Positive Thinking Is a Scam

I’ll begin by saying something straight up: The reason positive thinking isn’t working for you is not because you’re doing it wrong.

At its surface, positive thinking seems something of a miracle cure. It seems this way because it, supposedly, has the power to ‘hack’ any experience you may have in your life.

As you well know, life doesn’t just happen to you. Events within your life indeed take place, but everything is ultimately felt after it is first filtered through you.

You may accidentally knock your coffee mug from the countertop. You will see it fall, smash as it hits the floor, and a puddle of your beloved drink form near your feet. So far, all you have done is witness physics in action.

The feelings of inconvenience, annoyance, and anger — they come after. After the events you just witnessed are processed and filtered through a lens.

The lens you call “me” or your “mind.”

The school of positive thinking starts by telling you something you already know: It is not possible for you to control all the events and circumstances that take place in your life. In fact, more extreme individuals may claim the control you really have is virtually non-existent.

But here’s the great thing: None of this needs to matter!

Because though you may not be able to control many (or even any) of the things in your life, there is one thing that does rests in your palm. It is like playdough — it can be shaped, however you want, with the right force and skill.

You can take your coffee spillage, or any of the countless, unsavoury things that will happen in your life, and turn them into something ‘positive.’

Your mug broke, and perhaps as you shop for a replacement, you discover a model that looks nicer and is far better at keeping your drink warm. Fantastic! Had you not had your little accident, you would’ve never found this new mug.

Or, maybe as you mop up the spillage, you realise how dirty your floor has become. You’ve been putting off cleaning it for so long. Great! Life finally gave you the nudge to sort out your laziness.

The crux of positive thinking is that the silver lining of any ‘negative’ event can be found — so long as one has the fortitude to look for it.

There’s also a greater level of positive thinking you can access. It’s for the rare few that are serious about it. Instead of coping with negative events in your life by living in the hope for eventual silver linings to materialise, one can treat every negative event as a ‘test.’ The Stoics are particular fans of this approach. You know, in the grand scheme, this coffee mug incident is inconsequential. Insignificant. Meaningless. But a human, supposedly by nature, is quick to anger. Annoyance. Frustration.

The coffee mug incident is not just an event that may present a silver lining. It also serves as an opportunity to practice and hone the ‘good’ qualities of a person. Their resilience. Their patience. Their understanding.

This all sounds amazing, does it not? The idea that you can find the ‘good’ in anything — and even when this proves difficult — you can treat the event as an opportunity to cultivate admirable qualities. To build character.

Sitting in the brightly lit supermarket, an apple looks very appealing. Glossy red, plump, and perfectly shaped. Certainly, this is an apple you want. You show your friends, family, and the world: Look at this apple! How magnificent is its beauty!

So you keep this apple with you a while. You take it with it you to work, to your home, and along your travels.

Let’s stop beating around the bush. The apple is rotting. All apples, eventually, rot.

Perhaps the issue lay with your approach of the apple. After all, what sort of idiot finds a perfect apple and then proceeds to simply boast about it for eons. He should eat it when it’s still ripe, right?

The apple was never eaten because it couldn’t be eaten. Because it was a fake. Because only a fake apple can look that good.

But even if the apple were real, how long would it curb hunger?

Short-term solutions are not solutions at all. But short-term solutions are all you know — all you have been sold — your entire life.

Of course, don’t believe anything I say. Nothing ever really comes from ‘believing’ — only knowing satisfies a man.

So, please, practice your positive thinking. Convince yourself it will, eventually, work. That you will get better at it, and it will become second nature.

Show your apple to the world. Eat it too, if you can.

See if this satisfies your hunger.

Positive thinking is a scam because it is an attempt to empty the Sahara Desert with a bucket and spade.

Even the name itself — positive thinking — is a declration of its redundant and useless nature. Lasting peace or happiness can never come to a person who distinguishes between positive and negative. Good and bad. Right and wrong.

How could it, when life itself is none of these things? Life just is. But only the one who has conquered their mind truly understands this.

The masses are not able to comprehend, let alone be interested, in such a thing. Hence, they look for fool’s gold in the form of practices such as positive thinking.

And, like all practices they pursue, they come up empty. Well, not totally: They’ve still got a rotting apple in their hand.