Many years ago, when I was around 12, my mother gave me a book she had loved as a child: Pollyanna. The story follows a poor girl who plays what she calls "The Glad Game," the goal being to find something good in every situation. At one point, she receives a pair of crutches as a charity gift. She doesn't need crutches, but instead of feeling disappointed, she celebrates the fact that she doesn't need them.
I couldn't finish the book. Something about it felt deeply wrong, even to my 12-year-old brain, and the Glad Game didn't feel like wisdom so much as a stubborn refusal to acknowledge how things actually were.
Twenty years later, I keep seeing the exact same logic everywhere, just with a different name attached to it. We call it toxic positivity now, and it shows up in phrases like "good vibes only," "everything happens for a reason," and the coaching industry's perennial favorite: "your mindset is the only thing standing between you and the life you want."
The word toxic is doing significant work in that phrase, and it's worth taking seriously. The problem isn't positivity as such, but rather the use of positivity as a tool to suppress or dismiss emotions that are inconvenient to whoever is in the room. When someone is grieving, anxious, or genuinely struggling, being told to focus on the good isn't encouragement. It's actually toxic, as it sets an expectation of a performance of emotional states they don't actually feel.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that the pattern is not new at all. Pollyanna was published in 1913, and the same logic has been repackaged many times since: Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking in the 1950s, the Law of Attraction in the early 2000s, and now the sprawling personal development industry that floods every social media platform with motivational content, morning routine culture, and coaches promising radical transformation.
The packaging changes, but the underlying message stays consistent: your feelings are an obstacle, so replace them with better ones. What has changed is the scale. That message is now ambient, inescapable, and dressed up in enough psychological language to sound credible.
The research, however, points in the opposite direction. Suppressing negative emotions doesn't make them disappear; it tends to intensify them over time. Avoiding difficult feelings also interferes with the kind of processing that actually produces resilience, which means that the Glad Game doesn't just fail to help, but actively gets in the way.
Perhaps most damaging is the belief that mindset alone determines outcomes, because it leads people to blame themselves when circumstances don't improve, even when the factors involved are largely outside their control.
The alternative to all of this is not pessimism. It's closer to what psychologists describe as emotional acceptance, meaning the capacity to acknowledge what you feel without immediately trying to neutralize it or reframe it into something more palatable.
Some situations are genuinely bad. Some losses don't have silver linings, and searching for one is often just a way of avoiding the more uncomfortable work of actually dealing with what happened.
I never finished Pollyanna as a child, and I don't think I missed much. Whatever resolution the book offered, real life rarely works that way, and pretending otherwise, under whatever label happens to be trending, doesn't serve anyone particularly well.