When Did Positivity Get So Toxic?

Happiness has become the ultimate status symbol, something you can show off to the world as a sign that you, unlike others, are doing just fine. But, asks Daniella Scott, is the positivity movement actually harming us while pretending to help?

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I was nearing the end of a frantic day when the e-mail landed in my inbox. It was about to get chewed up with the rest in my 6pm delete-spree when my hand stopped millimetres from the keyboard. Something in the subject line caught my eye. ‘Tips for staying positive during lockdown’, it read.

It was just as newly-announced lockdown measures meant I couldn’t see my family that weekend, and just as a news alert on my phone told me we’d reached the highest number of COVID-19 cases in a single day since the outbreak began. But, you know, PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) and all.

Positivity has found itself in a place of omnipotence in 21st-century thinking. Every scroll through social media is met with #PositiveVibes, or a motivational quote etched in pastel calligraphy and flanked by peonies. The shops are full of manuals to help us ‘get over’ our struggles and clothes adorned with clichéd slogans about #Goals. But when depression, anxiety, and negative thinking threaten to swallow us whole, how helpful is the pressure to stay positive? Have we guzzled so many #PositiveVibes that we’re now greedily choking to death on factory-farmed happiness? And if so, at what cost?