A lot of the social dysfunction of the US can be traced to the uncritical positivity of the culture. It’s practically illegal to be sad. Sadness is a problem to be solved with good ol’ Yankee ingenuity. Eliminated from the collective psyche like a smallpox of the soul.
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Yeah, surprising to me how useful it's been learning to let myself be as fully sad as the experience requires
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Took me years to drop bullshit notions of it being bad mental hygiene or a sign of weakness to be sad. In fact it’s a sign of weakness to knee-jerk resist sadness.
Calvinism plus Positive Mental Attitude philosophy
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Barbara Ehrenteich had a book length version of that case, Bright-sided
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yeah, same. I also had this notion that if I let myself feel really sad, I wouldn't recover. Turns out it's the opposite, I recover very quickly once I've let myself mourn a bit.
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