From director Rian Johnson, a collection of some of the screenplays of his movies & TV shows, including Wake Up Dead Man, Knives Out, Glass Onion, Looper, and the Poker Face pilot. “Print them, share them, act them out with your friends.”
After a bombastic speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump backed away from his threat to impose tariffs on European countries
In the past few days, Donald Trump turned the US presidency into a tool for his personal glory and vengeance. On Saturday, he threatened to impose tariffs of up to 25% on a bloc of European countries until Denmark agrees to sell Greenland to the US. The next day, Trump texted Norway’s prime minister, saying his failure to win the Nobel peace prize was one of the reasons he’s intent on seizing control of Greenland. After being snubbed for last year’s award, Trump said he no longer felt the need “to think purely of peace”.
By Tuesday morning, as European leaders continued to absorb the shock of Trump’s threats and insults, the president posted an AI-generated meme that showed him planting a US flag on the island, flanked by his vice-president and secretary of state. “Greenland. US Territory. Est. 2026,” the image said. (Trump shared another image, also apparently edited by AI, that showed him sitting alongside a map of the US that includes Canada, Greenland and Venezuela, as he spoke with European leaders assembled at the White House.) Later on Tuesday, when he was asked at a press conference how far he was willing to go to acquire Greenland, Trump responded tersely: “You’ll find out.”
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University
Continue reading...Duchess of Sussex’s lifestyle programme will reportedly not return for third series
The Duchess of Sussex’s latest Netflix lifestyle show failed to crack the top 1,000 most watched programmes on the platform, figures suggest, amid reports that it will not return for a third series.
The second series of With Love, Meghan ranked 1,124th most watched shows between July and December 2025, with 2m views, according to data, coming below the second season of Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir, as well as programmes several years older including Downton Abbey.
Continue reading...The US president has backed down in the row over Greenland after threatening Europe with tariffs and the potential use of military force. After talks with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, Donald Trump said the 'framework of a future deal' had been agreed for the territory to allow the US to build its military presence there. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian's Europe correspondent Jon Henley
Continue reading...Island’s PM says sovereignty is non-negotiable after Trump claimed agreement would give US full access with ‘no end, no time limit’
Greenland has demanded its red lines on sovereignty be respected after Donald Trump claimed an agreement with Nato would give the US full and permanent access to the Arctic island, the object of an increasingly bitter months-long dispute.
Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, said on Thursday he did not know what was in the deal but the largely self-governing territory wanted a “peaceful dialogue” with the US, and its sovereignty was non-negotiable.
Continue reading...High court ruling marks first time a foreign state has been held liable for domestic servitude by its envoy on UK soil
The United Arab Emirates must pay more than £260,000 to a victim of human trafficking who was exploited by one of its diplomats in London, the high court has ruled.
Lawyers representing the woman said it was unprecedented for a court to order a foreign state to pay for domestic servitude by a diplomat on UK soil.
Continue reading...Emmanuel Macron says the oil tanker was boarded and searched ‘subject to international sanctions’
The French navy has intercepted a Russian tanker in the Mediterranean suspected to be part of the “shadow fleet” that enables Russia to export oil despite sanctions.
“This morning, the French navy boarded and searched an oil tanker from Russia, subject to international sanctions and suspected of flying a false flag,” President Emmanuel Macron said on X.
Continue reading...Coogler’s vampire thriller swept the Oscar nominations over Chloé Zhao’s tearjerker and Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture thriller. This genre-defying drama about the black experience could now rule awards season
• Full list of nominees
• Sinners becomes first film in history to earn 16 Oscar nominations
Agree with them or not, these Oscar nominations deliver a pert slap to the accepted assumptions of awards season. The industry had been expecting landslides for classy upmarket fare such as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and also for Josh Safdie’s delirious comedy Marty Supreme. And that’s what they got.
But perhaps no one expected these titles to get quite as colossal a smackdown as they got from Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama thriller Sinners: a violent, high-energy fantasia about racism, music and the black experience, which has soared ahead with 16 nominations – the most for any film in 97 years of the Academy Awards. Whatever happens on the night itself, Ryan Coogler has made Oscar history.
