Toxic positivity has become a cultural system in America, says historian and professor Kate Bowler.
She traces how optimism became an emotional mandate in American life: a belief that bright sides and silver linings can solve anything. But when positivity refuses pain, it stops being hopeful and becomes denial.
Drawing on personal experience and cultural analysis, Bowler reveals how forced optimism erases nuance, stigmatizes grief, and leaves us unprepared for the parts of life that don’t resolve. Some things aren’t meant to be mastered — they just hurt. Naming that, she argues, is the first step toward something more honest, and more human.
This video Why toxic positivity is making us miserable is featured on Big Think.
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What, exactly, composes the Universe?
In order for life to emerge within the Universe, the chemical precursor ingredients need to be delivered to an environment where life can arise, sustain itself, and thrive. This cannot happen until the elements required for life, including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, exist. None of them were created in the hot Big Bang, only later on in the interiors of their stars and through physical processes arising from their life and death cycles.
Credit: NASA Goddard/CI Lab/Dan Gallagher
In antiquity, many opined about “the elements” in combination.
It used to be thought, more than 2500 years ago, that there were fundamental “elements” to the Universe that combined to make everything up. These elements varied from culture to culture and philosopher to philosopher, often including fire, water, ice, air, wind, acid, lightning, earth, and metal, along with several others. It was not until the development of modern chemistry in the late 1700s that we began to better understand the fundamental nature of matter.Credit: elen31 / Adobe Stock
Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms.
Molecules, examples ... Continue Reading »
An unfortunate side effect of reading philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book, The Score, is noticing how much sway metrics hold over you. I say “unfortunate” not because the realization is unwelcome, quite the opposite, but because you’ll find yourself taking account of the numerical scrum in your life. And that exercise gets unnerving fast.
KPIs, BMIs, OKRs, credit scores, savings rates, social media likes, screen time, steps walked, hours worked, hours slept, to-dos done, to-dos still to do, books read, practice hours, blood pressure readings, calories consumed, macronutrient ratios, the list just keeps going. Heck, even those stressed-out smiley faces on your meditation app mask yet one more metric. Some of these are forced on us by our employers or our societies; others we willfully adopt. But whatever the source, there’s no shortage of rates, ratios, and ranges we feel compelled to satisfy.
The problem, Nguyen points out in his book, isn’t necessarily the metrics. Used properly and with care, they are handy tools that allow us to measure all sorts of things and easily communicate information to others. No, the ... Continue Reading »
If we’re willing to think about the future, the farther ahead we extrapolate, the farther along the inevitable path toward our thermodynamic end state: the heat death of the Universe. Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies will dissociate due to gravitational interactions, ejecting all masses and leaving only supermassive black holes behind. And then those black holes will decay via Hawking radiation, leaving only cold, stable, isolated bodies, from which no further energy can be extracted, all accelerating away from us within our dark energy-dominated Universe.
At least, that’s what will happen in our far future based on our current cosmic picture: the best one we’ve figured out as of 2026. But this troubles a great many people, including our reader Mary Luce, who writes in to inquire:
“I know I’ll be long dead and the Earth long gone, but it still makes me sad to think the Universe will die. That there will arise a time when everything that came before is meaningless. Instead of our Universe dying, why can’t the vacuum’s expansion ... Continue Reading »
We want to believe that love is guided by instinct, and that following our heart will lead us to our ideal soulmate. Alain de Botton argues that our romantic lives are shaped more by the emotional patterns we learned in childhood than by destiny.
This video Why healthy love feels uncomfortable to so many people is featured on Big Think.
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In Andy Weir’s bestselling novel The Martian, foul-mouthed protagonist Mark Watney “sciences the shit” out of his circumstances to survive being stranded on Mars. The result is an engrossing work of science fiction, particularly captivating for its apparent realism. Watney ekes out an existence by eating potatoes sowed in Martian soil fertilized by his own feces. He shelters from the frigid conditions in his above-ground habitation unit, huddling around a repurposed, radiating nuclear battery.
Watney’s survivalist experience isn’t exactly an advertisement from the Red Planet’s tourist board, but it does romanticize space settlement, showcasing humanity’s ability to heroically persist beyond our “blue marble.” Readers are left with the sense that living on Mars is not just possible, but probable.
In reality, Watney’s experience would have been far, far more uncomfortable.
We now know a “toxic cocktail” of oxidants, iron oxides, and perchlorates permeate the Martian soil and would make growing plants exceedingly difficult. Watney might have been able to harvest a few stunted potatoes, but they would hardly be nourishing, likely leaving him weakened and emaciated. Moreover, his habitat should have been built ... Continue Reading »
The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the imagination of humanity since it was first proposed nearly a full 100 years ago. Since the Universe is expanding today (as observations have indicated since the 1920s), then we can extrapolate back, earlier and earlier, to when it was smaller, younger, denser, and hotter. You could go back as far as you can imagine: before humans, before the stars, before there were even neutral atoms. At the earliest times of all, you’d make all the particles and antiparticles possible, including the fundamental ones that we cannot create at our low energies today.
