Positivity vs. negativity

In preparation for my upcoming Purpose Project launch, I recently read Byung-Chul Han’s 2010 book The Burnout Society. I loved it. But it was also quite heady and dense. There was far more in it than I could hope to summarize and reflect on in one short blog post.

But one concept I found particularly insightful is Han’s distinction between positivity and negativity.

When we think of positivity and negativity, we typically think of good and bad. Positivity is desirable. And negativity is undesirable.

This is not how Han means it. Rather, in this context, negativity is essentially about not doing things and saying “no.” At its best, this looks like contemplation, temperance, spaciousness, and so on. At its worst, this might look much more like repression and self-denial.

In contrast, Han’s positivity refers to doing things and saying “yes.” At its best, this leads to growth and achievement. But at its worst, it leads to stress, burnout, overwhelm, and a range of mental health disorders.

Han contends that over the decades and centuries, we’ve transformed from a repression/negativity-based society to an achievement/productivity/positivity-based society. We are now inundated with positivity. We essentially all now enslave ourselves to a never-ending cycle of productivity and self-optimization. We’ve become addicted to the endless onslaught of positivity: sugar, porn, global news, social media, self-help seminars, career opportunities, new relationships, and on and on. And because of it, we are deeply exhausted, unwell, and more dissociated from our sense of self.

Neither positivity nor negativity, in this sense, is good or bad per se. They form a polarity. We do and feel our best when they are in healthy balance with one another. In past centuries, we’ve had excess negativity and repression. This was a serious problem that caused widespread harm to society.

But today, most of us are sorely imbalanced toward excess positivity. In fact, it’s one of the defining traits of the modern age. We drive ourselves crazy by constantly blacking out our calendars and flooding our brains with a constant rush of dopamine.

So many of us who want to do good in the world come from this same paradigm. We go, go, go. We keep saying “yes” even when we don’t have the time, energy, or genuine desire to do so. We make ourselves unwell trying to do good in the world.

We fail to recognize that perhaps the most revolutionary and transformative thing we can do is to simply learn to say “no,” to liberate ourselves from our self-imposed need to be constantly productive, to resist the onslaught of positivity.