The background image is a muted-filtered dark photo of a winding asphalt walking path through a foggy wooded area. The white serif font reads, “WALK yourself out of your bad mood. Studies show that even a 10-minute walk immediately BOOSTS brain chemistry to increase happiness.” -Karen Salmansohn.” The macro itself is attributed to “Inspiring Quotes.”
Fuck therapy, sad sacks.
Y’all obviously aren’t walking enough.
Who needs drugs to manage their mental illnesses when plain old movin’ your body parts will do the trick?
And just to preemptively address the anger I’ve created in the pro-walking community I’m imagining in my mind: please recognize your big feelings and take a few moments to sit with them. (That’s the kind of advice I’ve always resented, because it actually is pretty helpful.)
I’m not writing this up because I don’t think walks can ever be good for anyone’s mental state.
I advocate for movement when feeling funky, in all senses of the word.
And it’s true that the reasons walking can help boost your mood actually do boil down to “brain chemistry,” since chemical reactions in your brain literally inform your experience of every single thing.
But people don’t die by suicide because they’re a little grumpy about missing their evening constitutional.
Consider the possibility, if you have not experienced depression (or if you have experienced it in the past but feel better now) and you agree with the sentiments expressed in this macro, that you might be projecting your own experience onto people who are dealing with something very different from your own experience.
It may not have been the intent of the original author to go into full medication-shaming mode, but those sentiments are rampant in Positive Thinking Land.
I Googled the person that the quote is attributed to, and I had to go take a 10-minute walk to be able to review her site more charitably.
I will just say this: I came across another pithy quote macro on her site in which she introduces her proposal for coining the new word “blesson.”
This is indeed an unfortunate blending of “blessing” and “lesson,” which she defines as “what happens when you see the blessing in the lesson that your challenge taught you.”
I’m clearly not her target demographic. It looks like she probably offers some decent resources that aren’t entirely shame-based or victim-blamey, but her whole ethos is buried under so much toxic positivity that I can’t take the good parts seriously.
To each their own. If she has helped you in the past or seems helpful now, I do genuinely want for you to be helped. Please try to hold onto at least a kernel of the healthy skepticism I advocate for, but do what you need to do for you.
Onward.
We all know that Big Pharma sucks, right?
A lot of kinds of research-based evidence for medicating all kinds of mental health diagnoses are actually sketchy as hell.
And at the same time, casting aspersions on the people who have chosen to rely on available medication to make their lives feel more manageable is not going to cause the collapse of the legal drug industry any time soon.
I get the impression that arguments like this one – the old “have you tried NATURE?” schtick – are not about resistance to capitalist neoliberal oligarchy etc. as much as they are about preserving the moral high ground that appears to exist within the WellnessTM branch of that same oligarchy.
Psychiatry’s public-facing emphasis on brain chemistry is to some degree an effort to legitimize the medical reality of potentially life-threatening diagnoses like depression.
I mean, there’s also dirty money and institutional pressure to pathologize humans’ normal reactions to abnormally difficult situations.
You win some, you lose some.
Even if that emphasis on brain chemistry began as a tool of the pharmaceutical industry, it’s still true that the concept has helped muster more widespread support for letting people seek help for their problems.
Concepts like “brain chemistry” have also become part of public discourse because there are a lot of non-depressed people who prefer to assume that depressed people are just bad at existing.
It’s still important to legitimize the fact that depressed people need support, even if drug companies will inevitably exploit that information .
The point here is that there are lots of internet folx (who, it turns out, also exist in the non-internet world) who don’t believe in using medication to balance out “brain chemicals” because they are super sure that there are better ways to get un-depressed than “professional medical treatment.”
I mean, sure.
Sweeping structural and systemic change that prioritizes individual security, access to health care, and an overall sense of purpose are really nice ways to combat depression.
Exercise, vegetables, water, and sleep are also pretty good.
It just also happens that the same WellnessTM Industry that promotes disproportionate numbers of images of fit, serene women doing yoga and drinking from recycled glass bottles is simultaneously invested in keeping the public focus off of neurotransmitters and back on “lifestyle choices.”