Continue reading...The Box, Plymouth
Roof-felters, bawdy boozers, off-duty sailors, whip-wielding dominatrixes … this 100th birthday show in Cook’s home town is an exuberant celebration of working-class frivolity
Generally, you get two versions of England in art: it’s either bucolic vistas, rolling hills, babbling brooks and gambolling sheep – or it’s downtrodden, browbeaten, grim poverty and misery. But Beryl Cook saw something else in all the drizzle and grey of this damp old country: she saw joy.
The thing is, joy doesn’t carry the same critical, conceptual heft in art circles as more serious subjects, so Cook has always been a bit brushed off by the art crowd. They saw her as postcards and posters for the unwashed, uncultured masses, not high art for the high-minded. But she didn’t care: she succeeded as a self-taught documenter of English life despite any disdain she might have encountered. And now, on what would have been her 100th birthday, her home town of Plymouth is throwing her a big celebratory bash.
Continue reading...Video game publisher to cancel Prince of Persia remake and close studios after several difficult years
The video game publisher behind the Assassin’s Creed series has cancelled six projects including a remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as it fights to stay competitive in the global gaming market.
Ubisoft announced a sweeping reorganisation and said it would cancel six games, sending its shares to their lowest level in more than a decade on Thursday.
Continue reading...
Voetballen of niet? Petitie ondertekenen of niet? Dat is opeens weer de vraag nu er in Nederland een actie is begonnen om het WK-toernooi van komende zomer te boycotten.
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Bert Wijbenga neemt deze week na 4,5 jaar afscheid als burgemeester van Vlaardingen. Die periode werd gekenmerkt door enkele bijzondere dossiers, zoals het Vlaardingse pleegmeisje, de explosiegolf bij loodgieter Ron van Uffelen en het Oekraïne-dorp. Na een hectische tijd kiest hij nu voor zijn gezin.
Bert Wijbenga neemt deze week na 4,5 jaar afscheid als burgemeester van Vlaardingen. Die periode werd gekenmerkt door enkele bijzondere dossiers, zoals het Vlaardingse pleegmeisje, de explosiegolf bij loodgieter Ron van Uffelen en het Oekraïne-dorp. Na een hectische tijd kiest hij nu voor zijn gezin.
Tientallen jongeren, wier wortels vermoedelijk niet in Het Straatje van Vermeer of een andere straat in Delft liggen, hebben de 17-jarige vlogger Bender en zijn cameraman belaagd en bekogeld met flessen en stenen. Op foto's lijkt goed te zien dat er rake beuken en trappen worden uitgedeeld aan cameraman Frits-Willem van der Hoeven, die op zijn beurt zegt dat Bender op zijn achterhoofd is geslagen door een of meerdere gekken. Bender was daar om verslag te doen van Wilders' azc-tourtje door de stad. Daardoor was de politie er in ieder geval snel bij, konden drie mensen worden opgepakt en zijn Bender en zijn cameraman in veiligheid gebracht. Voor de jongeren in Delft: journalisten sla je niet bont en (Delfts)blauw!
Ziek
Bender komt later zelf met beelden
SocialHij laat op Insta weten oké te zijn
Today's links
- The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating ungovernability as a habit: Get good at being on hold.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: "Ventus"; Woody Guthrie v Trump's dad; Tory MP v poppers.
- Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating ungovernability as a habit (permalink)
I am on record as being skeptical of the notion that if you shop very carefully, you can make society better. "Conscious consumption" is not a tool for structural change, and any election that requires you to "vote with your wallet" is always won by the people with the thickest wallets (statistically speaking, that's not you):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits
Now, that's not to say that boycotts are useless. But a boycott is a structured and organized campaign. The Montgomery bus boycott wasn't a matter of a bunch of people waking up one morning and saying, "You know what, fuck it, I'm gonna walk today":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott was an organized project, put together by a powerful membership organization, the NAACP, that demanded far more of its members than merely shopping very carefully. The boycott was the end stage of an organized resistance, not a substitute for it.
The problem with "conscious consumption" is that it comes out of the neoliberal tradition in which every political matter is supposedly determined by your individual actions, and not your actions as part of a union or other political institution that works as a bloc to overthrow the status quo.
