Vivat Libertas

...actually, the positive thinking sort of worked. Well, not quite, but sort of. What worked better for me wasn't trying to cultivate a happy happy shiny shiny attitude. It was doing what my body told me to do and getting some sleep. It was doing what my mind told me to do and getting out of the house to see some green space. It was seeing my amazing boyfriend and holding him, spending time with him, spending time just talking and making music and exploring new things. It was realising that I have really, really good friends, who care about me and actually want to spend time with me. It was realising that all of those things have been there since the beginning and I'm only just noticing them. It was going to parties and dancing badly and ending up covered in my friend's soft toys. It was diving deep into physics books and connecting with what made me love physics - with the strange and beautiful and elegant ways of viewing the world - and drawing on that to stud...

There is a very appealing concept sold by the positive living industry: the critical positivity ratio, or the Losada line. First published in 2005 by the psychologists Marcial Losada and Barbara Fredrickson, their paper uses nonlinear dynamical modelling to show that people need a ratio of just three positive interactions to one negative one to live happier, healthier lives. It's a brilliant idea, combining mathematical legitimacy and common sense into one weird old tip for being happier. What a shame, then, that it's also complete bollocks. The critical positivity ratio was debunked by Nick Brown, a graduate student in applied positive psychology, Alan Sokal, a physicist most famous for trolling the journal Social Text  by writing complete shit and getting it published, and the psychologist Harris Friedman. There were severe flaws in the theory - for example, in several of Losada's analyses the data used did not meet the basic criteria for using differential equations ...

This formula doesn't even make that much sense and it's still  a better tool for finding happiness than what we've ever come up with. We Westerners seem to be on a quest for happiness. It's a quest as old as dirt, and in the thousands of years we've been on it we appear to have made no progress. And we call ourselves smart. I think that might need a little more consideration... ...Right, that's the obligatory misanthropy over with, so let's get back on track! Anyway, we're still on this quest today and still just as clueless. At this point, I'd love to turn to positive thinking (I reserve judgement on positive psychology in academia, as opposed to positive psychology in the media, due to not knowing enough about it) and absolutely fucking rip into it - and, for those of you who like some invective mixed in with a good dose of cynicism, disillusionment and disgust with the status quo, and maybe, hopefully, even a glimpse of some logic, I sha...