The connection between those narratives is very clearly highlighted in this macro.
Neither the Big Pharma or WellnessTM frameworks truly offers some kind of objectively moral high ground to shame other people for struggling to cope with this nonsense world. We’re all competing with way too many systems that are rigged against us to be able to push back against all of them and fully thrive in equal measure (as tempting as that sounds).
Anyway, in a conclusion that’s allowed me to bury the lede, let it not remain un-noted that neither a bad mood nor severe depression are just about “not enough happiness.”
An edited image of a person’s silhouette in profile. They have long hair, and are facing towards the right half of the photo. In the background, a distant horizon line is visible. The entire image is grayscale, although with a bluish tinge to the gray. It’s difficult for me to determine if the horizon line has low mountains or plateaus. Most of the background (behind the silhouette) is an overcast sky. The silhouette has had an image of puffy clouds and a crescent moon superimposed over / inside of the head, creating a surreal effect. The white sanserif font reads, “Stop telling people more than they need to know.” It says “unknown” after the quote, and the whole image has been marked with the “Power of Positivity” logo at the bottom.
The relatively interesting image here (compared to, like, a generic sunset) makes the relationship between that image and the quote feel ambiguous.
It is good that their head is full of puffy clouds and moonbeams, or is it a cause for concern?
Is the silhouetted head giving the advice to other people?
Like, is their head full of all kinds of beautiful things already, and they’re just like, “Please stop talking to me”?
Or is the silhouette the one to whom the advice is being given?
Like maybe they are under the impression that all the stuff they have in mind is super important, but they are actually just an insecure over-sharer?
Variants of this piece of advice are pretty common, so I understand why the quote is simply credited as “Unknown.”
And Power of Positivity as an organization doesn’t seem too bothered about copyright or intellectual property, in general.
When it comes to images, it seems like the basic attribution policy is to assume that the creator is “unknown.”
Probably it’s because most of the photography is already in the public domain, but there are still usually other design choices being made.
This image here, for instance, required at least two photos, and someone to put them together.
At that point, why make the effort to specifically establish that the words originated from an unknown sources?
Your heart’s in the right place, anonymous macro creator, if a bit misguided.
I get that you want to make it clear that you are not the brilliant philosopher-poet behind these words of pithy wisdom.
You just felt compelled to design a space for those words to exist in a social media-friendly medium.
But where do your design choices begin and end, my friend?
Did you Photoshop the moon onto this person’s silhouette?
Is it your own silhouette, or an image of a stranger from Shutterstock?
Do you truly know, person who humbly acknowledged distance from the creation of these words, the face of the human whose profile graces your macro?
I have the sense that when the author of a quote is left unspecified in a context like this, it’s kind of implied that they’re either unknowable or so well-known that it there words can be expected to be common knowledge. (Including those situations where a quote is commonly but erroneously attributed to a very famous person.)
The advice in these anonymous words is actually potentially useful, but ironically it lacks sufficient context to account for how and why it’s useful.
A reductive but useful example of finding The Right Amount of Information is the IT classic: “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”
Opening your conversation with tech support with a play-by-play of everything you’ve tried already, just to prove to them (but actually to yourself) that you’re not totally incompetent, is an example of “telling people more than they need to know.”
I imagine that most of us have put our foot in our mouths at some point, insisting something like “Of course it’s plugged in!” only to have to later sheepishly admit that it wasn’t.
But the person whose job it is to troubleshoot whatever is preventing you from getting your work done has no obligation to care about your pride or sense of self-worth. (Not that IT folx are uncaring, of course. Just that it would be unreasonable for them to invest that much emotional energy into each case.)
Then again, you often have to be able to explain your problem before they can begin to help you fix it.
My own anxiety often compels me to explain exactly how I arrived at any given decision to anyone I’m communicating with, so “telling people more than they need to know” is kind of my default.
I’m aware that my process is not always efficient.
