5 April

Toxic positivity is the desperate attempt to make all of life like an extended adolescence. Nothing but ‘happy’ times - going to gigs, hitting the piss, socialising, travelling, eating out, hanging out with friends etc. As Spinoza always said, the only true joy in life comes from understanding. You can pretend it’s something else, like love, or good times, but it isn’t. You need to understand to love, and to have genuinely good times, and not just avoidance behaviour, distraction from things you won’t confront. Shakespeare didn’t write about how he and his mates went on holiday somewhere, and had some pints and saw the Foo Fighters. He wrote about love, and suffering, and war, and relationships, and power etc. All things that made him passionately ‘happy’ to engage in. It’s what grown ups used to do. If we don’t find happiness in our actual reality, it eventually bites back hard. Like it is right now, 50 years of adolescent avoidance behaviour now threatening civilisation itself.