The Truth About Happiness: The Violence of Positivity (Part 2)
What kind of fortune do we seek in this land where schedules whisper demands and notifications scream for attention? Are we aware of the many differences that exist between how we must live and how we choose to live? We have become a society of achievement, where the violence we inflict upon ourselves exceeds any external force or coercion. The whip has been internalized, transformed into an endless pursuit of optimization, productivity, and positivity. We have become, as Han notes, “achievement-subjects” who exploit themselves willingly, even enthusiastically.
In the silence between productivity and that task after our next task, in those rare moments when we pause our relentless self-improvement, we might glimpse the truth: that we are running from a deeper silence, a fundamental aspect of human existence that our society has deemed unacceptable.
The Violence of Achievement
Han observes that “the achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination forcing it to work… It is an entrepreneur of itself. Everyone is master and slave in one.” This entrepreneurship of the self creates a peculiar form of violence - one that pretends to be freedom. We are free to optimize ourselves to death, free to pursue endless self-improvement, free to never be satisfied with who we are.
The modern individual believes they chase achievement and positivity for themselves. But we all push for positivity because society at some point commanded it, convinced us it was a worthwhile chase. But those who have gone past this, and played the game to the end, know it isn’t worth the effort.
We set ambitious goals and demand that every moment of the day be productive. Wasting time is a sin. Even in our leisure time, we seem to aim at some form of achievement in levels of relaxation or entertainment. We measure everything, to the grams of protein in an egg, and then we wonder why we eventually get depressed or burnt out. What about simply experiencing life? What about just being bored?
As Han notes in “The Burnout Society”: “The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’” We have created a world where the violence of positivity manifests as an inability to say no, to accept limits, to embrace negativity as a natural and necessary part of human existence.
There are complications that arise once people touch elementary sufferings of being human. They find them wildly uncomfortable. Most people search harder for distractions and change, seeking an urgent antidote to their suffering—hoping to regain that perfect and optimized person. Unable to accept their suffering, they put on a face of victory as if they have conquered it through their methods.
Once production lines had mindsets that called for continuous improvement. Now, we do this to ourselves and over time this idea of perpetual improvement becomes a violence we inflict on ourselves. The moment we achieve a goal, we set a higher one. The moment we’ve reached a standard in our lives, that standard goes higher, the margins for perfection grow tighter. What we don’t realise in all this is that contentment becomes impossible. It will never be enough and we’re stuck in a bad loop.
The Digital Exhaustion of Being
In the fog of our struggles, the lifting clouds are always aided by the mind and its conviction about truth. We are not what the world tells us we are, and neither are we what our unconscious, inner reality, says we are. The truth lies somewhere in between, but in our digital age, this truth becomes increasingly difficult to grasp.
As Han observes, “The digital age is abolishing truth. Even facts are being replaced by data… The world is becoming progressively more opaque the more data we gather about it.” It seems that knowing more about the world has not become revealing but it has become more blinding—data and statistics blind us to real problems that numbers cannot quantify.
Along with our misdirected conviction, our current state of being has evolved into a constant performance—an act of theatre. The digital realm demands transparency, yet this very transparency becomes a form of violence. Han notes that “transparency is a neoliberal device… It serves only to generate information and accelerate communication.”
We find ourselves caught in what he calls the “transparency society,” where the pressure to be visible, to perform, to share becomes overwhelming. Couple that with an individual whose sole aim is to achieve something, anything and then we can see why the rise of social media influencers has been so prominent. With modern technology, work schedules and the busy lives we all lead—we’ve become more and more isolated as individuals who now only ‘feel’ connected through our devices.
He further notes, “The digital swarm is not a mass. It lacks the unity that would make it a crowd. Its individuals are isolated unto themselves.” This isolation manifests in peculiar ways – we’re more connected than ever, yet increasingly alienated from authentic experience. We see each other as personas but hardly ever as real human beings with real human problems, which are wildly similar to ours.
For the isolated individual, sharing is one of the few ways of connecting but what has caused this isolation in the first place? We’re all products of a past generation whose interests were status, power and the glorification of the economy. There is a narrative we’ve grown up with that keeps us going, keeps us pushing all by ourselves—but to what end? We seem to be caught in pressures that stem from the outside and from inside and in our isolation, the digital realm offers the only chance at connection. But we’re losing something and we don’t even know what for we rarely have time (or take out time) to think and just connect with ourselves.
Consider the modern phenomenon of “doom scrolling”: A person lying awake at 3:00 A.M., exhausted but unable to stop consuming content, responding to messages, or checking social media. This isn’t mere addiction—it’s a manifestation of the violence of connectivity. The individual feels compelled to remain “plugged in” despite physical and mental exhaustion, fearing that disconnection might mean irrelevance or invisibility in the digital social sphere. The violence here is in the elimination of natural rhythms of engagement and withdrawal, replacing them with constant performance pressure.
As Han points out: “The society of transparency does not allow for any gaps of information or vision. But both human thought and inspiration require a void, a gap… Today, there is no longer any intermediary space for reflection, for quiet contemplation.” This constant visibility—both to see and be seen—this ceaseless performance of positivity, creates what he terms “digital exhaustion” a state where we are too tired to even recognize our own fatigue.
