This article is fine and all, but maybe we should also have a warning about toxic empathy. This is all a lot of emotional work, guess it is something we can all work on but so much other stuff going on.
No, it’s when they have problems but you have all the anxiety as if they were your problems.
This anxiety has jack to do with you actually helping them, it’s just that you get so anxious about their problems that it impedes working on your own problems.
People who are complaining often aren't soliciting advice and don't welcome it if offered. I think the "damn that's crazy" responses generally come from people who are aware that offered help won't be warmly received and don't have the emotional energy to put on a more convincing display of empathy, but still pay lip service to the premise for the sake of civility.
But the exact opposite would be "What does that have to do with me?"
Interesting, I don’t see that happening in social media on a scale big enough to warrant as much criticism as toxic positivity. In fact, I don’t see that at all, though of course it could just be the curation algorithms—or is that being applied to activism too?
I don't know what the official definition is, but I'd consider deliberate mirroring of posture, online tone, and emotional state for conscious deceptive, and manipulative ends to be toxic empathy.
Trivial example - phone services with the stock "Your call is important to us but we're experiencing an unusually high level of calls right now" message. When the truth is the company is spending a bare minimum on phone support and knows it.
Or customer service scripts that say something like "I understand you're frustrated that you're having this problem."
In reality there's no understanding. And there may not even be any interest in fixing the problem - because when you read back through other messages you see the problem has been there for years and there's been absolutely no effort to find a fix.
That sounds like most CEOs jumping on an HN thread when there is an article denouncing there company.
They follow the same pattern. Start with "Hey! SomeStartup CEO here."
Then proceed to explain that they are happy about the feedbacks and that they hear the complains. Followed by more words that could have been written by GPT-3.
Apparently the official definition is when someone over-identifies with the emotions of someone else (the over identifier is experiencing toxic empathy).
I resent the scripted CS, so I'm not arguing about that part of it, but I think those are actually the opposite of empathy, sociopathically inserted in order to manipulate, emotionally aware but indifferent.
Seen a few pieces about how we should be prioritising compassion over empathy to save ourselves from exhaustion. Only place I remember reading off top of my head was Rutger Bregman's Humankind. Interesting to ponder
I very much agree that so-called "toxic positivity" can be a problem, but I found this article greatly lacking in any sort of substance. There are no specific examples of toxic positivity, no explanation as to why its bad other than vacuous general terms repeated ad nauseam (did she mention toxic positivity invalidates lived experiences?), and no in depth explanation as to the alternatives other than what is essentially a dictionary definition of "empathy".
Part of the disjointedness comes from the writer's apparent obsession with over-simple language and very short sentences made by chopping up longer sentences. It's a good example of what happens when inexperienced writers rely on readability tools like Readable (it's on the Readable blog).
> It’s natural to emulate what we see online. But, going overboard on the ‘positive vibes’ may affect your content.
Agreed, come on, splitting the sentence there just made it worse. Unlike many people, I'm not opposed to sentences that start with "but", but here it serves no purpose. It's not like we have an attention span of six words.
Yeah, I don't want to be cruel, in case the author is reading this, but it really is uniquely egregious writing (no toxic positivity here!). The broken-up sentences you mention are. Awkward and mostly grammatically inco. Rrect as a result. They seem weirdly unaware of the incredibly basic writer's injunction to vary your sentence length. There's no rhythm or cadence to it. You can literally feel the author grimly trudging toward the target word count.
It feels completely disconnected from anything real, full of unevocative abstract nouns connected with unevocative abstract verbs. "Don't be too hard on yourself if you're struggling with negative thoughts" - well, what the fuck do you think 'negative thoughts' are? Reading this felt like having my teeth pulled.
I think the biggest problem, though, is that they really just do not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn't be surprised if it were written at gunpoint. We used to write essays on random subjects instead of lines as a punishment at school, and I think those essays were more enthusiastic and insightful than this one. It just meanders along, with no overarching direction or purpose, from useless bromide to useless bromide, until they get to the word count and stop, and that's it.
I hate this. I admit I often get carried about by combining my thoughts into massive complex sentences, but the reverse is even worse. I feel like I have to write like I’m Dr Suess.
I get why they want you to simplify your righting, but iirc they tend to want you to target a 9th grade level and if I remember correctly when I was a senior half the people in that class could barely fucking read.
One thing I could use is an autocorrect that works. My phone things it’s appropriate to randomly change worlds like die->sue but is helpless when some other word is a single character off.
That's because the author seems to be firmly anchored in a coastal elite bubble. In particular this phrase:
> invalidate someone's lived experience
...is particularly cringe-inducing. These are code words. This is not how any normal human in the English speaking world has ever spoken prior to exposure to a particular brand of (most often quite expensive) education, and let's be clear--that's the whole point. People train themselves to use this language as a way to demonstrate their membership or desired membership in the current socio-economic elite. It is not really any different from learning to use the "correct" fork at a 19th century dinner party, even to the point where watered-down versions of both trickling into middle class.
So let's say now you've gone and learned these phrases and weaponized your speech in this manner, great on you right? Wrong! You've lost your voice, everything you say is now constrained without the confines of this language and carries connotations set by someone else that overshadow whatever you may wish to express, but more importantly, your speech is now a constant performance. Just as how nourishment was not the point of dinner, what's being discussed is not the point of conversation when using this language. People who talk this way occasionally slip up and deviate slightly and you can hear in their voice how much anxiety this causes them, usually some small nervous joke follows. Crippling anxiety is perhaps the defining trait of these folks, to the point that many many of them, a far higher percentage than you'd expect naturally, are on some kind of anti-anxiety drugs. This risk of saying something that puts you out of step with the tastemakers grows enormously as your investment increases, better to say nothing of substance at all while using lots and lots of this language and drop in as many of these code words as possible.
I think you're illustrating that person's point. I'm a liberal, with-the-times person in a liberal, with-the-times city, and I cringe at the thought of ever uttering the words "invalidate someone's lived experience". Aside from anything else, what the fuck does it even mean? I don't think it's a bad rule of writing to speak in simple, clear, plain words, not glutinous agglomerations of abstract verbiage which evoke nothing.
(While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)
> Aside from anything else, what the fuck does it even mean?
I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding. Invalidating someone's lived experience is the process by which someone more or less says, "that didn't happen to you", or "your interpretation of events that happened to you is wrong." Before we start to find edge cases like "they clearly left the door unlocked and believed it to be locked," no that's not what invalidating lived experiences pertains to. Invalidating lived experience pertains to social knowledge and interpretations usually of harmful events. Or in other words, overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them. Broad categories include, "no, that wasn't racism/sexism/bigotry that you experienced", or "no that really wasn't abusive." You might think of it as a certain kind of gaslighting.
Could there be a better name for it? Maybe? Signifiers are often detached from what they signify- it doesn't matter much to me at this point that this is the case. Let me be clear. I'm not here to discuss that this is or isn't a problem in discourse. Moving from, obtuse wording to, not-actually-a-problem is a kettle logic I don't wish to engage in.
That phrase is often used to move goalposts when someone is using an anecdote to justify actions they've taken, or policy they're advocating. This can include leveling accusations at other people.
It is a linguistic tactic that attempts to bypass debate through appeal to emotion. "You can't tell me I don't feel this way!" Correct, you feel that way, but your feelings don't magically turn assertions into fact. The objection of "invalidating lived experience" is the notion that one's feeling are facts when they are not. They are subjective impressions unsuitable as the sole grounds for action.
Really good example. Thank you. This is precisely the type of thinking that goes into invalidating lived experience.
The mechanism behind invalidating lived experience is fundamentally a reality construction mechanism. It's goal is to construct a reality, namely by the person doing the invalidating. The reality being constructed is absent bigotry and abuse as a way of avoiding the task of confronting them directly. In short it says, "My reality is objectively true and yours is not" when the person doing the constructing hasn't the same personal encounters as the person being invalidated.
Invalidation of Lived Experience is also what we do, and should do, to Targeted Individuals [0], people who boast of having diseases cured by crank medicine, and con game victims certain that they're beloved by overseas supermodels. Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit.
Great. In agreement, but help me understand how we went from lived experiences involving bigotry and abuse to crank medicine and con game victims? I added that boundary specifically so that cases like this wouldn't be brought up and used to counter-example.
> Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit.
Agreed. Veiled-skepticism is, however in the case of invalidating lived experience, a powerful gaslighting tool. Discerning between the two is an additional hurdle targets of bigotry and abuse see layered on top of them.
> help me understand how we went from lived experiences involving bigotry and abuse to crank medicine
There's no bright line between the two. Someone claims some experiences, and someone else disputes the claims. Bigotry isn't necessarily a factor, or, there might be disagreement on whether it is. "Invalidating lived experience" seems like a thought-stopping cliche, rather than any sort of argument at all. It is a fancy way of saying "you're wrong, and I'm right!" or "you're not allowed to say that I'm wrong."
That's so interesting. For me, it's a reminder to "pause twice before telling someone how they should be interpreting their experiences relating to bigotry and abuse. Get curious instead." I guess for some people it gets translated into "You're not allowed to say I'm wrong." I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you?
