Positive vs. Toxic

by Austin Knott

Have you ever heard the phrase, “just be happy it could be worse” or “good vibes only”? If you have, then chances are you have experienced some toxic positivity.

What is toxic positivity? The dismissing or invalidating of negative emotions in favor of forcing a positive outlook, the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations

Key Traits

1. Emotionally dismissive- rejects or downplays difficult feelings 

2. Inauthentic- forces a false sense of cheerfulness

3. Shaming- makes people feel guilty for experiencing sadness, anger or stress

4. Avoidant- avoids real problems rather than addressing them 

What is healthy positivity? The practice of maintaining a hopeful and optimistic outlook while acknowledging and validating difficult emotions. It does not ignore pain, frustration or sadness- it makes space for them and encourages growth and resilience through those experiences.  

Key Traits 

1. Emotional honest- accepts that negative emotions are part of being human 

2. Compassionate- offers support without judgement or pressure 

3. Grounded in reality - encourages positive outlook while recognizing real challenges involved 

4. Growth oriented- focuses on learning from setbacks, not denying them

Let’s play a game! Toxic or Healthy?

1. Don’t be so negative!

2. Its okay to feel bad sometimes

3. Think happy thoughts!

4. Failure is part of growth 

5. It can be difficult to see the good in this situation, but we’ll make sense of it when we can

6. Good vibes only 

7. It’s okay to feel a range of emotions, it’s normal 

8. I shouldn’t feel upset, I just need to be grateful 

9. That didn’t go as planned, but I learned something. I’ll try a different approach next time. 

10. Failure is not an option 

11. Just look on the bright side

12. It could be worse 

13. Sometimes we experience bad things. How can I support you?

14. I shouldn’t feel upset, I just need to be grateful 

15. You’ll get over it, just move on

A: T, H, T, T, H, T, H, T, H, T, H, T, H, T, T

Doomscrolling and Anxiety in 2025: Is the Internet good for us or bad for us?

by Brooke Hartman

Good news, I’ll give you the punchline right up front: The Internet is not good or bad, it’s just a thing. It’s a tool that extends human capacity. It can be used in a lot of ways, and if it isn't used well, or it's overused, or monopolized or monitored, that new extended capacity collapses in on itself.

The thing to know here is that there is a connection between eyeballs and headspace. Once you see it, it’s in there, rattling around in your brain. This has an energy cost and opportunity loss. Imagine that your brain is a new frontier, and that billions of dollars are being spent to colonize that new frontier THROUGH YOUR EYEBALLS.

We are surrounded by noise, clips, comments, commentary, analysis, outrage, shock, and when we click on that, we’re telling the Internet, THIS IS WHAT I CLICK ON. And when we tell the Internet THIS IS WHAT I CLICK ON, the Internet makes more of it. It creates what we tell it we want more of. So when we click on insanity and then call the Internet insane, it actually just reflects back to us the choices we have made. If your Internet doesn’t feel good, in the words of Rob Bell (podcast summarized here), clean up those clicks. Protect your headspace. Defend your brainland from being exploited by colonizers.

The follow-up to this is, but how do we stay informed? Well, most of what calls itself the news is not. It's actually an industrial outrage, tragedy, scandal, entertainment, matrix machine. And the machine has tricked us into thinking that the world is out there, right? It gives us images, fragments, and bits of stories, often without much context, that we can't really do anything about. It brings the far near, but without any embodiment.

But what happens if we turn off the news? I tried this two months ago, and it turns out that you don’t know what’s going on unless somebody mentions something. And then when they mention something, we ask, Well, what’s that? And they tell us, and we discuss. Whatever is happening, the person telling us is articulating how they understand it, and immediately, in real time, actual humans are interacting with what that news means. When we do it this way, we learn the news in community, which is very different than being all alone, just endlessly scrolling through how everything's falling apart.

The other thing we can do if a friend mentions something we want to know more about is simply look it up. The Internet is really good at this—it’s historically unprecedented how much information has been sifted, sorted, and curated, and how much you can learn about a certain subject in minutes, with the context and history behind it. There are experts who have studied different issues for decades and can tell you major themes, historical moments, basic terminology.

For example: what is the deal with interest rates? Who sets them? How do they affect things? How many people actually do cross the border each day? It would probably be good to have a rough idea whether that's a thing, and of what size.

You can then convert that anxious energy into learning— like, you can build a converter in your heart to convert the tension, stress, anxiety into less dramatic, very straightforward education at a level citizens need to know. So a good question to ask, because you can spend forever going down deep dives and rabbit holes, is: Is this a good thing for a citizen to know? Should an informed citizen know this? Some of it—no. But some of it, definitely yes. An informed citizen should probably have a handle on some of this.

So here is the plan: we clean up our clicks, we become informed citizens, we do this not through doom scrolling but in community and with intention.

*The information below is summarized from The RobCast: Official WHAT WE DO 2025 Talk