It’s been suggested by very patient and wise people at various points in my life that it’s okay if I provide just a little information to get started, and remember that whoever I’m talking to has the freedom to decide whether they have any follow-up questions about what they need or want to know.
Apparently, it’s not a failure on my part for not having already predicted and preventatively addressed every conceivable reaction to my very normal bids for reasonable responses.
Weird.
I’m still getting used to it.
On the other hand, one of the reasons I developed a tendency to overcompensate with Too Much Information was how often people bring up things that I’ve already considered, dismissed, and/or attempted.
I know I’m always on about this whole “context matters” business, but…
stop framing situationally-specific advice as generalizable imperatives that are more likely to reinforce shame and silence among mentally ill and/or traumatized and/or marginalized folx who’ve developed those targeted behaviors as coping mechanisms than they are to promote understanding, mindfulness, or useful self-reflection.
A square with an orange filter over a photograph of college students rappelling on a climbing wall. In the upper right hand corner are the hashtags #momentummonday and #uwec, the educational institution that shared the post. In white sanserif letters, it says, “It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” -William James
I originally wrote this post in early 2020.
At that point, I had heard of coronavirus, but people were dismissing whispers about lockdowns.
More recently, here in mid-2022, I was reading the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Amelia and Emily Nagoski, and I was struck by their chapter on “persistence.”
The perspective they present there is much more nuanced and thoroughly researched than my blog post here (which makes sense, because they wrote a whole book), but I’ll go ahead and admit that I was chuffed to see a well-rounded argument by people I respect with some thematic parallels to my burned-out thoughts from two years ago.
Back in the before-times, I was feeling especially salty about this featured quote because I had just received a long-overdue confirmation of rejection for a job that I was extraordinarily confident about my ability to perform, that I was ridiculously prepared for, that I was eminently qualified for, and for which I made an exceptionally strong argument for myself for in both preliminary and final interview stages.
I also received my poorly-handled rejection notification the day after Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the 2020 presidential race.
It wasn’t a great day to see an inspirational quote about attitude.
My attitude had varied over the months of the academic job application and interview process, but overall, I remained uncharacteristically positive.
I mean, I was still fundamentally me.
Of course I experienced bouts of doubt and anxiety.
But for once, my professional self-doubt felt like a lie that could be countered with evidence.
When I saw the original advertisement for the position, I thought, “Well, that’s me. I can do all of that, and I can do it well.”
(It was far more common for me to read the bulleted Preferred Qualifications list and feel great about three of them, okay about four or five, ambivalent about a couple, and terrified by at least one.)
When I started pulling my materials together, I told myself, “I will turn in an application that they can’t ignore. They may not actually contact me for an interview, because that’s out of my hands, but by god, they’ll have to work hard to justify keeping me out of the running if that’s the case.”
And they contacted me pretty promptly to schedule an interview.
And when I prepared for the interview, I told myself, “I will not give them any reason to second-guess choosing my application, and by god, they’ll have to sweat if they don’t put me through to the next round.”
And I made it to the next round.
Every other time I had a campus visit, I’d leaned into a “fake it ’til you make it” approach to get me through, but this time, I just felt a qualified colleague.
It would be unfair for me to resent the fact that another person existed with pertinent qualifications, which they proceeded to show off to good advantage in their own interview. The person who got the job was presumably confident, prepared, and qualified, and capable of making a strong argument on their own behalf.
Awareness of this fact didn’t do much to alleviate the sting.
So, back to William James (and those who like to quote him out of context):
How does “attitude at the beginning” really come into play when we arrive at an unsuccessful outcome?
I admit that I threw myself a big old pity party when I got the rejection, and I stand by that. Pretending not to be bitter will only exacerbate bitterness.
I also admit that my above question originally arose from a place of resentment and frustration.
But once the emotional lava has hardened, the issue still stands: what’s the connection between attitude and success?
The quote in this macro is being used in service of this broader Power of Positivity enterprise that blames individuals’ thought patterns for individual failures (or successes), rather than engaging more meaningfully with the social infrastructures that reinforce patterns of success (or failure).