As an aside, the inability to draw a clear line between abuse and other topics isn't so much of a problem for me. It is a form of Sorites paradox that we deal with in other topics all the time.
I don't exempt perceptions of bigotry from any other reported phenomena, and I think they're as valid a target for skepticism as any other.
Personally, I am liable to refrain from such discussions because they are universally fruitless, but not because of delicacy.
> I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you?
As a member of a group subject to bigotry, I see exaggerated stories deliberately weaponized, and legitimate critical thought silenced with thought-terminating cliches that include the one under discussion.
I also see folks boast "I listen to People of X!", but only paying attention to the most lurid stories, totally ignoring those who report the absence of bigotry. They're motivated by something other than the search for objective truth.
I encourage skepticism and independence of thought for all. Your curiosity should include the possibility that they're experiencing something you've never considered, but also the possibility that they're really mistaken, or exaggerating for any number of reasons.
Honestly? Don't bother. You're not going to get through to a place that doesn't instaban people who have posts like:
> frontman1988 7 days ago | on: On Aging Alone
> 40 is the prime age for men. You can easily get a younger gf from
> Thailand/Vietnam/Philippines with minimum effort. And you never know
> you might find true love (if it exists) as well.
> reply
or
> frontman1988 16 hours ago | on: Can growth
> continue?
> The solution to tackling declining population can be by generating
> Genetically modified babies. This new race of humans will be smarter
> and stronger than the current lot due to eugenics. CRISPR will make it
> possible and it's already happening in China. The west needs to look at
> it instead of ramping up immigration and importing instability from
> third world countries.
> reply
I mean, the person you're responding to hasn't taken the time to understand the base concept of "cultural appropriation", or relative disparity of experience:
> MockObject 3 months ago | parent | context |
> prev | next [–] | on: The Casio employee
> behind the “Sleng Teng” riddim ...
> This speaks to a fatal flaw with the concept of cultural appropriation.
> Ok, so a "white" person can't "speak for Native Americans", but
> a Native American can? Can any, or just certain ones? Who wins if they
> disagree?
> reply
I'm not really sure why they would show more ability to empathize here with you than they do in other threads!
What's funny here is that these people would be probated or in the case of frontman1988, banned, on SomethingAwful these days. How times have changed!
> MockObject 4 months ago | on: Being black in tech is exhausting
> I am a minority, and I am furious that my advancement is besmirched
> with the asterisk of the possibility of affirmative action. But I am
> powerless and unheard.
It appears that the end point of debates around this end in both parties having their own "lived experiences" based on fundamentally different "truths". How can anyone reach agreement on anything under these rules?
Could the element of "personal experiences" be the cause? Limiting proof points to established facts rather than subjective experience helps tremendously. Someone claiming whatever has a much more powerful voice (and is less likely to be silenced as a vocal one-off) when citing research. Similar to how academic papers don't reference the author exclusively, but rather peer papers.
Everyone has a unique and relevant perspective - lived reality is reality! But with so much noise, its far easier to dismiss individual voices than reporting on the aggregated voices of others. This filters out confounding variables and roots the hypothesis in fact (e.g. Consider an individual reporting of a nearby road keeping them awake at night. It could be they have an uncomfortable mattress, a light on in the room, or any other factor. Only when other neighbors report the same issue is the proposed cause worth a serious look).
Obviously this is more difficult in lower incident / harder to measure areas - e.g. bias, harassment, etc. Don't have a good answer here other than the burden of hard proof is unfortunately on the accuser, which leads to so many of the troubles society is grappling with today. Things like police bodycams seem to help, but resolving all disputes based on 'lived experience' doesn't seem like the best outcome.
It's rather frustrating that I specifically added in cases of "bigotry and abuse" and we're detouring into abstract epistemological discussions and trying to back fill those generalizations into the specific.
Invalidating lived experience is overwhelmingly used to describe a pattern of behavior which occurs in the realm of bias, harassment, and interpersonal conflict, not arriving at scientific or universal truths through debate.
This is much more about "Your Dad didn't hit you. That never happened," than "In my experience the Earth is flat." The suggested change in behavior also isn't "You're never wrong." It's merely the suggestion to get genuinely curious, and pausing to listen before framing someone's experience. Maybe the body cam shows otherwise, great. Getting curious tends to have a humanizing effect - the body cam evidence can wait 15 minutes.
Or to be more clear, it's a phrase which means that if a person feels victimized, their anecdotal personal account supersedes any empirical evidence.
It's essentially a new form of religious anti-intellectualism, but without identifying itself as such.
In the past, you might not have been allowed to say "no, God didn't appear to you in a vision" or "no, this event wasn't evidence of divine intervention". Today you're allowed to question someone's anecdote about religious experience, but you're not allowed to question their experience of victimization under a certain set of classes.
It's very simple. I'm not sure why we're talking about visions. If someone says, "Such and such happened to me. I think it was abuse," consider stopping to think two times before responding with "No, that didn't happen." It's the very same thing already in the HN guidelines in the form of "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine." I'm not sure why we're constructing parallels between religious interventions other than to ridicule having curious conversations instead of deciding for other people.
> I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding.
I'm assuming you're a genuine person and not a weird 8-foot-tall android robot, so I'll bless you with the same provisional magnanimity. Here's my answer in all its glory:
I am very tired of this line, to be perfectly honest. If you think it's not a genuine question, just say so; if you don’t think that, then I don’t need to hear about what you don’t think. Insincere insinuative rhetorical tricks at the start of a comment make me feel that you're not being genuine.
In future, you can just check the question mark at the end of the line. Think of it as a ‘checksum for questions’, if you will, or a bitmask.
> overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them
This is a very artful smooshing-together of "question someone's feelings" and "question the external events which [avowedly] caused them to feel that way". I have to say, I was nearly persuaded by the end of it.
I obviously agree, as anyone would, that questioning someone's feelings is absurd (outside extremely specific edge cases, as you acknowledge, like malingering). I obviously do not agree that questioning the events claimed to have caused them to feel those feelings is in any way unreasonable.
My general impression is that this is slangified verbiage used by people who want to be imprecise about the very straightforward concepts they are discussing, in order not to be pinned down on the dividing line between feelings and facts in these examples. As a wise man said, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity (not necessarily on your part, personally). I think we're unlikely even to have a productive discussion about this, much less to agree, but I figured I had to post some sort of response.
> Signifiers are often detached from what they signify
Signifiers are always detached from what they signify, or else they wouldn't be much use as a signifier.
I have used this exact phrase multiple times, but your parent's "rant full of strawmen" did make me reflect on it.
- How is "lived experience" different than "experience"?
- How can an experience be "invalidated"? What does that mean? Disrespected, discounted, something else?
I think there are great discussions to be had on the subject of listening to people's experiences without necessarily ignoring factual evidence that contradicts it. My problem is specifically with that person writing two paragraphs of literal fantasy over someone expressing themselves in a way that feels foreign to them, interestingly enough contradicting the very point they're trying to make by doing so. Just very weird, in a way I haven't seen here before.
I mostly disagree with grandparent's diagnosis of the issue, but it really doesn't seem like a normal phrase to me. I live in one of these elite coastal cities, work with mostly Ph.D's, and my primary social circles have an unusual proportion (even for where I am) of educated folks as well. The phrase reads to me much like something that came out of Google Translate -- I know what it's trying to say, but it does not seem like the way a human would say it.
Aye. Policy should be based on data. In that world, lived experience has a proper word to describe it: anecdotes. The reason there's an attempt to change the language around anecdotes is that "lived experience" is intended to be beyond argument as evidence.
The most common example I've seen at companies is when higher ups portray everything as a positive, even when a project isn't going well. Some execs have a tendency to cheerlead, rather than to be realistic.
In some cases this can amount to gaslighting, as people will be left wondering whether they're being too negative due to their own flaws.
This was my reaction too, I didn't want to comment as such earlier when it would be the only comment, but it feels like this has been propelled to the top of the front-page by the title alone.
I would hope HN would be more immune to this general online phenomenon, but these sorts of articles get ranked highly often enough that it seems like a majority of users rush to vote and opine without taking the time to read.
The post is also focused on content marketing. Many already are in agreement sales and marketing tends to be more positive because, let's face it, most of them are still coming in cold with products which are meh at best and terrible at worst.
For the majority of people, toxic positivity is a far bigger issue by having things invade their life to the point of having to sell themselves or others as far more positive than necessary, for reasons that do not reflect empirical evidence. Some people noted mass media culture of farming likes and internet points. Job interviews, performances and such are another, where negativity in any way is so taboo individuals now have to learn how to navigate a minefield of "give us criticism but don't you dare give us criticism". Most will even dare scapegoat it under "it's unprofessional to be negative".
The world sucks in a lot of ways. Yes, we don't have to keep rubbing in how much it sucks. No, we don't need to decorate it ad nauseam at every corner. The last bit will eventually explode into a counterculture where everyone berates the overly positive status quo. It already has online, just waiting for counterculture to catch up to corporate.
One of the most amusing things, for me, is watching marketing folks struggling to say "no," or disagree[0].
