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Uncomfortable truth: How close is "positivity culture" to delusion and denial?


“Positivity culture” is tricky to define but easy to feel, especially for someone like me, whose fatal cancer diagnosis elicits many responses rooted in the desire to evade the discomfort of immine…

From a sufficiently cosmic perspective, our lives can look kind of pointless and meaningless, which seems bad, and maybe it’s better to imbue life with a meaning that doesn’t intrinsically exist. “I’m fine,” is rarely the truth, but it’s easy to imagine the discomfort we’d cause by answering, “My marriage is on the rocks and I’m worried about my last performance review, I could really use a friend to talk with over coffee.” We know the person asking doesn’t really want to know. [5] On the flight to Manifest, the nerd conference associated with the Manifold prediction markets, Bess and I sat near a guy who works as some kind of project manager for constructing data centers.

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