Besides, social fights and movements have another problem, which is well explained in the article you linked: "While feminists in the West who have jobs, property, and supportive families, and who do not face direct discrimination for refusing feminine practices, will say that they cannot be openly radical feminist due to financial precariousness and fear of reprisal, women in Daegu — whose income is precarious, who live in a far more male-dominated culture, persist."
I can't speak for the feminist movement in particular, but, the way I see it, that statement is a general truth that could apply to all kinds of fights: the fear of losing more than what they're aiming to achieve drives people to a state of pasivity and acceptance of reality, even if it's not the best for them. And the more they grow up and the more they gain, the less they're prone to want an uprising or align themselves with a certain fight or movement that could benefit them; thus, the true, subversive acts of rebellion are a lot common among young people, but not pretty much among the adult population, who have works and homes that they could lose, and a lot of entertainment that makes them happy and helps them evade from all those aspects of reality that they don't like.
In fact, I think that's precisely one of the greatest "triumphs" of modern, developed societies: the welfare state. They offer us a lot more shiny services and products than what we can actually have, telling us that the more we enjoy or collect of them, the happier we'll be and the better we'll live, which to an extent is true. But the problem is that we don't have a choice: since we're born, we have to unconditionally accept our roles as meaningless pieces of a bigger puzzle and see ourselves forced to sell our life in order to buy the promise of a better one, which in many cases won't even become real; that's our true meaning and purpose in life: the constant search of our promised life under a lot of unfair and biased conditions.
And yet we still think of this as something positive, something which we embrace and defend, by repeating the same lesson what we've learnt during our whole life: that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And that, in my opinion, is just bullshit: we live in the world that is more convenient for those people who (successfully) try to indoctrinate us in believing that this is the best of all possible worlds. The same principle that I commented before applies here too: those who have the upper hand will always try to keep it.
Now, I understand that for a society to work properly we all need to make our contribution, and that's something that I'm not implying that needs to be changed. In fact, people who are happy with their current lives should still be able to maintain their lives unchanged and be as happy as they are now. The problem is that often this not the case, and that's because of multiple reasons: not everyone has the same opportunities, not all the opportunities have the same value... This current model of society is very, very unbalanced in a lot of ways and levels.
And it only gets worse when we think of the main tacit rule or condition that is supposed to regulate and secure the functioning of this society as a whole: basically, this current model forces us to have a job..., but is blatantly unable to provide one for everyone. How the fuck is this world supposed to be the best of all possible worlds if it already fails at such a basic level?
This whole situation I just described can be compared to playing a game where you need a key to get access to all the locations of the map, but in which the key is just not there. So you just stay in the same place for an indefinite amount of time, wandering aimlessly until the key finally decides to appear. And, when it does, it's not even a certainty that you'll be able to keep it, so you may end up in the same situation than before: stuck once again in the same place. If I had to rate a game like that, I would certainly not give it a pass.
But, even if you're able to secure your key and have it with you all the time, what you will find in a lot of those locations that you now have access to is everything but funny: many people, like those who are in the primary sector, work in terrible conditions even today, while others have better job conditions, but lack the time to fully enjoy that better life that they were promised they'd enjoy - and we don't have to go too far to find a perfect example for this: many of those who are in the game industry could have a word here.
Speaking of this industry, I don't know if it's the same in all schools, but the teachers in the one I attended just kept telling us that, when we'd finally get to work, sometimes we would have to work more hours than what were stipulated in our contracts and that those hours wouldn't necessarily be paid, because our contracts wouldn't be based on time worked, but on projects and dates, so we would need to have those projects finished at a certain time regardless of how many hours we would need to spend on them. And, if we didn't like that, the company would just fire us and choose another person who would willingly do that job we didn't want to do, because there would be a lot of young people who'd be more than happy to do it just for the sake of working in the game industry.
And all that was told to us so that we were prepared to embrace it as something normal and natural, as something that we shouldn't question, because that's just how things work and we cannot do anything to change them. We were basically indoctrinated, and people were happy about it, because, even if companies would exploit them, at least they'd be doing something they liked. That was their logic, at least.
And, if I go back to my Translation studies, things don't get much better: we were told a lot of times that many of the translation assignments that we'd receive would have ridiculous deadlines, to the extent that this became a more or less common joke there, like this: "Hey, something new today?" "Yeah, another translation." "Oh, okay. And when is the deadline?" "Yesterday." Well, that was it. And, even if people in Translation were a bit more critical with this situation than all the youngsters in the video game studies, they would still just accept it as something natural that didn't deserve a second thought, so in the end, there wasn't much difference.
