Off Centre | Zero-sum game: how the positivity industry prefers us to worry
Believing that we're doing brilliantly in life is a lucrative business for self-help gurus, but we can't be winners all the time, can we?
I've been receiving a torrent of communications from the positive thinking brigade lately. I don't know what prompted it. Maybe it was something I googled. Or something I wrote on here: maybe I create such an impression of charlatanry that I’ve been fingered for susceptibility to charlatanry in general. Reader, how should I know?
At any rate, the email invites have been coming thick and fast: from mind coaches and self-belief gurus, character educators and positivity activators. They wish to show me the way, they say, to unbridled confidence, success, happiness. Some merely offer to help me build my “personal brand”.
As described in The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-being, a recent book by a chap named William Davies, this is all very lucrative stuff. Vast operations are at work nowadays to benefit from making us worry – about how optimally engaged we are in our jobs; how fulfilled and confident we are in ourselves; in short, how brilliantly we're doing. I doubt very much if the sum of human happiness is increased at all.
According to Davies some occupational psychologists are keen on companies sacking workers who do not show the proper enthusiasm for their advances. The Maoist tenor of that approach might sound a little extreme, but it does seem to chime with my experience on the handful of occasions when I have been forced by employers to attend motivational workshops and the like.
What I have noticed, see, is that for everyone in these situations who instinctively gets it, for everyone who has his or her self-belief calibrated the way the psychologists might desire, others are there out of fear: fear of not getting ahead; worse, of being left behind. Often they appear to have been ambushed by the notion that being bumptious and insufferable is the only way to get where they want to be.
Perhaps the idea that most frightens such people, then, is this: that self-belief and self-promotion may not in fact be enough, on their own, to guarantee making it to the top, that no matter how good your personal brand or your CV, unfortunately other factors, such as ability and, yes, connections, also come into play.