It seems they are trained to never say no.
I tend to keep things positive, and rely on good team dynamics (I don't like team members competing against each other).
That's not "toxic positivity." It's just common sense. We don't all have to have kum-ba-ya singalongs, but we need to treat each other with respect, and work together. I was a manager for 25 years, and my team seemed to like the environment I fostered.
I think a lot of folks are crippled by cynicism, and that can be just as bad as "toxic anything." It can completely destroy a team. Decent managers can help to defuse that.
Can you share any insights into how it gets defused? I'm a recovering cynic, and so is my manager. Sometimes we get into a feedback loop, which isn't great.
In my case, I had a team of mature, experienced developers. They all had decades of experience, and at least a couple of them, were smarter than me.
I stressed that we respect each other, and I also managed each as an individual. When there was conflict, I generally looked for common goals, and stressed them. I treated them as family. I made sure they all understood that the company's goals were always foremost to me, but that they came second; even before my own needs. I gave them whatever time they needed for family and/or personal reasons. I supported them through life crises, and had their back.
I also -and this is important- acted as a buffer between my team and my company's rather rapacious HR. This actually got me in trouble, a couple of times, but was really appreciated by my team (and also by some very highly-placed managers, in Japan).
No ridiculous team-building exercises. I used to take my team out for a nice dinner, every holiday season, and my own expense (the company would not cover that kind of thing). This was very much appreciated, and my team did not abuse it. We still get together, once a year (if possible), but these days, it's dutch.
The team stayed together and highly functional, for over 25 years. When they finally rolled it up, the engineer with the least tenure had ten years.
I'm fully expecting a deluge of fairly nasty and abusive posts about this, but that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.
Holy cow, a team running for 25 years? Thats almost an entire career.
I appreciate you being straightforward with priorities/goals (company’s THEN the individuals’). I think an awful lot of managers fail because they try to act like friends with their team and then get hit by the reality of whats expected of them and it gets real awkward at best.
Yeah. The company didn't pay especially well, so it was important to keep people, and new hiring was always painful.
Rigorous Honesty is critical in my management. I need to be honest with myself, my superiors, my coworkers, and my employees.
It's quite possible to keep things confidential without lying. I've done it for many years.
Another drawback of my style, is the employees become loyal to me, not the company. If I had left, they probably would have lost the whole team, fairly quickly. The company didn't seem to mind that.
I agree. This paragraph might explain the lack of substance:
Readable’s tone and sentiment tools help you to optimise your content for positivity. Using our sliders, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your language.
So the article is an ad for sentiment analysis and has probably been "optimized" by that tool. Hence the vacuous tone that ironically is an example of toxic positivity itself.
This article seems like an employee slyly attacking her employer with malicious compliance with the Brand Voice -- showing everyone how their product ruins writing.
Does toxic positivity also count for those who overshare online for internet points?
I think it is brave to share the human side of our lives more often, but I feel like most platforms have people sharing a bit too much from the heart. As if every post has a meaningful insight from a lived experience of the human condition.
Almost to the point where there's a lot of narcissism in self-hatred and the realization of that in a public forum.
> Airing concerns or struggles in the workplace can be really nerve-wracking. Often, we are afraid of appearing unprofessional. We fear being judged negatively. This is the perfect opportunity to practice active listening.
This ^ is toxic positivity.
I am not unpaid therapist for my work colleagues. I have my own problems.
OTOH, it’s useful to know when your colleagues are struggling, either professionally or personally. It puts their reactions into context and helps anticipating their performance. If they’re struggling, they will not be giving their best show, as will you and as will I. We’ll all drop the ball, be slower,… and knowing I should expect that helps me, because I can try to cover some of their bases, as will they when I’m struggling. There may also be some unresolved conflict in the workplace that could be lowering everyone’s performance.
There’s no need to get into details or cross over into therapy territory, but a “hey, I’m currently not doing perfectly fine” is a much appreciated heads up for me. Showing that you do care to a certain extend helps people share those feelings.
> Showing that you do care to a certain extend helps people share those feelings.
Unless you don’t actually care and can’t tell them “get your shit together on someone else’s time, dude” because that would be a micro-aggression since they don’t like being called dude.
If you can provide those kinds of affordances to someone after they've informed you that they're "struggling, either professionally or personally", then you can do it without making them have that conversation as a precondition to your charity.
If someone is struggling, that means they're vulnerable. Forcing them to take a gamble by enlarging the "surface area" of the risk that they're exposed to (by advertising it to someone else) is shitty. It punishes people who can't take that risk (in other words, the people most in need of relief) and also (separately, possibly doubly) punishes the people who manage to successfully cover their own bases without slipping or otherwise indicating that any of this is coming at great cost.
Corollary: you should assume that anyone could be struggling at any time (or all the time), and default to giving everyone whatever latitude they've earned and deserve, whether they've had an intimate heart-to-heart with you beforehand or not.
I disagree: If I assume that anyone is struggling all of the time, then I cannot prioritize assistance to those that are actually struggling - which means that those that are actually struggling loose out.
I agree that it comes with vulnerability and risk. However, I believe that the way out here is reducing the risk, by building team structures where people can talk about these issues without being punished for it. That is: Teams where people are not expected to be robots and interchangeable, but humans with strength, weaknesses and temporary or permanent challenges that need addressing.
I can't see anything here that's not solved by the simple algorithm "If someone is performing badly, help them. If they still perform badly, fire them." I don't think you need to know about their personal life. Just provide help to whoever is underperforming.
I don't see any evidence that the writer has that level of self-awareness.
I'm increasingly beginning to suspect that business culture is inherently hallucinogenic.
Between title inflation (everyone is an "executive" or maybe a "champion" and has "superpowers"), emotional distortions (don't be too negative, don't be too positive, never be sure where the line is or what the correct emotional state is), and perpetual overhyping ('Our incredible journey...') - it's very literally an altered state of consciousness designed to exclude reality.
I wonder if you have any self-awareness about the toxicity of making a presumptuous and insulting comment about me, someone you don't know, based only on an article I wrote about toxicity...
Or maybe you are just that uncaring about the impact you may have on someone's day? I can take valid criticism and have read the critique on here with genuine interest. However, I don't believe this comment about 'the writer' is necessary.
I don't see anywhere I've talked about our "incredible journey" on the post either? This is a little baffling.
I thank you for your view and engagement nonetheless.
I think it's probably not a good idea to read comments about your writing on the internet. They aren't sending them 'to you' - you've sought out this discussion - so it's on you if you choose to read people's opinions.
If you want constructive advice: try to write in the same way that you would talk. Shallowly, that means read your writing out loud – what Flaubert called his 'gueulade' – or, even better, vice versa: write down your spoken thoughts. More deeply it means not saying anything that you wouldn't say in real life. Get to the point, ditch the fluff, treat it like a (garrulous, one-sided) phone call. Have your point constantly at the front of your mind, and only say what's absolutely necessary to explain or justify it. It will improve your writing immensely.
Oh, and read Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language': https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli.... If pressed for time, then particularly the last third or so. His advice is the best you can ever hear as a writer. Reflect on your good fortune: by writing this, you've now identified what makes good writing.
Hey, thanks for your comment. I took a walk in the sunshine to decompress a bit and before I go I just wanted to pop back on to explain a couple of things. I didn't seek this out. I don't really go looking for such discussions because I'm a bit too time-starved, but someone let me know they shared my article on here because they liked it so I checked it out. Because I don't go looking for this, this hasn't really happened before (as far as I know) and it's a bit jarring to see people make assumptions about my intelligence for conforming to a style guide for accessibility reasons and practicing what the product preaches.
I want to also mention that whilst I'm sure you're trying to be helpful and not condescending, I have read Flaubert and I've read Orwell, his fiction and his work on the English Language. I have a Masters Degree in English so I've read quite a lot lol, I sound like a dickhead saying that. I only say that to contextualise that I like a lot of 18th and 19th-century Lit which has a lot of long, winding sentences; my own writing took on that character and I struggled for a long time to adapt my writing style. So if it's coming across disjointed then that's something I need to take on board because I'm writing in a style that isn't mine. Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that. Readability compliance is actually really important when it comes to inclusivity and vital things like medical literacy, which is just one of the reasons people use our product. With this being said, its effect on writing style is obviously something I need to feed back for product development so we can continue making a better, more nuanced tool. We've already made a lot of progress from readability calculators from the past and want to keep improving this technology. I'm not shy about criticism, I haven't even been shy about my username. But yeah, I don't even go here, so I don't know what the critique environment is like. Thank you for taking the time to write this, I do appreciate you're coming from a good place here.
I think one of the contributors to toxic positivity is to try to head off subthreads like this.
I spend more time than I’d like adding in positive language around everything because people overreact to anything not super positive. So to avoid people misinterpreting my comments, Ill usually add in lots of “a+,” blue ribbon, superpowers, etc blargh.
I appreciate you writing your article and participating in this thread but think we’re part of the problem.
If people are better able to accept criticism, then we’ll get more reality. Until then, I’m more likely to comment positively or not comment at all on the very likely chance that the author jumps into a thread and spazzes out on me.