"Conscious consumption" arises out of the tradition that gave us Margaret Thatcher's maxim, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it's worse than that. Because "shopping very carefully" never makes systemic change, its practitioners inevitably decide the reason they're not seeing the change they yearn for is that their allies aren't shopping carefully enough. This turns the careful shopper into a cop who polices other people's consumption, demanding that they stop eating some foodstuff or using Twitter or watching HBO Max. Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis.
Which is not an argument against boycotts! Boycotts work. If boycotts didn't work, then genocide apologists wouldn't be apoplectic over the BDS movement:
But a "boycott" isn't the same thing as "you and your social circle deciding that buying the wrong product makes you a Bad Person and then devoting your energies to scolding your allies for choosing Coke instead of Pepsi." Boycotts are downstream of organizing; they are not a substitute for organizing. There is such a thing as society.
Now, all that said, I will confess: I sometimes do something that looks a lot like "shopping very carefully," and when I do, I derive enormous satisfaction from it (but I am always careful not to mistake my tiny victories for political action). But I get it, honestly, I do. Sometimes, "shopping very carefully" is a way to eke out a tiny, personal victory in the face of overwhelming odds against a wildly overmatched opponent. That feels very good.
One example would be patronizing my local repair shop (or fixing my stuff myself). The big structural barriers to repair are things like "parts pairing":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification
And manufacturers who abuse trademark law to get CBP to seize refurbished parts at the border:
The repair problem isn't that your neighbors are "sheeple" who've had their minds warped by a "throwaway society." The problem is that technical and legal countermeasures have made repair so hard and unprofitable that getting your stuff fixed is more expensive and time-consuming than it needs to be.
That said: I love going to my local repair shop. I love fixing things on my own. It's great. It makes me feel great. I think you should do it because it may make you feel great, too, and it'd be nice for you to support your local fix-it place, but let's not pretend that we'll change society that way.
Here's another example: for the past couple years, I've been navigating a (thankfully very treatable) cancer diagnosis. The fact that my cancer is very treatable doesn't mean it's easily treated. America's shitty, for-profit healthcare system is terrible at the best of times, and nearly unnavigable when coping with a complex condition that crosses a lot of disciplinary lines and requires access to specialized, expensive equipment.
I'm asymptomatic, so the hardest part of having cancer – so far – is fighting the Kaiser bureaucracy to make sure my treatment goes off as planned:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail
The fact that the different Kaiser departments drop so many balls when handing off care between them means that I have to juggle those balls for them. I make extensive use of organizational tactics like "suspense files," which are a kind of inverted to-do list, in that they let you manage other people's to-do lists, rather than your own:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo
(In case you're wondering, the best part of having cancer is that Kaiser comps 100% of your parking! Free cancer parking!)
Now, I also make sure to note each of Kaiser's failures and I raise grievances and California health ombudsman complaints for each one – not because I'm angry and want an apology, but because I'm a well-organized, native English-speaking cancer patient with no symptoms, which means that I can do the advocacy that other people can't, and help them (I also track these complaints with suspense files, calendar entries, etc, to make sure that they're followed through).
Partly, I'm able to do this because I'm very organized. I'm not organized because I worship at the cult of "personal productivity"; I'm definitely Jenny Odell-pilled on that score:
I'm organized because I pursue The Way of Jim Munroe's "Time Management for Anarchists" ("once I learned how to make my own structure, I was able to kick my expensive boss habit and work on my own"):
Having invested a lot of energy into being organized, I now get massive discounts on dealing with other people's shit. Remember: giant corporations and other remorseless bureaucracies throw up roadblocks on the assumption that you will be a "rational economic actor." The airline assumes that if it costs you 15 hours to collect on the $50 voucher you're entitled to, you will just let them steal $50 from you. But once you get organized enough, you can cut that 15-hour investment down to a 15-minute one, and I will absolutely trade 15 minutes of dealing with an airline's bullshit for $50 of that airline's money.
(Why yes, Air Canada did fuck me over on Jan 3 and get me home at 5AM the next day, instead of 730PM the night before; and yes, they did deny my compensation claim; and yes, I have filed an appeal with the Canada Transport Agency; why do you ask?)
