I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation differently: the Vector Marketing (Cutco) approach of getting desperate youth to sell knives to their families is an exploitative business model; working that job was bad and I don’t miss it one bit. But what’s in question is the lessons we draw from that situation.

Yes, we should be clear-eyed enough about the badness of our situations that we have an eye to changing them where possible. But what I didn’t realize then is the lesson of the Serenity Prayer: we also have to accept, and even be positive about, the bad things we cannot change. If we don’t do that – if we decide to see every 50% cup as half-empty – then we are undercutting our own goals.

I remained a social activist at 19, and the negativity I advocated was largely in the name of activism for social change. But the question I didn’t ask was, even if I could accomplish all the social change I wanted, what would it be for exactly? I had already begun to have some misgivings about utilitarianism, but it was very much my default position: I thought we should bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and that the systemic social changes I sought would be the way to do that.

And the connection I hadn’t made was: despite having all the comfort and privilege that I sought to bring to the world’s starving people, despite living in a world where the effects of climate change were not yet noticeable, I wasn’t happy. Was I merely striving to give everyone else the same level of misery that I was in?

For what was making me so unhappy was not that I worked in an awful job like knife marketing. Even that job wasn’t as bad as my 19-year-old self portrayed it: when I complained that “we were not even allowed to decide what to wear to a ‘casual’ sales workshop”, what I meant is they didn’t allow us to wear sweat pants. (Which I’d been used to doing, and balked at not being allowed to.)

Negativity does help us change the situation, but while that’s important, it only goes so far. In the case of my 19-year-old self, it wasn’t as if I had better options! Armed with the knowledge that the knife job was bad, I quit it not long before I wrote that post… but then the next job I found was babysitting a girl so mean-spirited that she spat in my face. Overall, as bad as it was, I’d been better off with the knives.

More importantly, I was unhappy before both of those jobs, and I was unhappy after I was done them – despite having enough money generously provided by my parents and grandparents that I was materially better off than many of my McGill undergraduate fellows, even while unemployed. I was not very successful in romance, and I blamed most of my unhappiness on that. But I now know that that was not the real problem either.

What helped me figure the real problem out was going to work at the United Nations office in Bangkok immediately after graduation. For not only was that a job my classmates envied, but I even found an attractive girlfriend at the office while I worked there – filling an absence in my life tthat I’d previously felt more acutely than the work situation. Yet the job environment was clouded by paranoid office politics, and the girlfriend was self-centred and mean. Neither of those made me happy. Instead I looked forward to the time when the contract would end and I could travel upcountry around Thailand and Laos – but I found reasons to be unhappy there too.

Fortunately, everywhere around me in Thailand and Laos was something that did offer me happiness, or at least the absence of suffering – which sure sounded good by comparison to the previous twenty years. That something, of course, was Buddhism. Not unlike the Buddha himself in Aśvaghoṣa’s biography, I found a path forward through my interactions with monks. Many of the monks I met had grown up with much less than I had, and they voluntarily rejected even that wealth – and seemed a lot happier than I was. The Buddhist books I devoured, especially by modernized Buddhists like Walpola Rahula and Thich Nhat Hanh, promised me that I could be happier by being mindful, whatever my external situation might be. And they were right.

From the Buddhists I learned well the lesson that our happiness depends more on our habits of mind than on our external situations. And in the years that followed, I came to realize that in addition to mindfulness proper, one of the habits that does most to make you happy is gratitude and appreciation: putting your attention on what’s good in your situation, however many bad things might accompany it. The French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, in his lovely little book on the big virtues, points out that gratitude is the most pleasant of the virtues (and goes on to wonder why it’s then so hard). A positive outlook helps to constitute that happiness that the activist utilitarians seek.

So in 2018, more than two decades after Cutco’s positivity had so repulsed me, I attended another positivity-soaked professional workshop, this time in educational technology management – and that time I realized it was exactly what I needed. Its smarm, its cheerleader-ish positivity, now felt like a balm at a time when everyone around me seemed to be miserable and sniping, overly full of snark. And myself even more so: I am a naturally snarky and critical person; I need smarmy positivity as a corrective. I needed that workshop’s reminder to try and be happy even in bad situations, because you’re always going to be faced with situations that are bad one way or the other. Do what you can to change them, sure, but know that changing them isn’t everything.

Consider a recent study by John B. Whitfield and other epidemiologists at the Berghofer Institute in Brisbane. This study found that “higher pessimism score was associated with increased mortality but there was no significant association between optimism score and mortality.” It is not that being overly optimistic helps you; you may as well be realistic in that regard. But being overly pessimistic does hurt you.

Because after all, so much of optimism and pessimism is about different interpretations of the same data. It is equally true that the glass is half-full and that it is half-empty. And yet, I submit with what I hope is the wisdom of the years, it is better to think that the glass is half-full: it is better for you in a variety of ways. Snarkers like to think they are so much smarter than smarmers. Occasionally this is true; some optimists can ignore the data. But it’s not true as often as the snarkers think.