Is This the End of Positive Psychology?

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Positive psychology is the study of optimal human functioning. It became popular at the turn of the century when Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, called upon psychologists to shift from their predominant “negative” focus on the alleviation of suffering to include a “positive” focus on understanding human flourishing and that which makes life most worth living. Positive psychology can be considered an area of scholarly inquiry and also a popular movement.

A number of conditions contributed to the growth of positive psychology. In a 2009 chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, Ed Diener, one of the seminal figures in the area, suggested that positive psychology emerged at the time it did because industrialized societies were better off and more affluent than they had been in the past, which sparked an interest in philosophical questions concerning "the good life." As he noted, “concern for how to live a good life is natural once people’s basic needs are met and threats are relatively contained.”

However, in the intervening years, conditions have changed. The COVID-19 pandemic undermined the basic need for security of countless people around the globe. After decades of warnings, environmental catastrophes caused by climate change have become commonplace and are increasing in frequency and intensity. In many countries, the economic gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” is growing. Political unrest is mounting, and we are currently witnessing the greatest number of global conflicts since the Second World War. In these anxious times when threats are more common and severe, might the popular fascination with positive psychology and human flourishing be eclipsed by more fundamental interests that have immediate survival value?

Positive psychology tends to focus on topics that reflect the needs for growth and flourishing, but people also have physical needs for such things as food and shelter, which take center stage when they are not satisfied. In the current environment, might the satisfaction of our basic needs for existence begin to take precedence over our needs for self-actualization?

Maybe. But maybe not. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor who wrote a book called Meditations, which lays out the principles of a good life based on stoic philosophy. It is a classic work offering tidbits of advice such as “Let not future things disturb thee, for thou wilt come to them” and “It is in thy power to live free from all compulsion in the greatest tranquility of mind.” These sound like prescriptions for the good life you might find in any number of popular books on positive psychology.

An interesting tidbit is that Aurelius wrote Meditations during the Antonine plague, which is estimated to have taken the lives of up to 5 million people. Perhaps it was due to, not in spite of, the extreme suffering and loss caused by the plague that Aurelius chose to record his thoughts about the art of living well.

An adequate understanding of the human condition requires accepting the negative. Some scholars suggest that negative thinking and feeling is not only useful but indispensable, and that we do not give enough attention to acknowledging and even welcoming loss and suffering. Indeed, it may be during our most difficult times that the goods of life reveal themselves most clearly. However, these philosophical reflections are hard to swallow when you have no food on the table, when your house has been swept away by a flood, or an adversary has destroyed your town. If conditions involving abundance and security set the stage for positive psychology to flourish, might conditions involving scarcity and threat create an environment in which interest in positive psychology dwindles, and is replaced by seemingly more fundamental survival concerns?

Positive psychology is both an area of inquiry and a movement. As an area of inquiry, it is not going away, because it has never been absent. Interest in the life well-lived long pre-dated Seligman’s introduction of positive psychology to the masses. As Darrin McMahon (2006) explains in Happiness: A History, “the pursuit of human happiness, it would seem, has been with us from the start." “Perhaps happiness is, was, and ever shall be the ultimate end in every time and place." Interest in knowing how to live well is a perennial human concern. It is here to stay.

However, as a movement, positive psychology may have had its moment in the sun. Threats are no longer relatively contained. As more and more people become preoccupied with securing shelter, finding enough affordable food to eat, and protecting themselves from increasingly numerous dangers, the positive psychology movement may come to be seen as a quaint luxury, a relic of a comfortable past era when rich people were able occupy themselves with grand philosophical questions instead of focusing on the basic necessities of trying to survive. Considered as a movement, we may soon witness the end of positive psychology.