And here I'm talking about only a couple of specific jobs that have more or less good condtions beyond hours worked, but there are lots of more and even worse situations in jobs with much tougher conditions. And all that is without even counting other factors, like the time spent in moving from home to work and vice versa, and in the case of people working both in mornings and evening, that dead time that is left in between. We're basically living in a society where we either have time or money, but never both, and which treats us as machines designed to work, while we accept that situation as "the best of all possible worlds".
And, well, maybe it's true that at some point this was the best possible world, but at the rate things move nowadays, I really think that this status quo is (becoming) really obsolete and we're reaching a point of dire stagnation, where we just occasionally tweak things a little, but without moving forward at all. Using a gaming analogy, we're playing the same game once and again with a few minor quality of life improvements and maybe some minor DLCs added from time to time, when we should already be playing instead a full and much needed sequel that would expand upon what is already built, but improving it in all the possible ways.
But (and with this I come back to the initial point that gave room to all this excessively long speech), if we want things to move forward and to move faster, we need to make clear that we're not happy with how all this currently works, and that's where the problem lies: our lives are not as good as they could be and we know it, but they're also not as bad as to make us want to put them at stake.
In this regard, positive psychology has become, intentionally or not, a good tool to control people, because it promotes the acceptance of everything as it is, while creating artificial diversions from reality that are sold as infallible (and almost divine, in some cases) solutions for our true problems in real life. And let me clarify: it's important for us and our mental health to accept ourselves and accept reality, and it's also important to have some distractions that help us clear our mind a little, but all that shouldn't be conceived as the solution to our problems, but as the foundation which would help us find the true solutions for those problems.
Expressing that in gaming terms (again), that situation that I'm talking about would be similar to that of a player who always dies in a certain boss stage. That player ends up feeling frustrated and asks for help, and then someone tells her/him: "You just need to use a shield to protect yourself against boss attacks. Do that, and you'd only have to worry about enjoying the graphics, animations and effects of the beautiful game you're playing".
And, of course, there's nothing wrong with admiring the art of the game and it's indeed necessary to use a shield for protection against these boss attacks, but, if you don't strike back, how can you possibly beat it? Yes, maybe the boss won't defeat you thanks to your shield, but you will not defeat the boss either. Instead, you'll just get stuck in that same stage forever. Well, that's more or less what all these methods of positive psychology promote.
Of course, I'm conscious that there are some problems or situations that cannot be sorted or fought, and in those cases there's not much else that we can do than just accepting them. That's indeed true. But it's important to be able to acknowledge which situations can be changed and which can't, and all this positive psychology doesn't make a distinction at all.
And the worst part is that all these methods have been spreading so much for years and they're now so widely accepted and followed that I now feel that sharing our problems, fears, weaknesses and frustrations is harder than ever. When I was younger, more than a decade ago, people didn't hide their bad feelings as much as they do now, because they didn't have this imperative need to project an artificial image of 100% positivity to the world: if they were fucked up, they were fucked up, period. In today's world, however, when someone has been through a very bad experience, they tend to embellish it and disguise it so that it looks more positive; people today are more reluctant to recognize that sometimes things can be wrong and shit just happens.
And if I were to find reasons for that, I'd say that there are two main motivations: the first is that happiness works as one of many means of achieving self-reinforcement, in the sense that, when other people brag about their life or their alledged happiness, you don't want to fall behind and instead you just feel the need to say: "Hey, I'm happy too! Look at what I have, what I've lived, what I've done!" In a way, maybe we (unconsciously) feel that we have to be at least as happy as the rest in order to find some value in ourselves and our lives.
And the second reason is that, since people have become so opposed to anything negative and only look now for good vibes and other people who share that same mentality, there may be a certain fear of rejection, of staying out of the flow, so to speak; and so we just hide all what worries us and disguise it with a big smile. In a way, it's almost like if expressing negative feelings is seen as some kind of crime or sin nowadays, and the person who dares to do it becomes toxic and isn't worth of other people's time and attention; like if we've partially lost the freedom to feel bad and the only feelings that we are allowed to have are positive ones.
Overall, this is a bit like when the URSS created all that propaganda that was used to project a wonderful image of themselves that didn't match at all with reality. Except that this time the image is not projected towards the outside, but towards all the individuals that are part of that society, and it's not the governments that try to spread it, but people themselves. And, since that image is more or less spreaded in this society, the result is that we all end up living in a humongous bubble of artificial happiness where the good always prevails and there's no need to make any change beyond some little tweaks here and there. Basically, we'are getting back again to the same initial idea that gave room to this (kind of random) speech: people don't think that their situation is bad enough to get themselves involved in a more efficient fight.
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