As time went forward, the Universe would cool, expand, and gravitate all together. First atomic nuclei would form from protons and neutrons, then neutral atoms would form, and then gravitation would lead to stars, galaxies, and the grand structures of the cosmic web. These leftover relics — the light elements formed in the Big Bang, the relic photons from the primordial plasma, and the large-scale structure of the Universe — would, along with the cosmic expansion of the Universe, form ... Continue Reading »
What, exactly, composes the Universe?
In order for life to emerge within the Universe, the chemical precursor ingredients need to be delivered to an environment where life can arise, sustain itself, and thrive. This cannot happen until the elements required for life, including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, exist. None of them were created in the hot Big Bang, only later on in the interiors of their stars and through physical processes arising from their life and death cycles.
Credit: NASA Goddard/CI Lab/Dan Gallagher
In antiquity, many opined about “the elements” in combination.
It used to be thought, more than 2500 years ago, that there were fundamental “elements” to the Universe that combined to make everything up. These elements varied from culture to culture and philosopher to philosopher, often including fire, water, ice, air, wind, acid, lightning, earth, and metal, along with several others. It was not until the development of modern chemistry in the late 1700s that we began to better understand the fundamental nature of matter.Credit: elen31 / Adobe Stock
Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms.
Molecules, examples ... 
An unfortunate side effect of reading philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book, The Score, is noticing how much sway metrics hold over you. I say “unfortunate” not because the realization is unwelcome, quite the opposite, but because you’ll find yourself taking account of the numerical scrum in your life. And that exercise gets unnerving fast.
KPIs, BMIs, OKRs, credit scores, savings rates, social media likes, screen time, steps walked, hours worked, hours slept, to-dos done, to-dos still to do, books read, practice hours, blood pressure readings, calories consumed, macronutrient ratios, the list just keeps going. Heck, even those stressed-out smiley faces on your meditation app mask yet one more metric. Some of these are forced on us by our employers or our societies; others we willfully adopt. But whatever the source, there’s no shortage of rates, ratios, and ranges we feel compelled to satisfy.
The problem, Nguyen points out in his book, isn’t necessarily the metrics. Used properly and with care, they are handy tools that allow us to measure all sorts of things and easily communicate information to others. No, the ... 
If we’re willing to think about the future, the farther ahead we extrapolate, the farther along the inevitable path toward our thermodynamic end state: the heat death of the Universe. Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies will dissociate due to gravitational interactions, ejecting all masses and leaving only supermassive black holes behind. And then those black holes will decay via Hawking radiation, leaving only cold, stable, isolated bodies, from which no further energy can be extracted, all accelerating away from us within our dark energy-dominated Universe.
At least, that’s what will happen in our far future based on our current cosmic picture: the best one we’ve figured out as of 2026. But this troubles a great many people, including our reader Mary Luce, who writes in to inquire:
“I know I’ll be long dead and the Earth long gone, but it still makes me sad to think the Universe will die. That there will arise a time when everything that came before is meaningless. Instead of our Universe dying, why can’t the vacuum’s expansion ... 
In Andy Weir’s bestselling novel The Martian, foul-mouthed protagonist Mark Watney “sciences the shit” out of his circumstances to survive being stranded on Mars. The result is an engrossing work of science fiction, particularly captivating for its apparent realism. Watney ekes out an existence by eating potatoes sowed in Martian soil fertilized by his own feces. He shelters from the frigid conditions in his above-ground habitation unit, huddling around a repurposed, radiating nuclear battery.
Watney’s survivalist experience isn’t exactly an advertisement from the Red Planet’s tourist board, but it does romanticize space settlement, showcasing humanity’s ability to heroically persist beyond our “blue marble.” Readers are left with the sense that living on Mars is not just possible, but probable.
In reality, Watney’s experience would have been far, far more uncomfortable.
We now know a “toxic cocktail” of oxidants, iron oxides, and perchlorates permeate the Martian soil and would make growing plants exceedingly difficult. Watney might have been able to harvest a few stunted potatoes, but they would hardly be nourishing, likely leaving him weakened and emaciated. Moreover, his habitat should have been built ... 
The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the imagination of humanity since it was first proposed nearly a full 100 years ago. Since the Universe is expanding today (as observations have indicated since the 1920s), then we can extrapolate back, earlier and earlier, to when it was smaller, younger, denser, and hotter. You could go back as far as you can imagine: before humans, before the stars, before there were even neutral atoms. At the earliest times of all, you’d make all the particles and antiparticles possible, including the fundamental ones that we cannot create at our low energies today.
As time went forward, the Universe would cool, expand, and gravitate all together. First atomic nuclei would form from protons and neutrons, then neutral atoms would form, and then gravitation would lead to stars, galaxies, and the grand structures of the cosmic web. These leftover relics — the light elements formed in the Big Bang, the relic photons from the primordial plasma, and the large-scale structure of the Universe — would, along with the cosmic expansion of the Universe, form ...