Re:Toxic Positivity
by lauraekelly_ on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @07:35PM
(#31498807)
I would like to say a second thank you for your response here. The way you've expressed this gives me food for thought on how I spread my time and energy, and how it manifests in terms of quality. I'm leaving this behind me tomorrow and taking what I have found useful so I've actually screen-shotted this comment in particular to take away with me. The way you've worded the issue is thoughtful and I'm not able to respond to it point by point here but I appreciate it.
Ah, thank you - I had this thread open in a tab all day, and I'm a compulsive procrastinator (not just some amateur crastinator), hence the intermittent participation! It reads as quite pompous now that I read it back, but hey, I think that of all my comments, so I'm very happy if it was any use to you. Wishing you all the best, and that you find an opportunity to put your skills to better, worthier use. Here's to artists, chefs, and saints :)
And, let's be honest, this is only an unusually pure rendition of that genre of writing: formulaic, saccharine but detectably hollow, devoid of substance, strung together with stale clichés, seemingly written to typify an attitude (one of cultish overfriendliness without boundaries) more than what we would traditionally recognise as a 'point'.
The discomfiting feeling you get when reading it is the feeling that the author doesn't care about any of this. And that you don't blame her. It's an egg laid by a caged hen, full of sad hormones and stress. You can feel it in the way that there's nothing there above the phrasal or (at most) sentential level: no overarching purpose, every sentence out for itself with no overarching strategy from above, like an Elizabethan commonplace book full of random helpful platitudes.
It's why I recommended Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. I have never read bad writing, truly bad writing, produced by someone speaking sincerely and plainly of a subject they care about, saying something about it which they think ought to be said.