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eveglass
The main thrust of Bright-Sided is that positive thinking has a dark side. A very dark side, if you believe Ehrenreich, whose successive chapters blame positive thinking for everything from the collapse of the American economy to a virtual enslavement of the minds of its people. Now, I think she might have swung the pendulum a bit too far in the other direction, and sometimes it seems like she's toppling some contrived straw men, but some of her points are actually quite good.What could possibly be the downside of thinking positively? Ehrenreich lists many, from the relatively innocuous to the deeply insidious. If you're in a work culture where you're encouraged to think positively, suggesting valid criticisms ("I'm not so sure we should be buying these sub-prime mortgage backed securities; they seem risky") can get you labeled a "negative thinker" and have you thrown out on the street. If you've been diagnosed with cancer, as Ehrenreich was, the focus on always being positive stifles the very real emotions of fear and anger, and moreover prevents you from speaking out against the medical establishment when you think something's gone wrong.
Even more unfortunate, though, is the flip side of the positive-thinking message. If you believe in the law of attraction, that everything that happens to you comes into your life because you've focused on it and thought about it, then all you need to do to be successful is to focus on success. But it also means that people who are poor, who've been diagnosed with an illness, who've seen their village destroyed by a tsunami... those people must have been drawing those events to themselves with their thinking. They must, on some level, deserve it. There's actually a wonderful TED talk on just this idea by Alain de Botton that I highly recommend.
In the end, I think Ehrenreich raises some excellent points. But I wish she'd expanded more on her final chapter, "Postscript on Post-Positive Thinking," in which she explains that the opposite of positive thinking is not negative thinking, but realism. That's a topic that deserves more than just a handful of pages.
