Response Paper #3, Option 2

After having finished reading Chapter 6 of Ehrenreich’s book, I am undecided.  Throughout the chapter, I was getting really irritated by almost everything she was writing, because it felt like all she was doing was complaining about things that were completely irrelevant to positive psychology or anything else that she seemed to be originally trying to prove. It took me until page 170 to finally find some common ground with her and stop feeling like I wanted to throw this chapter out a window.

As I read, I took notes in the margins of the ideas or opinions that immediately popped into my head, so I could refer to them later on.

In the very first paragraph of the chapter, she’s describing a pessimistic man winning an election regardless of his negativity. I think that’s a normal thing that happens to everyone.  Did any of you notice that sometimes, when you think you did horribly on a test, you almost never get a result that’s nearly as bad as you expected it to be? I know that happens to me all the time. Maybe we just expect the worst so that we can be pleasantly surprised when we have good results? After all, that’s better than expecting a really high grade and then being devastated when you get your low results.

One moment of this chapter in which the author really irritated me was in her description of her meeting with Seligman, on page 152-153.  She began describing several things that delayed her interviewing him, and in my opinion she just spends way too much time complaining about it. Are you trying to talk to me about positive psychology or are you just trying to bash on this guy that you want to interview? Because it seems to me like she’s lost focus here. Do I care that he made you wait in his office while he spoke on the phone? What does that matter to me? Focus on the facts: if you want to show that he’s inconsistent, just provide detailed information about instances when he was inconsistent (which she did later on, towards the end of the chapter), don’t waste words on trying to make him out to be a bad person because he made you wait an extra few minutes in his office, or because he wanted to go to the museum.

And again on page 153 she says “Like most lay books on positive thinking, it’s a jumble of anecdotes….” Is her complaint about being in his office not an anecdote?

It seems to me that reading this chapter was almost like reading a manuscript of a documentary. She seems to be like an investigative journalist. She probably claims to be searching for the truth but in reality she is just angry with optimists (for whatever reason) and it seems to be part of her agenda to bash their ideas. She takes every positive thing she possibly can and turns it into something negative.

I think what she’s trying to show is that optimism makes you stray from realism. But she tends to stray from this idea and a lot of her evidence of this only points to the idea that optimism should instead be pessimism. She herself is a pessimistic person, which is clearly shown when she received a low score on the Authentic Happiness Inventory and on one of the questions even confessed that she was pessimistic about the future. Have you ever heard of the saying “misery needs company”? Seems like she’s miserable to me.

The thing that irks me most of all about her writing is the fact that she’s bashing something that does help some people. Yes, self-help books are not the cure to all problems, and they make it seem like changing your life is as easy as 1-2-3. Obviously, self-help books are not perfect. First of all, some of them are good and some are bad. But honestly, are there not people who are helped by these books? I’m sure the authors of self-help books don’t write the books with a goal in mind of helping all 6 billion people inhabiting this planet. It’s not possible. But, if the books do help SOME people, why bash them? I think that if there are people out there reading these books and improving their lives as a result, what’s so bad about that? Can’t you say the same thing about medicine? Medicine does not always work on all people. Each person has their own individual health situation and it’s not always that medical professionals are able to help them. Does that mean we should just completely outlaw the science of medicine? If anti-depressants don’t help 100% of the people who take them, should they just be completely stricken off the market?

What I did find interesting about this chapter was the fact that in order to get a Templeton award, you can’t have null results. So this is probably the incentive that fuels positive psychologists’ ulterior motives of finding and publishing only positive news about positive psychology. Another thing she said that I really liked was on page 172: “Why advocate for better jobs and schools, safer neighborhoods, universal health insurance, or any other liberal desideratum if these measures will do little to make people happy?” Seligman apparently doesn’t believe there’s a point in social activism. So it seems he’s just encouraging people to stop trying to change the world, and rather to just accept it just the way it is and learn to be happy about it.  Perhaps a better way to phrase his thinking, in my opinion, would be to have people still trying to make improvements and positive changes in the world, but simply to teach them not to get discouraged or upset when things don’t work out (because oftentimes they won’t).

Basically, I think Ehrenreich definitely did her research when writing this book. She brings in a lot of different sources of evidence. However, just because there’s evidence, doesn’t mean she’s completely correct. She only shows one side of the story. It would be interesting to do research about positive psychology from all different aspects of it, and only then making a conclusion about it.