I’m an avid reader, mostly nonfiction. Probably 80 percent of what I read falls into the spiritual/religious realm, usually of an Eastern or East-West tradition. But this past year I’ve been bumping up against a lot of “law of attraction”-type chatter from friends and the CTI leadership program, and it’s been grating on me. It took a lot of searching and figuring out what exactly was ticking me off.  I have never fully resonated with the Law of Attraction. Years ago I tried—oh, how I tried—but it felt like putting icing on a sand cake: appealing and yummy at first but the more you dig in, the more it falls apart (and the grit stays between your teeth).

Then I found the antidote. Literally. Here are the points that truly resonated with me.

• At its core, the law of attraction is an attempt to control our experience; we determine, by our thoughts and intentions, what comes into our lives. If we think positively enough, we can manifest happiness. Control is a tactic that usually doesn’t end up paying off with the best results, just sayin’.

• And, when did we decide that happiness is the goal? When I look at the oldest religions and philosophies—the ones that have stood the test of time—they tend to emphasize compassion and understanding as the highest calling. And from that, happiness, joy, and contentment can emerge. It’s a byproduct, not the objective.

• Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America traces this “cult of positive thinking” back to a semi-religious movement called New Thought in 19th century America. It rose as the great societal pendulum swing away from American Calvinism, which emphasized hard work and predestination. New Thought was appealing because practitioners could achieve happiness and success through the mere power of their minds. It’s so understandable in this light: from “work hard, but you still might go to hell” to “you control your destiny.” This New Thought is what also gave rise to the religion of Christian Science.

• Ehrenreich notes that “New Thought imposed its own kind of harsh judgmentalism, replacing Calvinism’s obligatory hard work with obligatory positive thinking. Negative thoughts were fiercely denounced – a message that echoed ‘the old religion’s condemnation of sin’ and added ‘an insistence on the constant interior labour of self-examination’.”

• Here’s what seems to be so insidiously addictive about positive thinking and the law of attraction: you can explain any and all events as proof for the power of positive thinking. And any doubt or question is just negative thinking. Well, how … handy. How “positively” fallacious.

• “The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. {Psychologists and philosophers] didn’t see this conclusion as depressing, though. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.”

• “These days, this notion certainly gets less press than the admonition to remain positive at all times. But it is a viewpoint with a surprisingly long and respectable history. You’ll find it in the works of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasised the benefits of always contemplating how badly things might go. It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity – in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can. It underpins the medieval tradition of memento mori, which celebrated the life-giving benefits of never forgetting about death. And it is what connects New Age writers, such as the bestselling spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, with more mainstream recent work in cognitive psychology on the self-defeating nature of positive thinking. This same ‘negative’ approach to happiness also helps explain why so many people find mindfulness meditation so beneficial; why a new generation of business thinkers are advising companies to drop their obsession with goalsetting and embrace uncertainty instead; and why, in recent years, some psychologists have reached the conclusion that pessimism may often be as healthy and productive as optimism.”

• Our obsession with the positive leads to survivorship bias,  which focuses on the things or ideas that survive a process and overlooks failures because they’re not as visible. Burkeman tells the story of Jerker Denrell, a management theorist from Oxford University, who was attending an academic conference in Stockholm. A fellow researcher was explaining his findings about the personality traits of highly successful entrepreneurs. “It may well be true that successful entrepreneurs possess perseverance and leadership skills, of course. What is less obvious – and much less boring – is … that those traits are likely to be the characteristics of extremely unsuccessful people, too. ‘Think about it,’ Denrell observed [after the conference]. ‘Incurring large losses requires both persistence  … and the ability to persuade others to pour their money down the drain.’ People without much perseverance or charisma are more likely to end up in the middle, experiencing neither great success nor great failure. (If you never stick at anything and if you can’t persuade others to follow you, you may never lead an army of like-minded souls to a stunning victory – but neither will you lead them off a cliff.) It seems entirely likely that the very successful and the very unsuccessful might actually have rather similar personalities. The only indisputable difference between the two is that the very unsuccessful are much, much less frequently interviewed by management scholars who are studying the causes of success.”

• In theology, the term ‘theodicy’ refers to the effort to maintain belief in a benevolent god, despite the prevalence of evil in the world; the phrase is occasionally used to describe the effort to maintain any belief in the face of contradictory evidence. Borrowing that language, Chris Kayes termed the syndrome he had identified ‘goalodicy’. … What motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn’t any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it’s something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present. ‘Uncertainty prompts us to idealise the future,’ Kayes told me. ‘We tell ourselves that everything will be OK, just as long as I can reach this projection of the future.’

• “The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur, Chris Kayes is convinced, isn’t ‘vision’ or ‘passion’ or a steadfast insistence on destroying every barrier between yourself and some prize you’re obsessed with. Rather, it’s the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning: an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by rigid focus on any one goal. … ‘Start with your means. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: what you are, what you know and who you know.’ A second is the ‘principle of affordable loss’: Don’t be guided by thoughts of how wonderful the rewards might be if you were spectacularly successful at any given next step. Instead – and there are distinct echoes, here, of the Stoic focus on the worst-case scenario – ask how big the loss would be if you failed. So long as it would be tolerable, that’s all you need to know. Take that next step, and see what happens.”

• ‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,’ argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. ‘Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.

• And from my favorite monk and spiritual teacher, Thomas Merton, in his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain:  ‘The truth that many people never understand’, he wrote, ‘is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.’ Seen this way, it becomes clear that security-chasing is a large part of the problem with the ‘cult of optimism’. Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we’ll be ceaselessly happy and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.