The Violence of Positivity

When someone says, “Depression is the result of something terrible happening or being in a terrible state,” the usual reply is, “No shit, Sherlock.” Yet, Byung-Chul Han takes it seriously: the question that this idiotic statement opens up is, “What is this terrible state?” And Byung-Chul Han thinks the answer is not simple at all.

He makes a very astute observation—depression is a very “first-world disorder.” The usual demographic associated with depression is typically the bourgeoisie—college students, office workers, content creators. And the demographic not usually associated with depression is precisely the lower percentiles—workers, illegal immigrants, rags-to-riches exemplars. This is by no means the basis for an empirical claim that only the first-world bourgeoisie suffer from depression. Rather, it indicates an important cultural fact: depression—both as a signifier and with all its connotations—is a first-world construct. In this sense, when we state that “depression is a first-world disorder,” we mean that the concept of depression is framed within a first-world context.

This symbolic link opens the way for an investigation into the core of the lesion: perhaps we need to locate the elements of the first world that give rise to depression, the precise “first-world elements” within it. One element that signals danger for Byung-Chul Han is positivity—the incessant need for affirmation, the “you can do anything” ideology. Think of the phenomenon of New Year’s resolutions: every year, family or friends ask a person what they have accomplished throughout the year and what they plan to achieve next year. The New Year’s resolution is precisely the incessant need for affirmation—the value of a year must be affirmed by one’s accomplishments. Could we not extend this to life in general? The value of a person must be affirmed through accomplishments (broadly speaking, both material and internal). “I” need to be affirmed by what “I” did that is worthwhile—sports, starting a business, reading a certain number of books, achieving some form of spiritual elevation—because why not do it when you can?

Products and sales ideas are pitched to consumers in precisely this way: the laptop or phone is not for enjoyment but for productivity (the “work as you go” model); the ideal middle-class “green foods” are not for satiating hunger or desire but for health and appearance; even most consumer-oriented films (those purely made for enjoyment, like the MCU films) carry a positive aspect—they must convey a specific moral theme. Not to mention the proliferation of self-help gurus and “grind bros.” We live in the age of positivity.

And the problem, precisely, is with this positivity: it is violent. Positivity’s maxim—“You can do anything”—entails a nasty obverse: You can do anything, so why aren’t you doing it? Your identity must be wholesome, self-motivated, hardworking—your identity must be what is positive—because why not? Why not improve yourself, why not be hardworking, why not be wholesome? And when you don’t, positivity turns on you, revealing its fangs in the following denominations: you lack our modern virtues. The grind bros will say you are a sheep (and ironically, if you are a man, they will denounce you as feminine and unmanly); the millionaires will say you are lazy; the mentors and gurus will say you lack virtue. You lack the approval of the Other. The most liberating maxim unveils its most totalitarian fangs. This “thirst” for positivity will not end. The positive finds value in closure—something positive is only satisfying if it is finished, turned into an accomplishment. Yet, due to the perversion of positivity in our era, it is not the closure of the positive that we desire but the whole positive process itself—the fact that I am desiring the positive, chasing goal after goal, etc., is what actually gives me satisfaction. Therefore, there is no real closure of the positive, no truly finishing a goal or task—there is always one more closure, one more goal, one more accomplishment to be reached.

It is obvious that this positivity is in conflict with one’s drive: you are told to desire all the positive content, but you simultaneously desire the opposite. It is the self-exploitation of a subject who does not want to be exploited and the isolation of a subject who wants to be connected, leading to burnout and depression.

It is on these grounds that Byung-Chul Han considers depression (along with some other disorders) to be a symptom of our overly positive world.

Indeed, if you think about it, burnout and depression are the best coping mechanisms for this incessant need for positivity. The symptoms of burnout are anti-positivity at its extreme: the removal of one’s entire desire to do something, both the enjoyment and the self-exploitation. Similarly for depression, which manifests as the desperate need to remove identity and reject all emotions once associated with positivity, such as happiness (think of the common view that happiness comes from working—for example, those millionaires who claim to continue working because it makes them happy).

To me, this is also the precise reason that depression, under Byung-Chul Han, remains a first-world disorder. The violence of positivity remains a psychological need: it is a cultural phenomenon rooted in the need to establish identity. In places where survival, not identity, is the primary concern, a disorder of identity and positivity is definitely absent. Perhaps this is what Byung-Chul Han considers too: his distinction between the Foucauldian society of negativity and the postmodern society of positivity—one punishes, while the other “rewards.” The society of negativity belongs to the past, when economies and cultures were not developed enough. Is this not what non-first-world countries are?

Perhaps this divide is not even between countries but within them: don’t we see different social classes having different issues? As pointed out earlier in this article, the workers don’t have depression, while the college student most definitely does.

Now, this is where the social critique of psychology (not as a discipline) comes in handy: in valuing depression, we are essentially setting our focus on the upper percentiles—the college students, the “suburban kids.” But who cares about a poor person’s mental well-being? The lack of awareness regarding the mental problems of those traumatized and/or of the lower class illustrates this situation. When most people encounter someone who “rose to the top” despite trauma and poverty, their first thought is not the potential for latent disorders or mental instability but their resilience and virtue. When they encounter a “fucked-up” person, they do not situate them in any context or consider them a real patient in need of treatment; instead, they take the coward’s way out—“I wanna stay away from that one.” Contrast that with their attitude toward a college girl (presumably attractive) coming to tell them about her mental problems—the disparity is obvious.

I am, however, not attempting to do activism here—saying that lower-class trauma and mental health need to be addressed (though I wholeheartedly agree with this activism)—nor am I trying to denounce the state of modern psychology (the price of therapy has already determined this to be a “bourgeois sport”). Instead, I am pointing to the need for a reconsideration of Deleuze’s philosophy.

Deleuze’s embrace of a different yet ontologically equivalent type of positivity—where everything matters—could suffer from the same problem as the recognition of depression here: the embrace of depression as an actual problem neglects other problems, such as the mental struggles of the less fortunate. Is the embrace of positive totality doing the same thing? Ignoring some crucial part of the world in its attempt to “ignore nothing”?