James Horton, Ph.D
1 min readMar 1, 2022

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Ah. One of those people who treats "happy" like an emoji, to be painted on the bat she uses to hit other people.

I've seen people do that with other virtues too--honesty, "love," bravery, etc..--there are very few ways to devalue a virtue more than to use it as a pretense to disguise narcissism and abuse.

On a related note; the "silver lining" philosophy is very simplistic. Like most overly simplistic things, at its worst it can also be nasty, stupid, and wicked.

It degrades the role of the person suffering by acting as if taking something happy out of a bad situation is a simple matter of changing perspective. And the tacit implication in it is that if you're not making that simple change in perspective something must be wrong with you. Great tool for a narcissist who wants to control what others say.

My experience has been that taking something good out of a bad situation often requires an immense, shattering amount of work, and demands a willingness to go through even more pain. And often even if you've taken something good from it, you're still worse off than you would have been if the bad thing had never happened in the first place.

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James Horton, Ph.D
James Horton, Ph.D

Written by James Horton, Ph.D

Social scientist, world traveler, freelancer. Alaskan, twice. Writes about psychology, well-being, science, tech, and climate change. Ghostwriter on the side.

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