoever the audience might be – a first date, intimate lover, friend or sister. Sociologists even have a term for this: impression management, coined by the symbolic interactionist Erving Goffman.

Leafing through someone’s album is probably right up there in deciphering volumes about the person in question. I happened to stumble upon my sister’s album today as I was instructed to water her parched plants while she visits her fiancé abroad. I came upon this album of gargantuan proportions, reminiscent of a bygone era, as I was eying her bookshelf for potential novels. I made myself comfortable on her not-so-comfortable new age sofa, and slowly turned the pages, savoring each postcard size photo. An endless array of photos of shiny, well-dressed, happy, perky people that you’re more likely to see in People magazine, as opposed to a personal album leapt from every single page. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the album was that there were only two photos of *me – her sister, that is. The one who waters her plants, the one she calls when mother or some other matter gets her down, the one who cooks her cherished foods. And looking at those two photos, it was hard to determine whether they were there because they showcased me, or my cat whom she adores immensely. Granted, I am not the most happy-go-lucky person in the world, and she may have thought one too many photos of my melancholic, pensive face might contaminate the mood she was going for in this album.

Sitting there, her house keys on my lap, an all too familiar feeling of loneliness crept up, cutting flesh like a thousand razor blades. How well do we know the people in our lives? How well do we know what others think of us? I mean really think of us. To listen, to share, to reminisce, to consult, and yet to be relegated to mere two photos on the last page of a personal album. The feeling of loneliness swelled inside of me, than shrank, then swelled again. I could hear the pangs of the loneliness so well in this hushed, still house as the hour struck 3pm on the dial.

We pretend to be someone we are not, we pretend to listen, we pretend to care. Why do people have to be this phony? What is the point of it all? People are like deep wells, you don’t really know what is at the bottom. All you can do is imagine what lies there.

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power.” Barbara Ehrenreich

I’ll admit I am a bit of a crank, a ‘walking nimbus cloud’ if you will and would certainly describe myself as pessimistic about the future of the world, though not necessarily about my own future. This apparently is a sin in a country beaming, oh, just radiating with pop positive thinking that permeates every aspect of our lives. Talk show hosts, “life coaches,”, commercials, psychotherapists, friends and family (think of all those smiley faces and exclamation marks), employers and colleagues all encourage us to plaster a smile on our faces and go about our merry day.

So you can imagine my delight when I came across Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest publication Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I have followed her since my undergraduate days and have read almost all of her books. She is a “god-sent” (we need to come up with a better word for atheists) for the independent and critical minded. Although I’ve found meaning in all of her books, this one probably resonated the most with me.

The book is on the tyranny of positive-thinking in America. We’re constantly told to look on the bright side of things, to see the glass as half full (even if lies shattered on the floor), to put a smiley face on, to radiate positivity…but as she contends this super insistence on the almighty smiley face “is a great way to brush of poverty, disease, and unemployment, to rationalize an order where all the rewards go to those on top. The people who are sick or jobless – why, they just aren’t thinking positively. They have no one to blame but themselves.” Barbara is finally sounding the alarm bells on this predominant mode of thinking in our culture. Never mind that wages have stagnated in the last couple of decades, that environmental degradation has reached an all time high, that jobs are fleeting at a faster rate than you can say ‘where is my cheese?’, that unions have been all but destroyed…no, never mind all of that..you just need to send out positive energy into the universe, and before you know it you too can have success, wealth and health.

I have always found the pervasiveness of positive thinking in America to be crippling, and a great way to avoid working for social change at a larger level. Why bother working for causes that could lead to the leveling of inequalities when you can work on yourself, right? It seems highly impractical and time-consuming to work on changes at a larger societal, political, cultural level, but what we fail to realize is that in the long term we pay a very high price on not being realistic about the root causes of our troubles, whatever those troubles may be.

We can't expect to improve our situation without "addressing the actual circumstance we find ourselves in. Positive thinking seeks to convince us that such external factors are incidental compared with one's internal state or attitude or mood."