One of my friends decided to present a chapter from my book, The Life Guide for Teens, as a topic for discussion at a recent family dinner. He chose the first chapter of the book that discusses using positive self-talk as a tool for helping the mind consider new possibilities in challenging situations.
His college-aged son responded dismissively. “That’s just positive psychology garbage. It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.” The son ran to his bookshelf and pulled down the 2016 bestselling book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson.
The son said he had read this book multiple times. He explained he learned from it that people who think positively live in a fantasy world. They think that through thinking positively, everything will get better magically, they can always find happiness, and they can achieve anything. And when that doesn’t happen, this leads people to become anxious and more dissatisfied.
He said Manson thinks that improving our lives does not involve turning lemons into lemonade but rather it’s about learning to accept the lemons better.
Positive Thinking Is About Attitude, Not Magic
I appreciated that The Life Guide for Teens helped spark a vigorous family discussion. I suggested that perhaps I could meet with my friend and his son to respond to his concerns about the nature of positive thinking as described in my book.
When I teach that positive thinking has a definite role in our real, non-magical world, I explain that it provides a constructive way to deal with the challenges we face. It does not mean that everything will work out in the way that we desire.
For instance, when life hands us lemons, we can take Manson’s advice to mean that we should say to ourselves, “OK, it seems life sometimes is very unfair. Since life has handed me a lemon, it sucks now.”
I agree that saying, “I don’t need to worry, because everything will be fine,” is an unhelpful thought. First, mentioning the word “worry” can lead our minds to experience worry. Second, thinking that everything will be fine may be unrealistic.
Manson is right that we shouldn't pretend the lemon isn't sour. But accepting that the lemon is sour does not mean that we should avoid looking for ways to make the lemon sweeter.
For instance, I teach that it is helpful to make a positive statement such as, “I want life to taste better.” Such a statement directs our attention to thinking about how such an improvement can take place. Importantly, while I believe that we can often turn lemons into lemonade, this doesn’t imply that life will be perfect once that happens.
I do believe that positive self-talk helps to lead us to find a silver lining in difficult situations. In that vein, it is worth recalling the popularly cited proverb: “When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”
To summarize, people face very difficult challenges and sometimes experience devastating losses. Once they acknowledge and accept their challenge or loss, they can choose to use a positive approach as they work through their adversity.
This process can help them develop resilience and become better able to handle future difficulties. This does not guarantee that their life will necessarily become great, but it should improve.
This reminds me of another popular proverb: “The happiest people are not those who have the best of everything, but rather those who make the best of everything they have.”
Rabbi Akiva and His Positive Attitude
On the day I spoke to my friend about his son, as if the conversation had been waiting to continue in a different venue, my Rabbi's High Holiday sermon returned to the same theme of moving from accepting hardship to finding a constructive positive way to respond to it.
My Rabbi recounted a story about one of the famous Jewish sages, Rabbi Akiva, who was walking along the road and came to a certain city. He asked about lodging, but they gave him none. He said, “Whatever God does, He does for the best.”
Akiva went and slept in a field, and he had a rooster, a donkey, and a candle with him. A gust of wind came and extinguished the candle; a cat came and ate the rooster; and a lion came and ate the donkey.
Akiva said: “Whatever God does, He does for the best.” That night, an army came and took the city into captivity. It turned out that Rabbi Akiva alone, who was not in the city and had no lit candle, noisy rooster, or donkey to give away his location, was saved.
Akiva said to them: “Didn’t I tell you? Whatever God does, He does for the best.”
My Rabbi then told our congregation that he does not believe what Akiva said. He said that sometimes we discover something good that emerges from what seems terrible. But sometimes suffering remains suffering, loss remains loss, and no explanation changes it.
As evidence for his position, my Rabbi cited what happened to Rabbi Akiva at the end of his life when he was tortured and martyred by the Romans. He explained that our Jewish tradition does not tell us what was good about that.
Instead, it remembers Akiva holding fast to what he believed even when, at the end of his life, no satisfying explanation was offered for what was happening to him.
At that moment, I thought, But something good did come out of Akiva’s tragic death. When he held fast to his faith even as he was dying, he served as a powerful positive role model that even in the face of the most difficult of times, we can hold on to our heartfelt beliefs.
And to those who might respond that Akiva ended up dead, I thought, We all die at some point. For me, Akiva's example suggests that a deeply held faith can give a person a sense of resilience and meaning that can transcend even the fear of death. Perhaps it was such a sense of meaning that allowed Akiva to hold on to his faith until the end.
I recognize this reframing might lead someone to respond that I am suggesting Akiva’s manner of death was a good thing. To that argument, I have two responses:
- There is a difference between saying Akiva’s suffering was good and finding positive meaning in how he may have responded to his suffering and how we interpret the circumstances of his death.
- Akiva’s statement that whatever God does, He does for the best, includes the possibility that it is for the best that God allows injustice and suffering in this world. For instance, such bad outcomes challenge us and give us the opportunity to repair and improve our world.
Takeaway
Positive thinking, properly understood, is not a promise that life will become perfect. It is a tool for finding meaning, building resilience, and holding fast to our values even in the most difficult of circumstances—as Rabbi Akiva demonstrated with his life and his death.