All sunny in Brooklyn. (Ebru Yildiz)

“It’s All Such Bullshit!”

In defense of positive thinking

Mitch Horowitz
15 min readJan 31, 2024

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Hardly one in ten thousand will have the

strength of mind to ask himself seriously

and earnestly — is that true?

— Arthur Schopenhauer, “Religion: A Dialogue”

I have never thought positively by nature. Growing up in the 1970s, I used to suffer bouts of stomach cramps on Sunday nights in anticipation of school the next day. Hostile teachers, threatening classmates, botched assignments: my mind saw phantoms everywhere.

In hope of guidance, I sometimes gazed up at an inspirational poem on a blacklight poster hanging in my big sister’s bedroom. The words, etched in velour, glowed three-dimensionally under the luminescence of a colored bulb (and sometimes with the aid of pot smoke). I memorized each one:

Forget Yesterday.

I am where I am.

I know where I could have been,

had I done what I did not do.

Tell me, Friend, what can I do Today,

to be where I want to be

Tomorrow?

I could never track down the poet, identified only by the tagline “Sigrad.” The furthest I got was determining that the Nordic-sounding name was…

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Mitch Horowitz
Mitch Horowitz

Written by Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China

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