I think you were trying to empathize, but I don’t think a master’s in English is necessarily useful for the topics brought up in this thread. Without more context (school, projects, interests, performance) I don’t think there’s any correlation between masters in English and ability to read and write well.
Eh, I think a Master's in English is good (a fortiori) proof that they know how to string a sentence together. I am still absolutely mystified at how they wrote that flatulent nonsense. And I mean truly, genuinely mystified, not 'mystified' as in 'clearly suspecting X or Y but not wanting to say'. It's now 100% beyond doubt, in my mind, that they are capable of writing far better than that, indeed very well by any standard, even within some given register[0]. I also don't at all buy their explanation of 'malicious compliance', considering their hurt, piqued responses to the criticism in this thread. Every possibility here makes very little sense to me.
[0] Not in a Dr Jekyll scenario, not even if in some Parfit-esque farce their brain were indexterously bisected with cheese wire and not either half but the intervenient dribble of corpus callosum attained sentience would said brain-dribble even in its admitted abjection be left with the deficit in neuronal voltage absolutely required to bring that tripe into existence, no more than I could fake a Pollock, or Infinite Jest, or Finnegans Wake.
> someone let me know they shared my article on here because they liked it so I checked it out.
> I didn’t seek this out.
Oh, come on.
> Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that.
Hmm, I suppose either the house style mandates what I would consider extremely poor writing (I won’t belabour the reasons), or the house style mandates some broadly formal style and the challenge is to write well within it. If the former, I suppose you should take my comments as applying to the house style and not your own writing ability; if the latter, I’d more or less reiterate what I said, and I doubt any non-insane style guide would, say, forbid you to use plain Anglo-Saxon words, vary your sentence length, write grammatically, etc.
In either case I admit I find it very bewildering to reconcile your well written comment with the solecisms and illiteracies that post was littered with*, or to make sense of your coming here to read and grow upset at criticism of a post which – given your now-evident possession of a brain stem – you must surely have known was atrociously written.
Thanks for your civil response, and for your taking my comment in the same spirit. It wasn't meant as a personal attack, no. It was meant to be an impersonal attack: all I knew of you was that piece of writing, and that was all I wanted to consider. Hopefully** my comment contributes to better instructing whoever and/or whatever was or were responsible for that lobotomised dross!
>I don't see anywhere I've talked about our "incredible journey" on the post either? This is a little baffling.
I'll step in to defend the OP because I know where they are coming from: your article is a drop in an ocean of a certain genre of article that HN has encountered over the years and we've devised certain aphorisms to describe them, and by association, describe the authors.
One of those is that the author is complaining, praising, making a statement about something that shows they are severely out of touch with reality. Usually it's some kind of a self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing thing that completely glosses
over red flags - like say somebody building a very eco-unsustainable house in British Columbia's mountain ranges while fawning over how eco-friendly they are in the details, missing the larger scale of problems they are (intentionally?) ignoring. Being flush with tech money does funny things to people.
Often times, however, we've seen the opposite, "Our Great Journey", which has been parodied over the years elsewhere, not just HN. It describes a PR puff piece style that glosses over the fact that a company has failed/not been profitable in it's mission and is being sold off to another company. The founders, of course, would never dare say it in those direct terms, and so the PR speak is written, copied, and eventually parodied.
And eventually we arrive to what OP is commenting on, where the language used to describe rather mediocre and boring jobs is flourished with fanciful titles/words (like "empathy superpowers"). It begs to be mocked because it's such an extravagant literal style that, at this point, we can't take seriously anymore. We've seen too much of this bullshit and it cannot be unseen. We've seen too many associations of this kind of phrasing with people who really are out of touch and whatever plights they have should at worst be ridiculed, at best be completely ignored.
Basically, it's all so tiresome.
As for your post, there's not enough meat on it. Using social media as a launchpad to talk about "toxic positivity" is fairly benign - you can find just about any stupid shit on Instagram to talk about and segue into whatever moral grandstanding you want to convey. You can find both for- and against- examples. Hell, you don't even need to give examples, you can just say such-and-such is happening, and people will nod and go with it, because who are they to know better, right?
I suspect, as with other writing I've seen before, that (a) they have no real thoughts about this topic (indeed it strikes me as very difficult for anyone to form a genuine thought about), and (b) therefore they are mechanically churning out 'content' (euch), emulating whatever examples they have seen. That's what explains so many in the comments feeling that it was produced by GPT-3.
And, let's be honest, this is only an unusually pure rendition of that genre of writing: formulaic, saccharine but detectably hollow, devoid of substance, strung together with stale clichés, seemingly written to typify an attitude (one of cultish overfriendliness without boundaries) more than what we would traditionally recognise as a 'point'.
The discomfiting feeling you get when reading it is the feeling that the author doesn't care about any of this. And that you don't blame her. It's an egg laid by a caged hen, full of sad hormones and stress. You can feel it in the way that there's nothing there above the phrasal or (at most) sentential level: no overarching purpose, every sentence out for itself with no overarching strategy from above, like an Elizabethan commonplace book full of random helpful platitudes.
It's why I recommended Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. I have never read bad writing, truly bad writing, produced by someone speaking sincerely and plainly of a subject they care about, saying something about it which they think ought to be said.
I would like to say a second thank you for your response here. The way you've expressed this gives me food for thought on how I spread my time and energy, and how it manifests in terms of quality. I'm leaving this behind me tomorrow and taking what I have found useful so I've actually screen-shotted this comment in particular to take away with me. The way you've worded the issue is thoughtful and I'm not able to respond to it point by point here but I appreciate it.
Ah, thank you - I had this thread open in a tab all day, and I'm a compulsive procrastinator (not just some amateur crastinator), hence the intermittent participation! It reads as quite pompous now that I read it back, but hey, I think that of all my comments, so I'm very happy if it was any use to you. Wishing you all the best, and that you find an opportunity to put your skills to better, worthier use. Here's to artists, chefs, and saints :)
I think people in customer-facing roles should be appreciated for their empathy but yeah I get you :) nope used the cover image ironically
Thanks for the feedback
It's more the 'champion' (her job title, not your fault) and 'superpowers' language than it is recognising and valuing someone's empathy.
It comes across as inauthentic to me, though I believe that's not the case. May also be a cultural difference (well, there certainly is, but broadly applicable to our respective nations I mean) since to me it's quite like how you can't offer a simple 'thanks' (resp. cheers!) to a shopkeeper or whoever in the US without being told 'you're so welcome', and probably to 'have a great day now'.
Yeah, I can't stand that about the US. The best supermarket experience of my life was in Croatia, in Zagreb. I asked a woman working there whether they had ice, and she just said "No." (punctuation hers), spun around, and marched off to the next thing. No "Let me see if I can find them in the warehouse, or else freeze them myself while you awkwardly wait", no "Can I help you find something else? What about some water and a freezer?", just "Nope, no ice, question answered, I'm out". I could have bought a house there, right there and then.
I find it so cringy when people hyperbole praise their co-workers. Just say she’s competent at her job. Empathy isn’t a superpower for goodness’ sake.
I had a peer who constantly referred to one of their employees as a “unicorn” for doing basic tasks. I felt bad for the employee.
I try to never work for people who call me a “rock star” or who refer to their employees as rock stars. (I’d make exceptions to work in the music industry)
Well after reading such a hard hitting article about toxic positivity, I am recommending job title change for a team member fixing bad data in accounts to "Account Wellness Champion".
The article here is a bit too fluffy. The ABC (think BBC, but Australian) covered the topic quite well via one of their radio programs / podcasts. The came at it from the context of illness, which makes it a more concrete example.
You can listen to it here, or read the transcript at the bottom:
To my mind, I think toxic is a byword for 'extreme behaviour'; and furthermore, extreme behaviour is often a symptom of a personality disorder at its most pronounced.
I think this is quite a good definition. After all, it's a key principle of toxicology - courtesy of Paracelsus - that the dose makes the poison. (Any woman who's had Botox can attest to this.) It certainly seems to be used that way in this article, in being applied to 'positivity'.
I don't mind it that much for things, but I hate it used towards people.
I think few people are that bad that you need to isolate yourself from them. In most cases, you can learn not to take their criticism, not to give into their games...
This is quite a thin article. Not really much to go on in either direction. I'd be interested in some better reading on the subject if anyone has any.
Personally, I think I see a lot more toxic negativity than toxic positivity in the world and I've rarely heard the phrase "toxic positivity" used in a justifiable situation. Not to say that toxic positivity can't exist but quite often articles discussing it come across to me as justifying a defense mechanism people use when challenged over their toxic negativity.
A lot of people just want to be modest and realistic. They don't like decorating things, telling half-truths or flat-out lying about the truth. Both being overly positive and being overly negative do this. However, from personal experience, most places which affect one's personal life and cannot be reasonably skipped (unless you wish to live close to a poverty wage, and even that is questionable) emphasize being more positive than need be. Negativity can more or less be skipped by just unplugging social media.
