Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

A sharp-witted knockdown of America’s love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism
Americans are a “positive” people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.
In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to “prosper” you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of “positive psychology” and the “science of happiness.” Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current economic crisis. 
With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science,and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

Hanna Rosin - The New York Times

I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like Bright-Sided…Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich's deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America—motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies—these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name "positive thinking."

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including This Land Is Their Land and the New York Times bestsellers Bait and Switch and Fear of Falling. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine.