Your Version of Positivity Isn’t Helping

By Hansi Zhu

After going the entirety of winter term without it, I broke my self-imposed ban the second week of March break and redownloaded TikTok. The first video that appeared on my screen displayed a swimsuit-clad girl dancing on her front porch, a scene characteristic of the vast majority of “viral” videos on the app. “What to do while you’re bored during quarantine!” read the caption. Then, with a large, plastered smile, the girl leaned into the camera and mouthed the words, “Stay positive!”

I buried my phone into my bed. From where I lay, legs tangled in Target throw blankets and eyes barely open from an exhausting day of house chores, I couldn’t help but wonder if someone else who watched the same video had closed their eyes and broken into tears. 

“An effective approach for maximizing one’s contentment is to be consciously grateful for one’s blessings,” two UC Davis and UMiami professors wrote in a 2003 study on gratitude called Counting Blessings vs Burdens. Similarly, a UC Berkeley study that tracked teens writing gratitude journals for three weeks led Dr. Robert Emmons to dub gratitude as “a relationship-strengthening emotion, because it requires us to see how we’ve been supported and affirmed by other people.” 

Look anywhere and there are mental health experts—heck, even industrious TikTokers—whose whole life exhortation describes the way that gratitude equates to eternal fulfillment. 

Yet, I wish to reframe this philosophy. While I fervently believe in the importance of appreciating the people and experiences that build the foundation of our lives, I contend that gratitude during a time of crisis is a privilege that most of us unwittingly take for granted.

Let me begin by saying this: the advertising of gratitude arises from people who have something to be grateful for—sufficient supplies, a place to socially distance themselves, and entertainment are examples. Let me also add this: the majority of essential workers belong to less economically advantaged individuals, who must choose daily whether to risk contracting the virus or neglect to go to work, which will inevitably lead to irrecoverable financial hardships. Such is also the current lifestyle of the impoverished, disabled, incarcerated, and homeless. For many, the oncoming recession will signify the demolition of their lifework and augmentation of their debt; the impending doom is merciless, drawing a future just as bleak as the present.

Now, I will confess: while I currently write from Manhattan, the hotspot of the American coronavirus crisis, I have not been forced to forgo a single meal since the onset of the food shortage. I underwent a brief scare in early March when my mother fell ill, but I have not had to grapple with the trauma of losing a loved one. Try as I might to conjure up enough emotion to understand the magnitude of the pain of any person right down the street, I am forced to acknowledge the unavoidable fact that empathy alone will never present the full scope of another’s experience.

This, of course, is nothing new. “But who am I to mope around?” I wrote in my journal during a particularly demoralizing week around the explosion of the virus in China, “Somebody out there’s got it way worse.” And yet, I found that acknowledging the pain of others discernibly did not heal my own; it merely sent me down an endless loop of misery, and then guilt and disgust for wasting all the time I spent brooding over unworthy things. Consequently, comparing one’s suffering to someone else’s won’t cure either of their distress. It does, however, inform them that the potency of pain is infinitely greater than they initially perceived, and it reminds them that their issues are nobody’s priority. Instructing optimism perpetuates our societal need to be satisfied with whatever hand we are dealt and prevents the emergence of dissatisfaction by invalidating it.

That is not to say that you cannot practice your own gratitude if you wish to steer away from trivial complaints and cultivate your own optimism. After all, recognition of our privileges opens our eyes to the profoundness of our fortune. On the other end, you have every right to feel bored, stripped of opportunities, set back, and frustrated, but hear this: there is no greater expression of thoughtlessness than to point at other people who are mourning, deprived, or otherwise in pain and tell them to “stay positive.” While we may think we are helping such people “focus on the bright side,” in reality, we are diminishing their hardships and implying that their misery is self-imposed.

Meaningful appreciation is an experience rather than a practice. It occurs when we feel connected and supported by the external forces that mold our society. Certainly, be aware of their sacrifices, for gratitude presents the opportunity for heightened contentment and community value—I just ask that we cease to preach it, especially when we cannot experience others’ realities.