Take the classic "why did you leave your previous job" question in job interviews. Most people leave jobs over something which cannot be interpreted as anything else but negative. Bad bosses, bad managers, no growth, no opportunities, too little pay to support future goals. Yet negativity is a no-no (as is "greed" and a bunch of other things). So yes, most people are decorating or lying about the actual reason. And no, this question doesn't exactly indicate any kind of job performance, it's more like a hazing ritual. Same goes for other questions.
It's a weird kind of dystopia for people who are primarily logic driven and/or horrible at selling themselves, and don't have a skillset so in demand they can ignore those barriers. Let alone those who are vulnerable to this kind of behavior (people who are too modest for their own good and anxious to boot come to mind).
I quit my job because I was a bit bored, my new job isn't better, but at least I have 10 weeks of vacations, and my 35h a week allows me to enjoy my life without sacrificing either sleep or family when I'm not traveling.
Obviously not. However, most people would be flagged by the interviewer for saying "I was a bit bored", and subsequently discarded unless their skillset is hugely in demand. Modesty is only appreciated when decorated with a dose of positivity.
Firstly, job interviews are difficult but they are not dystopian. Secondly, your claim that you can skip negativity by unplugging from social media is ludicrous.
While I understand the point you're making, it is obvious why negativity is a no-no. A negative disposition makes you hard to work with and if you can't find the effort to present yourself in a positive light during a job interview, then you probably can't maintain good working relationships. Greed is a no-no in a job interview because everyone wants more pay. How does "I want more pay" differentiate you from the next applicant? I do not see this as toxic positivity - just positivity.
People can do whatever they want, I will continue to be positive toxic.
When someone asks me how I am doing I am always "great". If anything it is a form of self hypnosis to boost my own mood. Of course there is a contagion when it comes to individual mood both positive and negative.
Twitter of course is not reality. I mean this in the context of the really real world.
There was an interesting comment on HN a few weeks ago [1] where an engineer at Fast (1-click checkout) attributed their downfall [2] to "Toxic Positivity".
Thanks the the feedback everyone, I will take it on board. It wasn't intended as a lengthy deep dive, and by the nature of our product is more from a branding and customer success angle. But perhaps I should have had more outgoing links to more coverage on the topic like the ones some of you have helpfully provided. I appreciate the comments that have been constructive!
How about the toxicity of attacking positivity? This world has WAY too much negativity right now and it's downright harmful to human psyche. People are freaking giving up on the world and deciding that they should never have children because they think they'd just be bring them into a doomed world. That's when you know negativity has gone so far.
Some toxic positivity on the odd occasion to counteract the nonsensical rampant toxic negativity is fine with me. It's gotten amazingly ridiculous. People are even cheering for good things to fail now out of some kind of warped jealousy.
And no, for those who thought this, I didn't read the article.
> That's the reason they give when they are put a microphone in their face, in reality humans are pleasure utility maximizers, if you cannot extract any advantage out of kids then it's only natural that people won't have them.
Exactly. I know that having kids ruined my mother's life and trapped my parents in an unfulfilling relationship. Why would I want to waste my life raising kids, when it leads to misery (scientifically proven!) and requires so much money and time?
You're exhibiting the exact behaviour that you're chastising by negatively focusing on points the article didn't even make. The article promotes genuine positivity and human emotion whilst considering the circumstances of those around you.
I consider YouTube comments to be an example of "toxic positivity".
YouTube are using AI to only show "postive" comments first, but the overall effect is a bizarre cultish "uncanny valley" approximation of how a real community react.
Youtube comments are useless for both criticism (generally censored, either by the video creator or by youtube itself) and praise (virtually always vacuous.) The only thing they are good for is adding context or relevant anecdotes. E.g. a video about an engine may have comments from retired mechanics who've serviced that engine before.
It really depends on what kind of content you're watching though. For wide swaths of content on youtube, there is nothing worthwhile that can be said in the comment section, either because youtube wouldn't show that sort of comment, or because there's earnestly nothing to be said.
I know someone who's genuinely very positive, a rare inspiration; but he once said (on Facebook) that he never posts anything non-positive because he doesn't want to be seen as a downer. To me this was problematic, because I was personally coming to find his relentless positivity to be quite depressing.
While Toxic Positivity the term exploded in usage during the pandemic, its been a problem since before social media.
The start up I was part of in the late 90s was rife with toxic positivity, making the work place oppressive and surreal; eventually playing a large part in its failure.
I just went to a massive workshop by Esther Hicks, famous for “law of attraction” and emphasis on positive emotions for manifesting deliberate creation. She presents a classic ”New Thought” philosophy—and her ideas are a big target of those espousing the dangers of Toxic Positivity.
I was happily surprised. She emphasized the value of negative emotions, the importance of noticing and identifying negative emotions, and the importance of “not beating yourself up” about having negative emotions.
But, at the same time, she unabashedly presented moods as something that we can and should consciously control. And, she claimed that positive moods can allow good things to happen that don’t happen when we are focused on negative emotions. I’d have to write more to clarify more, but I was surprised by her nuance.
“There is just one message: You create your own reality, and —-you just gotta vibe it out.” I’ve read a ton of philosophy and I just love this. It might seem vacuous, but now that I’ve seen her, I really think it is on point.
It’s a typical phenomenon that the original message/idea is often distorted by its replication.
Usually the ideas tend to mutete to be more simple to pass on. So Balance and counterpoint is lost, but sometimes stuff is added because it helps „victims“ to pass on the narrative.
Key example is agile: key ideas are lost (continuous re-evaluation of software development and user/stakeholder interaction), while other stuff replicates under the same label like crazy (sprints, story point estimation ).
At the end of the day I find it’s totally plausible how a „manage your emotions and don’t be permanently negative, stay open and don’t reject things straight away“ can turn into something like „be positive, always, and smile at all the traffic lights on your way to work“ (no kidding)
For a more substantive analysis of how an excess of positivity is causing problems, I highly recommend Byung-Chul Han's book "The Burnout Society".
He argues that Western culture has shifted from a negative "thou shalt not" model to a positive, open-ended "you can" model, and that this is a cause of much of the depression and burnout we see today. And he says that this has happened in capitalist societies because it results in greater efficiency--it gets people to exploit themselves rather than needing to be driven by others.
The crux of it is that it's more useful to give someone a harsh truth that will help them grow (in a tactful way, while conveying that you care about them personally) rather than trying to be nice but ultimately not helping them course correct.
When people are so generously out there "helping people grow" in tactful ways, much of the time the benevolent helper doesn't actually know how to do that.
People generally make what they think are rational decisions, it always feels like extreme hubris when someone decides that they know what would be best for someone else. They can't possibly know what reasoning lead to their current course of action. Thats what makes toxic positivity toxic, its people deciding that whatever lead you to have less than a cheerleader level of positivity is irrelevant, your thoughts on the matter are irrelevant, because they know how you should feel about something and want to help you "course correct"
Just to be clear, my comment is talking about toxic positivity in the workplace (I intended to anchor my reply to another related comment) - I agree that toxic positivity regarding other people's more general problems will just minimize their decisions and experiences.
At work however, I've definitely been helped by being given direct advice on things I hadn't even been considering I could be doing better (or doing at all, as a matter of fact). Your take implies a lack of trust in the motive of the other party, which is obviously a deal breaker, and the reason why establishing trust in the first place is required.
This is really insightful and I love how it’s presented! The workplace is the most guilty of this in my experience and I wish my previous employers could’ve learned the darn difference.
(Also the nature of these comments is the ironic cherry on the vitriol cake)
I actually deleted my Instagram, along with Facebook, but I've been considering setting up some kind of photo blog where I write out detailed descriptions of the set and setting for every photo I posted there during my time on The Website.
Real life is messy, and what's important is the trendline, not individual data points.
For example, if this was ten years ago, I'd be hung over, barely able to code, trying to get through some dense cryptography paper despite never having taken calculus, nearly punching someone in a cafe because I thought I heard them use a very offensive word for black people, only to have them chuckle and explain it's the name of a group of people in the region between Russia and the parts of China that are home to a different ethnic group.
Instead, I'm running a script I wrote that will help me gather data for an investment theory I'm working on (and will test) while catching up on the news from a location other than my home, because I got tired of unusual coincidences.
You don't want to be a debbie downer, but yeah, too much positivity can be a bad thing, IMHO.
- Greg.
Edit: Whoops, hit post early. I'm still skittish in public due to COVID, sometimes I post too quickly.
I don't think it's a genuine spam comment, because it doesn't actually mention any identifiable 'opportunity'. I assume it's someone trying to make a point, though God knows what that point could be.
177 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadThis anxiety has jack to do with you actually helping them, it’s just that you get so anxious about their problems that it impedes working on your own problems.
But the exact opposite would be "What does that have to do with me?"
Trivial example - phone services with the stock "Your call is important to us but we're experiencing an unusually high level of calls right now" message. When the truth is the company is spending a bare minimum on phone support and knows it.
Or customer service scripts that say something like "I understand you're frustrated that you're having this problem."
In reality there's no understanding. And there may not even be any interest in fixing the problem - because when you read back through other messages you see the problem has been there for years and there's been absolutely no effort to find a fix.