Jean Baudrillard’s prophetic observation that “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning” captures our current predicament very well. In his work “Simulacra and Simulation,” (which was the philosophical basis for the Matrix movies) he argues that we have lost touch with reality itself, replacing it with hyperreality – a simulation that has no original reference point anymore. He writes: “The virtual world is fabricated to escape from the real world, not to reflect it. It has no reference in reality anymore.” This mirrors our current digital existence, where we perform versions of ourselves that become increasingly detached from any authentic original.
As Han observes, “Digital communication enables immediate response. Immediacy makes reflection impossible… Respect requires a pathos of distance. Today, distance is yielding to promiscuous intimacy.” This collapse of distance that both Baudrillard and Han identify creates what Baudrillard calls “the desert of the real a space where authentic experience becomes impossible because everything is mediated through screens and simulations.
The Violence of Positivity
The violence of positivity is the final nail in the coffin where we experience a systemic denial of negativity. According to Han, this violence operates by pathologizing normal human emotions like sadness, doubt, or dissatisfaction, recasting them as problems to be solved rather than experiences to be lived through.
Someone asked me recently, “Is there something wrong with being happy? What’s negative about positivity?”
I said nothing at first, then slowly, an answer came to me. I replied: There is nothing inherently wrong with being happy. The problem is our chase for happiness. In that chase, there’s something we desperately try to avoid, sadness. I mean, if you really look at it, why is there this desperate desire for an illusory and transitory feeling called happiness? Why is our culture so obsessed with chasing it, possessing it and making it our modern God 2.0?
Spiritual traditions of various cultures all speak of the inherent suffering present in human life. Some say this suffering is itself an illusion, that can be transcended and some say this suffering is a gift which is a balm for your soul. Rumi says, the crack is where the light comes in. So, it may be that we have to be broken open in order to let our souls fly in this life.
But we are obsessed with painting our outer shells with shines and fake smiles that tell everyone, everything is okay, it’s fine, it’s awesome. There’s a darkness in this. When we start to believe that happiness is all there is in life, its one true goal, then we deny all other things that exist. When we start putting focus only on positivity we secretly deny the negativity in life. When we start focusing only on the light we forget the depth of the dark—not to mention the only time we can enjoy the beauty of the stars. It is not too different from people who believe sadness to be the only way of all life. We become, in Han’s words, ‘too alive to die, too dead to live, caught in a weird space where authentic experience becomes impossible.
If life is just happiness with small respites of sadness, or sadness with small seductions of happiness—we’re missing the big picture. In both cases, life is not whole but made to fit in a box that either gives us security or helps us run away from what we find uncomfortable. We’ve established how people cannot sit with themselves, let alone their sadness, their grief. We forget we are all human and grief is a natural process we have to learn how to feel. But often, unfelt grief and sadness mutates into a desire to run away from all negative emotion.
What we don’t realise is that we’ve made imaginary distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. While there’s nothing wrong with chasing positive emotion, the toxic part comes when we chase it at the expense of negative emotion. When we start to deny ‘the negative’ our life becomes one-sided and hollow. A vase with nothing inside it, a painting with no depth, words with no soul.
We think giving up on this chase is wrong. We’ve been promised gold at the end of the rainbow, a reward at the end of the struggle. What we don’t notice is that we’re actually going through exactly what we’re trying to avoid but in our minds we’re constantly denying it. In the chase for positive emotion, we have to inevitably go through negative emotion but in denial, we refuse to feel it.
That’s really all it asks—to be felt. Have we become so modern that we do not believe that our grief can bless us, that our sadness can guide us? My own heart has been broken several times, my illusions shattered countless times, my idea of self destroyed again and again. But through all that, I learnt something important—I am none of those things, I am what survived all that. The essence that persists is the truest reminder of ourselves we can find. Maybe that’s the blessing in the heart.
For everything we feel, does it not come from the heart? Are we so wise to tell our heart to allow the excitement but not the depression? If our senses are thinking and feeling our way through life, should it not stand to reason that they’re telling us what we need to see and feel?
It is said that denial of negative emotion is also the denial of positive emotion. If we can’t access our depths we cannot enjoy our highs. So we become monotone and flat individuals who have already denied one end the spectrum and slowly end up denying the other as well. Whether in the chase for happiness or the avoidance of sadness, what we’re truly afraid of is to feel. To feel the raw strength of our beating heart that can make us crumble. We’re afraid to feel the simple silence in which it beats and finally, we’re afraid to face ourselves.
For it’s easier to be fake than real in this maddening world. It’s easier to deny than to accept ourselves, and each other. The positivity violence is creating what Han calls “a society without respect (respectare: to look back).” When we can’t look back, we can’t pause and we can’t acknowledge the shadow aspects of existence. So, we lose the ability to truly see ourselves and others.
What then becomes of the authentic self in this desert of simulation? As Baudrillard warns us, “We are no longer in the drama of alienation, but in the ecstasy of communication.” This ecstasy, however, leaves us hollow. We find ourselves yearning for something deeper, something real – even if that reality includes pain.
We’ll conclude this essay series next week with Part 3. Thanks for reading and stay tuned.