During the celebration of the new year, as commonly practiced, people tend to have their “new year’s resolution”. Such practice always show the positive outlook people has in the span of the “new year”, wherein they set goals for them to do, or positive changes they look forward to.
We, Filipinos, are no exception to such practice. Many of our kababayans do in fact share their new year’s resolution in their social media accounts, or just by simply writing it down on paper. I do not know when such practice has started, what is certain though is that such practice depict how the “new year” is usually equated to having a positive outlook in life (or that, we should always be positive that we could handle anything in the new year).
Generally, there is no problem in celebrating the new year, or on making resolutions that have positivity written all over it. In fact, Having a positive outlook on life is good for our mental well-being.
However, the problem here lies in the truth that life isn’t always positive. I mean, all of us can relate to such statement. We all have painful emotions and experiences. We all have unpleasant occurrences in our life. While often unpleasant it need to be felt and dealt with openly and honestly to achieve acceptance and greater psychological health.
Hence, if we always look into the positivity of every circumstance that have occurred in our lives, even those of bad ones, it becomes too toxic (which reminds me of the famous Aristotelian doctrine of the Golden Mean — too much of everything is vice). Toxic, in a sense that we do could not properly deal
with them, because we think that looking at the brighter side would solve such. Such an even is what is called as Toxic positivity.
Toxic positivity is the belief that no matter how dire or difficult a situation is, people should maintain a positive mindset. While there are benefits to being optimistic and engaging in positive thinking, toxic positivity rejects all difficult emotions in favor of a cheerful and often falsely-positive façade.
Familiar?? Well, Filipinos are known to be a resilient bunch, because of such belief.