They follow the same pattern. Start with "Hey! SomeStartup CEO here."
Then proceed to explain that they are happy about the feedbacks and that they hear the complains. Followed by more words that could have been written by GPT-3.
I resent the scripted CS, so I'm not arguing about that part of it, but I think those are actually the opposite of empathy, sociopathically inserted in order to manipulate, emotionally aware but indifferent.
Agreed, come on, splitting the sentence there just made it worse. Unlike many people, I'm not opposed to sentences that start with "but", but here it serves no purpose. It's not like we have an attention span of six words.
It feels completely disconnected from anything real, full of unevocative abstract nouns connected with unevocative abstract verbs. "Don't be too hard on yourself if you're struggling with negative thoughts" - well, what the fuck do you think 'negative thoughts' are? Reading this felt like having my teeth pulled.
I think the biggest problem, though, is that they really just do not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn't be surprised if it were written at gunpoint. We used to write essays on random subjects instead of lines as a punishment at school, and I think those essays were more enthusiastic and insightful than this one. It just meanders along, with no overarching direction or purpose, from useless bromide to useless bromide, until they get to the word count and stop, and that's it.
I get why they want you to simplify your righting, but iirc they tend to want you to target a 9th grade level and if I remember correctly when I was a senior half the people in that class could barely fucking read.
One thing I could use is an autocorrect that works. My phone things it’s appropriate to randomly change worlds like die->sue but is helpless when some other word is a single character off.
> invalidate someone's lived experience
...is particularly cringe-inducing. These are code words. This is not how any normal human in the English speaking world has ever spoken prior to exposure to a particular brand of (most often quite expensive) education, and let's be clear--that's the whole point. People train themselves to use this language as a way to demonstrate their membership or desired membership in the current socio-economic elite. It is not really any different from learning to use the "correct" fork at a 19th century dinner party, even to the point where watered-down versions of both trickling into middle class.
So let's say now you've gone and learned these phrases and weaponized your speech in this manner, great on you right? Wrong! You've lost your voice, everything you say is now constrained without the confines of this language and carries connotations set by someone else that overshadow whatever you may wish to express, but more importantly, your speech is now a constant performance. Just as how nourishment was not the point of dinner, what's being discussed is not the point of conversation when using this language. People who talk this way occasionally slip up and deviate slightly and you can hear in their voice how much anxiety this causes them, usually some small nervous joke follows. Crippling anxiety is perhaps the defining trait of these folks, to the point that many many of them, a far higher percentage than you'd expect naturally, are on some kind of anti-anxiety drugs. This risk of saying something that puts you out of step with the tastemakers grows enormously as your investment increases, better to say nothing of substance at all while using lots and lots of this language and drop in as many of these code words as possible.
(While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)
I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding. Invalidating someone's lived experience is the process by which someone more or less says, "that didn't happen to you", or "your interpretation of events that happened to you is wrong." Before we start to find edge cases like "they clearly left the door unlocked and believed it to be locked," no that's not what invalidating lived experiences pertains to. Invalidating lived experience pertains to social knowledge and interpretations usually of harmful events. Or in other words, overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them. Broad categories include, "no, that wasn't racism/sexism/bigotry that you experienced", or "no that really wasn't abusive." You might think of it as a certain kind of gaslighting.
Could there be a better name for it? Maybe? Signifiers are often detached from what they signify- it doesn't matter much to me at this point that this is the case. Let me be clear. I'm not here to discuss that this is or isn't a problem in discourse. Moving from, obtuse wording to, not-actually-a-problem is a kettle logic I don't wish to engage in.
It is a linguistic tactic that attempts to bypass debate through appeal to emotion. "You can't tell me I don't feel this way!" Correct, you feel that way, but your feelings don't magically turn assertions into fact. The objection of "invalidating lived experience" is the notion that one's feeling are facts when they are not. They are subjective impressions unsuitable as the sole grounds for action.
The mechanism behind invalidating lived experience is fundamentally a reality construction mechanism. It's goal is to construct a reality, namely by the person doing the invalidating. The reality being constructed is absent bigotry and abuse as a way of avoiding the task of confronting them directly. In short it says, "My reality is objectively true and yours is not" when the person doing the constructing hasn't the same personal encounters as the person being invalidated.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/mind-games-the-tortured-lives-of...
> Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit.
Agreed. Veiled-skepticism is, however in the case of invalidating lived experience, a powerful gaslighting tool. Discerning between the two is an additional hurdle targets of bigotry and abuse see layered on top of them.
There's no bright line between the two. Someone claims some experiences, and someone else disputes the claims. Bigotry isn't necessarily a factor, or, there might be disagreement on whether it is. "Invalidating lived experience" seems like a thought-stopping cliche, rather than any sort of argument at all. It is a fancy way of saying "you're wrong, and I'm right!" or "you're not allowed to say that I'm wrong."
As an aside, the inability to draw a clear line between abuse and other topics isn't so much of a problem for me. It is a form of Sorites paradox that we deal with in other topics all the time.
Personally, I am liable to refrain from such discussions because they are universally fruitless, but not because of delicacy.
> I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you?
As a member of a group subject to bigotry, I see exaggerated stories deliberately weaponized, and legitimate critical thought silenced with thought-terminating cliches that include the one under discussion.
I also see folks boast "I listen to People of X!", but only paying attention to the most lurid stories, totally ignoring those who report the absence of bigotry. They're motivated by something other than the search for objective truth.
I encourage skepticism and independence of thought for all. Your curiosity should include the possibility that they're experiencing something you've never considered, but also the possibility that they're really mistaken, or exaggerating for any number of reasons.
What's funny here is that these people would be probated or in the case of frontman1988, banned, on SomethingAwful these days. How times have changed!
Could the element of "personal experiences" be the cause? Limiting proof points to established facts rather than subjective experience helps tremendously. Someone claiming whatever has a much more powerful voice (and is less likely to be silenced as a vocal one-off) when citing research. Similar to how academic papers don't reference the author exclusively, but rather peer papers.
Everyone has a unique and relevant perspective - lived reality is reality! But with so much noise, its far easier to dismiss individual voices than reporting on the aggregated voices of others. This filters out confounding variables and roots the hypothesis in fact (e.g. Consider an individual reporting of a nearby road keeping them awake at night. It could be they have an uncomfortable mattress, a light on in the room, or any other factor. Only when other neighbors report the same issue is the proposed cause worth a serious look).
Obviously this is more difficult in lower incident / harder to measure areas - e.g. bias, harassment, etc. Don't have a good answer here other than the burden of hard proof is unfortunately on the accuser, which leads to so many of the troubles society is grappling with today. Things like police bodycams seem to help, but resolving all disputes based on 'lived experience' doesn't seem like the best outcome.
Invalidating lived experience is overwhelmingly used to describe a pattern of behavior which occurs in the realm of bias, harassment, and interpersonal conflict, not arriving at scientific or universal truths through debate.
This is much more about "Your Dad didn't hit you. That never happened," than "In my experience the Earth is flat." The suggested change in behavior also isn't "You're never wrong." It's merely the suggestion to get genuinely curious, and pausing to listen before framing someone's experience. Maybe the body cam shows otherwise, great. Getting curious tends to have a humanizing effect - the body cam evidence can wait 15 minutes.
It's essentially a new form of religious anti-intellectualism, but without identifying itself as such.
In the past, you might not have been allowed to say "no, God didn't appear to you in a vision" or "no, this event wasn't evidence of divine intervention". Today you're allowed to question someone's anecdote about religious experience, but you're not allowed to question their experience of victimization under a certain set of classes.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
I'm assuming you're a genuine person and not a weird 8-foot-tall android robot, so I'll bless you with the same provisional magnanimity. Here's my answer in all its glory:
I am very tired of this line, to be perfectly honest. If you think it's not a genuine question, just say so; if you don’t think that, then I don’t need to hear about what you don’t think. Insincere insinuative rhetorical tricks at the start of a comment make me feel that you're not being genuine.
In future, you can just check the question mark at the end of the line. Think of it as a ‘checksum for questions’, if you will, or a bitmask.
> overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them
This is a very artful smooshing-together of "question someone's feelings" and "question the external events which [avowedly] caused them to feel that way". I have to say, I was nearly persuaded by the end of it.
I obviously agree, as anyone would, that questioning someone's feelings is absurd (outside extremely specific edge cases, as you acknowledge, like malingering). I obviously do not agree that questioning the events claimed to have caused them to feel those feelings is in any way unreasonable.
My general impression is that this is slangified verbiage used by people who want to be imprecise about the very straightforward concepts they are discussing, in order not to be pinned down on the dividing line between feelings and facts in these examples. As a wise man said, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity (not necessarily on your part, personally). I think we're unlikely even to have a productive discussion about this, much less to agree, but I figured I had to post some sort of response.
> Signifiers are often detached from what they signify
Signifiers are always detached from what they signify, or else they wouldn't be much use as a signifier.
> These are code words
Jargon for me, code words for thee.
I also found these articles/posts to be pretty decent: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395... https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-being-told-cheer-up-th...