If we’re looking to define an attitude that helps to determine success, it seems like confidence, persistence, and resilience are good personal qualities to have, eh?
I don’t know Elizabeth Warren personally, and I’m in no position to ever speak meaningfully about her mental or emotional state.
But at least in terms of her public image, she remained engaged, forward-thinking, and determined. She shows it when she’s angry, but she remains broadly “positive,” and does not appear unconfident or underprepared.
Elizabeth Warren’s own attitude wasn’t the problem with her campaign. Her attitude was demonstrably on point.
Of course she’ll persist. Of course she’ll be resilient. Of course she isn’t going to stop working altogether. She knows the drill. She’ll stay on her feet.
But still.
Fucking hell.
I’ve focused a lot on that word “attitude” in the original macro, but here I’ll start folding in that idea of “successful outcome.”
A “successful outcome” for a job interview – both at the local and national level – is a job offer.
That’s what it looks like your own attitude is mirrored by that of a larger system (which may or may not be rigged in your favor).
Now, I promise that I know that “not achieving a desired outcome” is not the same thing as either “failure” or “total lack of institutional support.”
When multiple people are competing for only one position, it’s obviously not possible for everyone to “succeed” in the sense outlined above, and so of course there’s going to be disappointment somewhere.
Toxic Positivity encourages us to elevate the lesson at the expense of acknowledging the disappointment, though.
Sure, I get to practice resilience this way, and I can identify opportunities for growth, but “someone else got the job” still wasn’t a “successful outcome” for me. (Or Elizabeth Warren.)
It’s a reasonable outcome.
It’s a manageable outcome.
It’s not a total failure, and it’s not the end of the world.
I’ll persist. I’ll be resilient. I won’t stop altogether. I know the drill. I’ll stay on my feet.
We can’t all have successful outcomes all the time, and that’s normal.
Now, I think that’s a reasonable attitude to have at the disappointing conclusion of a difficult task.
Cognitively, I know that this is my baseline “actual” attitude, even though I may struggle to stick with it as circumstance and emotions fluctuate.
This “attitude determines outcome” framing doesn’t seem to encourage a healthy, balanced response to unsuccessful outcomes, but then again, what do I know from healthy?
There are a couple of ways to justify this relationship between “attitude determines outcome” and what “a successful outcome” actually looks like compared to an “unsuccessful” one.
1) Play with the definition of “attitude.” If you have an unsuccessful outcome (e.g., not getting the job, not winning the race, not nailing the performance, etc.), it must be because your initial attitude wasn’t truly what was needed for that particular kind of success in that particular situation. Your attitude was always the problem, rather than anything circumstantial, and you need to try harder to have a more situationally-appropriate attitude if you want to achieve your goals. (Okay, I’ve been a bit flippant there, but then again I never promised not to be.)
2) Play with the definition of “success.” If you don’t achieve your desired outcome (the job, the medal, the gig, etc.), it’s okay to retrofit your idea of success to accommodate whatever actually happened. That sounds a lot like the ol’ “Everyone’s a winner” schtick that never made anyone feel any better in elementary school.
“You succeeded because you tried.”
(Don’t tell Yoda.)
Animated gif of the shriveled green character Yoda from Star Wars (specifically The Empire Strikes Back, for the nerds) saying his iconic line, “Do or do no. There is no try.”
Now, I’ve offered several either/ors here, and you know how I feel about binaries.
Of course success is not an absolute binary, and it’s reductive to treat most outcomes as “SUCCESS” vs. “FAILURE” with nothing in between.
At the same time, of course it’s disingenuous to act like “NOT SUCCESS” has so much overlap with “SUCCESS” that the difference is functionally negligible.
I have a background in social science research, but I’ve really only dabbled in psychology. I’ve spent more time engaging with popular psychology resources than digging into the academic theory and history of the discipline.
So I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure who William James was when I initially snagged this screenshot.
In fact, when I started writing, I was thinking of Henry James, and I was all ready to lay into him.
Wrong James, though.
