Creative Destruction Store - Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

In the vein of blog post Misplaced optimism is deadly - Alain de Botton


I love this quote re: Alain de Botton from the above link

"The modern bourgeois philosophy pins its hopes firmly on two great presumed ingredients of happiness, love and work. But there is vast unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within this magnanimous assurance that everyone will discover satisfaction here. It is not that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so for too long.

When an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and disaster in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages, unexploited ambitions and exploded portfolios, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to make more of ourselves"

I will be (slowly) migrating some of the MEC store stuff over to Creative Destruction