One of my favorite podcasts is "An Arm and a Leg," which divides itself between deep dive structural analyses into how corrupt and ghastly American medical billing is, and enumerations of sweet hacks that ninja bill-fighters have come up with to slice through the billing labyrinth your insurer and hospital trap you in and cut straight to the bullseye:
For example, the latest episode tells the story of med student Thomas Sanford, who figured out that hospitals were stealing billions of dollars every year from the poorest people in America, who were all entitled to have their medical bill canceled. He founded Dollarfor, a nonprofit that helps patients get their medical debt canceled:
https://armandalegshow.com/episode/our-favorite-project-of-2025-levels-up-and-you-can-help/
Dollarfor now has an automated tool that guides you through a survey and then generates and files the completed, hospital-specific paperwork needed to get your medical debt canceled (they've made versions of this for every hospital in America!):
(If you're a health worker, here's a printable guide with QR codes that you can clip to your lanyard and show to patients while you deliver care):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14cfwK66A_mfBBBqn35_Lp7930uoY-73f/view
Now, the real problem here isn't that hospitals steal billions from charity cases: it's that America has a garbage for-profit healthcare system that kills and bankrupts people at scale. Dollarfor is amazing, but it's not going to fix that problem. I don't know Sanford, but I bet if you asked him, he'd agree with this, and say something like, "Yes, and I'm helping people not have their lives destroyed by this garbage system, which is good unto itself; and also, it might give them the free time and wherewithal to participate in movements to overthrow the garbage system."
I really dote on the fact that Dollarfor has literally built a different version of their tool for every single hospital in the country. It's a perfect example of how turning yourself into a highly organized adversary can overcome the time-based economics our enemies rely on to keep their garbage systems intact.
Whenever I think of this stuff, I flash on two pop-culture references that made a deep impression on me. The first comes from 1985's Real Genius, Val Kilmer's best ever movie (fight me!). Real Genius is set on a fictionalized version of MIT in which young prodigies slowly discover that their scumbag prof has tricked them into working on a weapons contract for the DoD.
This being fictional-MIT, there are all these scenes in which very smart people do weird and amazing things. At one point, we learn that there's a former child prodigy living in the basement under the dorms, a guy named Lazlo Hollyfeld who became a hermit after discovering that he, too, had been duped into working on a baby-killer project. We get these tantalizing glimpses of Lazlo in his subterranean redoubt, where he has built some kind of giant Rube Goldberg machine that is engaged in a mysterious mechanical process that involves manipulating cards of some sort.
At the film's denouement (spoiler alert for a 40 year old movie), we discover what he was doing:
Lazlo: These are entries into the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes. "No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want" – so I am.
Chris: That's great! How many times?
Lazlo: Well, this batch makes it one million six hundred and fifty thousand. I should win thirty-two point six percent of the prizes, including the car.
Chris: That kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn't it?
Lazlo: They set up the rules, and lately I've come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kBfBXZBdc
Then there's a scene from the otherwise tepid (fight me!) Batman Returns (1992) in which we encounter the Penguin in his subterranean redoubt, brandishing pages full of kompromat that have been laboriously taped together:
The Penguin: What about the documents that prove you own half the firetraps in Gotham City?
Maximillian 'Max' Shreck: If there were such documents – and that's not an admission – I would have seen to it they were shredded.
The Penguin: Ah, good idea! [pulls out a sheaf of documents]
The Penguin: A lot of tape and a little patience make all the difference.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/quotes/
Both Lazlo and the Penguin are defeating the time-based security assumptions of their adversaries. Frito Lay treats filling in 1.65m sweepstakes entries as the same thing as filling in infinity entries; Max Schrek treats the time needed to piece together shredded paper as infinite. Rounding a very large number up to infinity isn't entirely irrational, but if once you get organized enough, you just might be able to find the time – or a system – to bring that very big number down to an entirely tractable value.
Yes, this is a species of "careful shopping" but my point isn't to say that shopping carefully is useless – rather, that it's a drastic error to mistake this useful (and surprisingly satisfying) tactic for a strategy that will truly alter the system.