It turns out that William James is often referred to as “the father of American psychology.”
The history of the philosophical tradition of Pragmatism, as James defined it and as it has since evolved, wasn’t exactly light reading, and I’ll be upfront about the fact that I just don’t feel like summarizing it here.
And at any rate, this blog isn’t a great space to develop a lengthy and well-researched essay on the history of ideological debates that have influenced contemporary psychological practice. I’m just here to pick apart their outcomes.
I liked the sound of “pragmatism,” though, so I considered the possibility that his quotable quote was pulled from a context that could offer some illumination.
I briefly searched for that original context.
Early efforts to identify the source beyond the author’s name were fruitless. This sentence has been macroed a LOT:
Screenshot of the many results of a Google image search for the William James quote “It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” There are many different treatments in terms of font, color scheme, and imagery. 14 are represented here, but that’s just what fit in the screenshot.
I have just a couple highlights to bring in from my very brief historical review.
“Pragmatism” as a movement has been paraphrased as “a return to common sense.”
Well, that sounds less promising. Naturally, I wondered whose senses were considered to be most common, and naturally, I have some hunches, William James, but we’ll table that for now.
(*cough* abled-ish financially secure cis het white dudes who were likely to have been raised with broadly Christian values if not beliefs *cough*)
It seems a little on the nose to me that the “father of American psychology” advocated for magical thinking that he preferred to rebrand as “pragmatism.”
Admittedly, I’ve presented a judgement about an influential figure and the significance of his entire career based on just a couple of Google searches and the brief perusal of a few articles. I stand 100% ready to be educated by the perspectives of those more familiar with his work (as I pretend that multiple people with relevant and informed opinions are reading this blog).
Shortly after writing an early draft of this post, I read a chapter from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America that expanded more on the historical context that led to the emergence of William James’ psychological philosophy. In short:
it seems like James approached the then-emerging pseudoscientific fad known as “new thinking” (the idea that people could manifest things simply by thinking about them) with a reasonable degree of skepticism.
His original motivation seems to have been practical enough. I respect anyone who is driven by a desire to disprove popular bullshit; yet the outcome has led to terribly impractical results (i.e., more people in contemporary society who lump his eventual admission that “thinking positive thoughts can in some cases seem to correlate with positive outcomes” into the same kind of magical thinking he was contesting in the first place).
So in that sense, his optimistic attitude at the outset does not seem to have resulted in a particularly successful outcome for his theories.
Just sayin’.
I write a lot here about what I don’t believe and not as much about what I do believe.
I want to stress that I believe deeply in the value of acceptance.
I can and always will learn from disappointment.
I know my Bob Ross, y’all.
Animated gif of painter Bob Ross from his ’90s TV show “The Joy of Painting,” standing in front of a nature-scape with his palette in hand, saying, “We don’t make mistakes – we just have happy accidents.”
I absolutely appreciate the value of being able to identify positive potential after a negative situation has unfolded.
I comprehend and respect the idea that the anticipation of success can have benefits that the anticipation of failure may not.
I recognize the ways in which negative thinking can perpetuate cycles of self-sabotage.
But.
Attitudes don’t exist in vacuums.
Having a good attitude IN A SYSTEM THAT PRIVILEGES AND PRIORITIZES YOUR ABILITY TO MAINTAIN THE IDEA THAT YOUR OWN ATTITUDE IS THE BEST ONE will, indeed, probably encourage successful outcomes.
You can have the best damn attitude in the world, but that’s not the primary thing determining your success. It just helps.
Know your strengths, know your limits, and know your value. That’s in your control.
But also know that there are plenty of folks out there who want you to be fully responsible for the “failures” that you encounter, just so that they can justify their own relative comfort and “success.”
I feel like this post turned out more ranty than usual. That’s not what I planned for when I started, but that’s where it ended up.
Unintended and unexpected outcomes are normal and fine.
It is possible to turn your mistakes into birds.
But that doesn’t have to mean that your attitude was always going to lay eggs in the first place.
Pith Rant 
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