metonymy4u

I believe there is a real disadvantage in our culture’s tendency to privilege perceived successes over perceived failures. From the attention deficit, commercial driven, instant pleasure culture of daily life, to publication bias in our scientific community, we can see the drawbacks of our positivity addiction. What use, then, negativity? Well for one thing it gives us the opportunity to learn how to make lemonade out of lemons. And this is an important skill for a species with such large, emotion driven brains. Clever enough to figure out how to build nuclear weapons. Angry enough to create god in our image. The problem, I think, is that we don’t accept the challenge. We don’t understand that to turn bitter into sweet is a task that requires effort, care and skill. That compassion is the sugar in our lemonade.