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Verizon Wastes No Time Switching Device Unlock Policy to 365 Days https://www.droid-life.com/2026/01/20/verizon-device-unlock-policy-365-days/
-
CEOs say AI is making work more efficient. Employees tell a different story. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/ceos-say-ai-is-making-work-more-efficient-employees-tell-a-different-story/ar-AA1UE3Tq
-
This is the End of the US Global Monetary System https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/this-is-the-end-of-the-us-global
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Europe has more bargaining strength than it thinks https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/europe-has-more-bargaining-strength
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U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-workers-just-took-home-214018586.html
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Karl Schroeder's "Ventus" https://www.mindjack.com/books/ventus.html
#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP plagiarizes entertainment industry in op-ed https://web.archive.org/web/20060814015107/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1082
#20yrago Pope: Divine inspiration is copyrighted https://web.archive.org/web/20070219175621/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article717916.ece
#10yrsago Gay Tory MP outs himself as a “poppers” user, slams proposed ban https://web.archive.org/web/20160122212659/https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/mp-crispin-blunt-admits-using-poppers-while-attacking-proposed-ban/ar-BBotElv
#10yrsago Donald Trump’s dad was Woody Guthrie’s hated Klansman landlord https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026
#5yrsago How one of America's most abusive employers gets away with it https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless
#1yrago EFF's transition memo for the Biden admin https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#memo
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 -
Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ -
Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/ -
Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/ -
Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/ -
Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/ -
Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/ -
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow -
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html -
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
Recent appearances (permalink)
- How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo -
Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/ -
Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0 -
Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/ -
Enshittification with Plutopia
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/
Latest books (permalink)
- "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
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"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1023 words today, 12377 total)
- "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
-
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
-
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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Misschien heb je van je ouders geleerd dat je niet moet zeuren. Dat er altijd wel iets is om blij over te zijn. En dat heb je te goed in je oren geknoopt. Dwangmatig optimisme lijkt onschuldig – wie wil er nu niet positief zijn? – maar psychologen waarschuwen dat het onze mentale gezondheid juist kan ondermijnen.
Wat is toxische positiviteit?
In de psychologie wordt toxische positiviteit beschreven als de neiging om stress, verdriet en woede te ontkennen of weg te drukken in naam van een altijd optimistische blik. Het gaat dus niet om gewoon hoopvol zijn, maar om de boodschap dat negatieve emoties per definitie “fout” zijn en zo snel mogelijk moeten verdwijnen.
Onderzoek laat zien dat dit juist het omgekeerde effect heeft van wat bedoeld is. Mensen die hun gevoelens steeds wegduwen omdat ze “niet mogen klagen”, ervaren meer lichamelijke stress, angst en somberheid. Een literatuuroverzicht in een psychologisch tijdschrift beschrijft hoe opgelegde positiviteit leidt tot emotionele onderdrukking, burn-out en een lager mentaal welzijn.
Waarom ‘altijd positief’ gevaarlijk is
Toxische positiviteit ontneemt mensen de ruimte om reële pijn, rouw of angst te benoemen, precies de emoties die nodig zijn om te kunnen verwerken. Wanneer de omgeving alleen “Kop op, denk positief” accepteert, ontstaat schaamte over normale reacties op tegenslag en voelen mensen zich extra geïsoleerd. De Amerikaanse psycholoog Tim Kasser waarschuwt dat de druk om voortdurend positief te zijn de psychische veerkracht juist aantast in plaats van versterkt.
Ook sociaal en politiek heeft dwangmatig optimisme een prijs. Wie elk risico weglacht – klimaat, ongelijkheid, oorlog – neemt minder snel maatregelen, omdat “het uiteindelijk wel goed zal komen”. Realistische hoop vraagt daarom niet om roze brillen, maar om de ongemakkelijke waarheid onder ogen te zien én toch te zoeken naar wat binnen bereik ligt.
Gezonde hoop als alternatief
Psychologen pleiten voor emotionele eerlijkheid: verdriet mag bestaan naast hoop, boosheid naast betrokkenheid. Gezonde positiviteit betekent niet dat alles goed is, maar dat het de moeite waard is om ondanks tegenslag te handelen. De echte veerkracht zit niet in het mantramatig herhalen dat je “gelukkig moet zijn”, maar in de ervaring dat ook lastige emoties gezien en gedeeld mogen worden.
Beleaguered country, unfortunately, has plenty of data from its conflict
Ukraine is getting a little AI help with its war against Russia. The country is giving Palantir a new level of access to critical warfighting data so its interceptor drones can become more autonomous. …