In some cases this can amount to gaslighting, as people will be left wondering whether they're being too negative due to their own flaws.
For the majority of people, toxic positivity is a far bigger issue by having things invade their life to the point of having to sell themselves or others as far more positive than necessary, for reasons that do not reflect empirical evidence. Some people noted mass media culture of farming likes and internet points. Job interviews, performances and such are another, where negativity in any way is so taboo individuals now have to learn how to navigate a minefield of "give us criticism but don't you dare give us criticism". Most will even dare scapegoat it under "it's unprofessional to be negative".
The world sucks in a lot of ways. Yes, we don't have to keep rubbing in how much it sucks. No, we don't need to decorate it ad nauseam at every corner. The last bit will eventually explode into a counterculture where everyone berates the overly positive status quo. It already has online, just waiting for counterculture to catch up to corporate.
It seems they are trained to never say no.
I tend to keep things positive, and rely on good team dynamics (I don't like team members competing against each other).
That's not "toxic positivity." It's just common sense. We don't all have to have kum-ba-ya singalongs, but we need to treat each other with respect, and work together. I was a manager for 25 years, and my team seemed to like the environment I fostered.
I think a lot of folks are crippled by cynicism, and that can be just as bad as "toxic anything." It can completely destroy a team. Decent managers can help to defuse that.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34UzHo4G5w
Can you share any insights into how it gets defused? I'm a recovering cynic, and so is my manager. Sometimes we get into a feedback loop, which isn't great.
I stressed that we respect each other, and I also managed each as an individual. When there was conflict, I generally looked for common goals, and stressed them. I treated them as family. I made sure they all understood that the company's goals were always foremost to me, but that they came second; even before my own needs. I gave them whatever time they needed for family and/or personal reasons. I supported them through life crises, and had their back.
I also -and this is important- acted as a buffer between my team and my company's rather rapacious HR. This actually got me in trouble, a couple of times, but was really appreciated by my team (and also by some very highly-placed managers, in Japan).
No ridiculous team-building exercises. I used to take my team out for a nice dinner, every holiday season, and my own expense (the company would not cover that kind of thing). This was very much appreciated, and my team did not abuse it. We still get together, once a year (if possible), but these days, it's dutch.
The team stayed together and highly functional, for over 25 years. When they finally rolled it up, the engineer with the least tenure had ten years.
I'm fully expecting a deluge of fairly nasty and abusive posts about this, but that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.
I appreciate you being straightforward with priorities/goals (company’s THEN the individuals’). I think an awful lot of managers fail because they try to act like friends with their team and then get hit by the reality of whats expected of them and it gets real awkward at best.
Rigorous Honesty is critical in my management. I need to be honest with myself, my superiors, my coworkers, and my employees.
It's quite possible to keep things confidential without lying. I've done it for many years.
Another drawback of my style, is the employees become loyal to me, not the company. If I had left, they probably would have lost the whole team, fairly quickly. The company didn't seem to mind that.
For toxic positivity, I call it old-fashioned denial, mixed in with a lot of bullshit.
Readable’s tone and sentiment tools help you to optimise your content for positivity. Using our sliders, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your language.
So the article is an ad for sentiment analysis and has probably been "optimized" by that tool. Hence the vacuous tone that ironically is an example of toxic positivity itself.
There's probably something about excess positivity that's worth talking about. This isn't it.
I think it is brave to share the human side of our lives more often, but I feel like most platforms have people sharing a bit too much from the heart. As if every post has a meaningful insight from a lived experience of the human condition.
Almost to the point where there's a lot of narcissism in self-hatred and the realization of that in a public forum.
This ^ is toxic positivity. I am not unpaid therapist for my work colleagues. I have my own problems.
There’s no need to get into details or cross over into therapy territory, but a “hey, I’m currently not doing perfectly fine” is a much appreciated heads up for me. Showing that you do care to a certain extend helps people share those feelings.
Unless you don’t actually care and can’t tell them “get your shit together on someone else’s time, dude” because that would be a micro-aggression since they don’t like being called dude.
If someone is struggling, that means they're vulnerable. Forcing them to take a gamble by enlarging the "surface area" of the risk that they're exposed to (by advertising it to someone else) is shitty. It punishes people who can't take that risk (in other words, the people most in need of relief) and also (separately, possibly doubly) punishes the people who manage to successfully cover their own bases without slipping or otherwise indicating that any of this is coming at great cost.
Corollary: you should assume that anyone could be struggling at any time (or all the time), and default to giving everyone whatever latitude they've earned and deserve, whether they've had an intimate heart-to-heart with you beforehand or not.
I agree that it comes with vulnerability and risk. However, I believe that the way out here is reducing the risk, by building team structures where people can talk about these issues without being punished for it. That is: Teams where people are not expected to be robots and interchangeable, but humans with strength, weaknesses and temporary or permanent challenges that need addressing.
People are very much paid to interact with colleagues in constructive manners, including understanding and addressing concerns.
> I asked our Customer Success Champion, Natasha, about this topic. Empathy is one of her many superpowers.
Groan!
... unless I misunderstood it... now I'm wondering if the 'think positive' lead image was used unironically..?
I'm increasingly beginning to suspect that business culture is inherently hallucinogenic.
Between title inflation (everyone is an "executive" or maybe a "champion" and has "superpowers"), emotional distortions (don't be too negative, don't be too positive, never be sure where the line is or what the correct emotional state is), and perpetual overhyping ('Our incredible journey...') - it's very literally an altered state of consciousness designed to exclude reality.
If you want constructive advice: try to write in the same way that you would talk. Shallowly, that means read your writing out loud – what Flaubert called his 'gueulade' – or, even better, vice versa: write down your spoken thoughts. More deeply it means not saying anything that you wouldn't say in real life. Get to the point, ditch the fluff, treat it like a (garrulous, one-sided) phone call. Have your point constantly at the front of your mind, and only say what's absolutely necessary to explain or justify it. It will improve your writing immensely.
Oh, and read Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language': https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli.... If pressed for time, then particularly the last third or so. His advice is the best you can ever hear as a writer. Reflect on your good fortune: by writing this, you've now identified what makes good writing.
I spend more time than I’d like adding in positive language around everything because people overreact to anything not super positive. So to avoid people misinterpreting my comments, Ill usually add in lots of “a+,” blue ribbon, superpowers, etc blargh.
I appreciate you writing your article and participating in this thread but think we’re part of the problem.
If people are better able to accept criticism, then we’ll get more reality. Until then, I’m more likely to comment positively or not comment at all on the very likely chance that the author jumps into a thread and spazzes out on me.
I think you were trying to empathize, but I don’t think a master’s in English is necessarily useful for the topics brought up in this thread. Without more context (school, projects, interests, performance) I don’t think there’s any correlation between masters in English and ability to read and write well.
[0] Not in a Dr Jekyll scenario, not even if in some Parfit-esque farce their brain were indexterously bisected with cheese wire and not either half but the intervenient dribble of corpus callosum attained sentience would said brain-dribble even in its admitted abjection be left with the deficit in neuronal voltage absolutely required to bring that tripe into existence, no more than I could fake a Pollock, or Infinite Jest, or Finnegans Wake.
> I didn’t seek this out.
Oh, come on.
> Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that.
Hmm, I suppose either the house style mandates what I would consider extremely poor writing (I won’t belabour the reasons), or the house style mandates some broadly formal style and the challenge is to write well within it. If the former, I suppose you should take my comments as applying to the house style and not your own writing ability; if the latter, I’d more or less reiterate what I said, and I doubt any non-insane style guide would, say, forbid you to use plain Anglo-Saxon words, vary your sentence length, write grammatically, etc.
In either case I admit I find it very bewildering to reconcile your well written comment with the solecisms and illiteracies that post was littered with*, or to make sense of your coming here to read and grow upset at criticism of a post which – given your now-evident possession of a brain stem – you must surely have known was atrociously written.
Thanks for your civil response, and for your taking my comment in the same spirit. It wasn't meant as a personal attack, no. It was meant to be an impersonal attack: all I knew of you was that piece of writing, and that was all I wanted to consider. Hopefully** my comment contributes to better instructing whoever and/or whatever was or were responsible for that lobotomised dross!
* With which that post… **Yeah, yeah, ok
I'll step in to defend the OP because I know where they are coming from: your article is a drop in an ocean of a certain genre of article that HN has encountered over the years and we've devised certain aphorisms to describe them, and by association, describe the authors.
One of those is that the author is complaining, praising, making a statement about something that shows they are severely out of touch with reality. Usually it's some kind of a self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing thing that completely glosses over red flags - like say somebody building a very eco-unsustainable house in British Columbia's mountain ranges while fawning over how eco-friendly they are in the details, missing the larger scale of problems they are (intentionally?) ignoring. Being flush with tech money does funny things to people.
Often times, however, we've seen the opposite, "Our Great Journey", which has been parodied over the years elsewhere, not just HN. It describes a PR puff piece style that glosses over the fact that a company has failed/not been profitable in it's mission and is being sold off to another company. The founders, of course, would never dare say it in those direct terms, and so the PR speak is written, copied, and eventually parodied.
