"happy people" that disdain the unhappy

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Is it because deep down they know they couldn't cope in that situation



but dahm that's catchy song

Either that or they're grown tired of miserable people who behave as psychic vampires.

There is a saying: Two men look out of prison bars; one sees mud and the other sees stars You can't change what has happened BUT you can control the way you look at life. I find it very emotionally draining to be around someone who wants to wallow in self pity; they don't realize their pessimism is a self inflicted wound.





P.S. Before Joe Walsh released Life's Been Good he had an almost 3YO daughter that was killed in a car crash. (Song For Emma on the So What Album)

It's an extremely Puritan perspective of toxic positivity probably most famous with Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking". I swear that book is pure evil and a psychopath manual. Anyhow it's all rooted in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and salvation through faith alone. I recommend looking into "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" by Max Weber. The whole American dream is really rooted more in Calvinism and eugenics (scientific Calvinism) than anything else.

People get mad at you because they believe a secularised version of the idea that "whining" or not testifying to God's blessing through the calling of work is evidence that you are not among the nation of the congenitally predetermined elect and do not have a place in the promised land (America or Britain). It's a legacy of Calvinism, the 16th century French inquisitoral legal system, legal humanism, whacky manifest destiny propaganda and Anglo-Saxon occultism. It's not so different from Thelema and Theosophy thoughtform nonsense/meme magick but just secularised and mainstream.

But it's not all black and white

...Why not see both the stars and the mud? They both exist. Why must one cancel the other out? Life is good. Life is bad. Life is life until it isn't. It's an ever flowing state of change.

Misery craves company because it wishes to be acknowledged. To be understood, so it doesn't feel so isolated. There is a danger though in regards to how it is handled. If misery is dismissed, it feels denied and it festers into resentment. On the other side, if it's validated to the point of encouragement, then the misery will continue to grow like a weed consuming everything and ruining the ecosystem.

Ideally, misery should be heard and treated with understanding and kindness but it should also be challenged. You don't get anywhere by staying exactly where you are. The tricky part is knowing when to be tough VS when to be comforting.

I've seen unhappy people show disdain towards the unhappier people. I've lived it too.

If you're in no way complaining to them or mooching off of them and they just can't stand that you exist around them, like in a work situation, I have my own thoughts on this and I have run into it when I was going through hell in ways they wouldn't understand.

My read of it - a lot of people sell themselves out early because in their minds success and survival far outweigh moral development, to the point that they see it as either superfluous or even as a sign of weakness if it combines with external physical traits the right ways (like if you look to them like you should be low status). They put a big fake smile on and it's kind of like the Offspring 'hit em right between the eyes' song. NT's, especially in today's work world, are mercenaries - they're out to cut each other's throats (figuratively and legally of course) and take each other's stuff. To that end they see toxic positivity as mandatory adult weaponry, a sign of strength that you killed your own soul for status and winning / domination, and when they see people who haven't sold out their interior for success there's both a) jealousy that you still have your interiority and integrity in tact and b) they've gotten twisted around enough that they think it's a sign of weakness / immaturity / slop on your part, ie. that you're the iddy biddy baby boy or girl who refused to grow up (ie. become culturally narcissistic).

Taking part in American work culture, especially corporate, is often like drinking poison from a firehose. It's like the worst of the human character traits you tend to see at charity dances and balls where you got the stress-twisted fanned baked bean teeth, leaded gasoline-addled belligerent boomers where everything's always cool even if they're millimeters from self destruction due to incompetence, nothing's serious, fly by the seat of your pants and procrastinate - unless you make one or two mistakes while they've got your work schedule overclocked, then your head rolls.

The really grim side of this for me:

1) Its not your fault or mine (or anyone else's here for that matter).

2) It's everywhere and you can't get away from it outside of working from home, independent consulting / freelancing, or trades.

I don't know if this will be of any consolation (or if I'm anywhere near what you're talking about - this is just how toxic positivity has hit me) - they're not aiming this at autistics. You're seeing, as sick as it is, the results of how NT's treat each other now. Probably no comfort when or if these people sabotage or fire us out of jobs within a few weeks or a month for being 'weird' even if we're competent with our work but really - you're seeing their failings much more than your own on display.

What I've come to understand - 'fakeness' always made me uneasy, I just thought it disturbed me because it seemed like moral failure on the part of the people who were being fake but there's a more important reason - it's zero-sum war footing, it means they've got their knives out behind their backs. Even when I've been in a room where I clearly wasn't the target (some NT in the room was though) it's still really eerie / creepy, although it was very helpful because whenever I see that in people they're not in my circle, I won't be inviting them over, they're just not the types of people I need or want in my life. Bad enough to be forced to deal with them at work.

I don't think the song is about that, but I do think that toxic positivity has become a scourge in our society in general, but especially in the corporate workplace. It's damaging to people to have to be positive all the time and not be able to show or express their unhappiness or dissatisfaction, especially when it's justified and it could be rectified by addressing it.