And eventually we arrive to what OP is commenting on, where the language used to describe rather mediocre and boring jobs is flourished with fanciful titles/words (like "empathy superpowers"). It begs to be mocked because it's such an extravagant literal style that, at this point, we can't take seriously anymore. We've seen too much of this bullshit and it cannot be unseen. We've seen too many associations of this kind of phrasing with people who really are out of touch and whatever plights they have should at worst be ridiculed, at best be completely ignored.
Basically, it's all so tiresome.
As for your post, there's not enough meat on it. Using social media as a launchpad to talk about "toxic positivity" is fairly benign - you can find just about any stupid shit on Instagram to talk about and segue into whatever moral grandstanding you want to convey. You can find both for- and against- examples. Hell, you don't even need to give examples, you can just say such-and-such is happening, and people will nod and go with it, because who are they to know better, right?
And, let's be honest, this is only an unusually pure rendition of that genre of writing: formulaic, saccharine but detectably hollow, devoid of substance, strung together with stale clichés, seemingly written to typify an attitude (one of cultish overfriendliness without boundaries) more than what we would traditionally recognise as a 'point'.
The discomfiting feeling you get when reading it is the feeling that the author doesn't care about any of this. And that you don't blame her. It's an egg laid by a caged hen, full of sad hormones and stress. You can feel it in the way that there's nothing there above the phrasal or (at most) sentential level: no overarching purpose, every sentence out for itself with no overarching strategy from above, like an Elizabethan commonplace book full of random helpful platitudes.
It's why I recommended Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. I have never read bad writing, truly bad writing, produced by someone speaking sincerely and plainly of a subject they care about, saying something about it which they think ought to be said.
It comes across as inauthentic to me, though I believe that's not the case. May also be a cultural difference (well, there certainly is, but broadly applicable to our respective nations I mean) since to me it's quite like how you can't offer a simple 'thanks' (resp. cheers!) to a shopkeeper or whoever in the US without being told 'you're so welcome', and probably to 'have a great day now'.
I had a peer who constantly referred to one of their employees as a “unicorn” for doing basic tasks. I felt bad for the employee.
I try to never work for people who call me a “rock star” or who refer to their employees as rock stars. (I’d make exceptions to work in the music industry)
You can listen to it here, or read the transcript at the bottom:
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/t...
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395...
https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-being-told-cheer-up-th...
And I haven't read it yet, but I saw a new book on the subject is out "Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy": https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Positivity-Keeping-World-Obsess...
Although shitty articles sometimes give nice topics for a better discussion here in the comments, so why not.
Not be confused with Dave Chappelle's sitcom https://youtu.be/D3U55usfJK8
e.g. You've had a bad day at work:
Negative: Being a bit withdrawn and avoiding conversation
Toxically negative: Shouting at your wife and kids
Maybe there could also be a side definition for running competitively in a nuclear contamination zone though!
I think few people are that bad that you need to isolate yourself from them. In most cases, you can learn not to take their criticism, not to give into their games...
Personally, I think I see a lot more toxic negativity than toxic positivity in the world and I've rarely heard the phrase "toxic positivity" used in a justifiable situation. Not to say that toxic positivity can't exist but quite often articles discussing it come across to me as justifying a defense mechanism people use when challenged over their toxic negativity.
Take the classic "why did you leave your previous job" question in job interviews. Most people leave jobs over something which cannot be interpreted as anything else but negative. Bad bosses, bad managers, no growth, no opportunities, too little pay to support future goals. Yet negativity is a no-no (as is "greed" and a bunch of other things). So yes, most people are decorating or lying about the actual reason. And no, this question doesn't exactly indicate any kind of job performance, it's more like a hazing ritual. Same goes for other questions.
It's a weird kind of dystopia for people who are primarily logic driven and/or horrible at selling themselves, and don't have a skillset so in demand they can ignore those barriers. Let alone those who are vulnerable to this kind of behavior (people who are too modest for their own good and anxious to boot come to mind).
Is this toxic positivity?
A better opportunity presented itself.
Or, “Why are you looking?”
Exploring better opportunities more suited to my skills and personality.
It’s fairly easy to not lie and present things in a favorable way.
While I understand the point you're making, it is obvious why negativity is a no-no. A negative disposition makes you hard to work with and if you can't find the effort to present yourself in a positive light during a job interview, then you probably can't maintain good working relationships. Greed is a no-no in a job interview because everyone wants more pay. How does "I want more pay" differentiate you from the next applicant? I do not see this as toxic positivity - just positivity.
When someone asks me how I am doing I am always "great". If anything it is a form of self hypnosis to boost my own mood. Of course there is a contagion when it comes to individual mood both positive and negative.
Twitter of course is not reality. I mean this in the context of the really real world.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947595
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/04/05/1091077398/checkout-startup-f...
Some toxic positivity on the odd occasion to counteract the nonsensical rampant toxic negativity is fine with me. It's gotten amazingly ridiculous. People are even cheering for good things to fail now out of some kind of warped jealousy.
And no, for those who thought this, I didn't read the article.
Exactly. I know that having kids ruined my mother's life and trapped my parents in an unfulfilling relationship. Why would I want to waste my life raising kids, when it leads to misery (scientifically proven!) and requires so much money and time?
1. I have kids (n=4) 2. I'm not miserable. In fact, the opposite.
Myth Busted!
Please take a second to read the HN guidelines if you genuinely want to make HN (and the world) a more positive and constructive place: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
YouTube are using AI to only show "postive" comments first, but the overall effect is a bizarre cultish "uncanny valley" approximation of how a real community react.
I pity anyone who doesn't already have a big subscription list of the small segment of quality YouTubers.
It really depends on what kind of content you're watching though. For wide swaths of content on youtube, there is nothing worthwhile that can be said in the comment section, either because youtube wouldn't show that sort of comment, or because there's earnestly nothing to be said.
The start up I was part of in the late 90s was rife with toxic positivity, making the work place oppressive and surreal; eventually playing a large part in its failure.
I was happily surprised. She emphasized the value of negative emotions, the importance of noticing and identifying negative emotions, and the importance of “not beating yourself up” about having negative emotions.
But, at the same time, she unabashedly presented moods as something that we can and should consciously control. And, she claimed that positive moods can allow good things to happen that don’t happen when we are focused on negative emotions. I’d have to write more to clarify more, but I was surprised by her nuance.
“There is just one message: You create your own reality, and —-you just gotta vibe it out.” I’ve read a ton of philosophy and I just love this. It might seem vacuous, but now that I’ve seen her, I really think it is on point.
Usually the ideas tend to mutete to be more simple to pass on. So Balance and counterpoint is lost, but sometimes stuff is added because it helps „victims“ to pass on the narrative.
Key example is agile: key ideas are lost (continuous re-evaluation of software development and user/stakeholder interaction), while other stuff replicates under the same label like crazy (sprints, story point estimation ).
At the end of the day I find it’s totally plausible how a „manage your emotions and don’t be permanently negative, stay open and don’t reject things straight away“ can turn into something like „be positive, always, and smile at all the traffic lights on your way to work“ (no kidding)
He argues that Western culture has shifted from a negative "thou shalt not" model to a positive, open-ended "you can" model, and that this is a cause of much of the depression and burnout we see today. And he says that this has happened in capitalist societies because it results in greater efficiency--it gets people to exploit themselves rather than needing to be driven by others.
The crux of it is that it's more useful to give someone a harsh truth that will help them grow (in a tactful way, while conveying that you care about them personally) rather than trying to be nice but ultimately not helping them course correct.
People generally make what they think are rational decisions, it always feels like extreme hubris when someone decides that they know what would be best for someone else. They can't possibly know what reasoning lead to their current course of action. Thats what makes toxic positivity toxic, its people deciding that whatever lead you to have less than a cheerleader level of positivity is irrelevant, your thoughts on the matter are irrelevant, because they know how you should feel about something and want to help you "course correct"
At work however, I've definitely been helped by being given direct advice on things I hadn't even been considering I could be doing better (or doing at all, as a matter of fact). Your take implies a lack of trust in the motive of the other party, which is obviously a deal breaker, and the reason why establishing trust in the first place is required.
Thanks a lot for sharing this!
I actually deleted my Instagram, along with Facebook, but I've been considering setting up some kind of photo blog where I write out detailed descriptions of the set and setting for every photo I posted there during my time on The Website.
Real life is messy, and what's important is the trendline, not individual data points.
For example, if this was ten years ago, I'd be hung over, barely able to code, trying to get through some dense cryptography paper despite never having taken calculus, nearly punching someone in a cafe because I thought I heard them use a very offensive word for black people, only to have them chuckle and explain it's the name of a group of people in the region between Russia and the parts of China that are home to a different ethnic group.
Instead, I'm running a script I wrote that will help me gather data for an investment theory I'm working on (and will test) while catching up on the news from a location other than my home, because I got tired of unusual coincidences.
You don't want to be a debbie downer, but yeah, too much positivity can be a bad thing, IMHO.
- Greg.
Edit: Whoops, hit post early. I'm still skittish in public due to COVID, sometimes I post too quickly.