It’s something we’ve all seen a million times: the Stepford smiles, plastered on to dead-eyed faces that keep insisting that, no, really, everything is and always has been perfect. There are no real problems — certainly none that are insurmountable, nor any that would leave one in a state of legitimate vulnerability — there is no strife, there is no struggle, and the world is peachy and wonderful forevermore. There exists only a single, default state, and that is being happy. This is, as you may have guessed from the title, a snapshot of fake positivity.
This doesn’t apply to reserved individuals, or people who would rather not air their grievances in a public space; on the contrary, these are the people who, instead of wishing to share only the feelings they want to share, opt to project a constant, never-ending facade of living the most perfect, idyllic life any human being has ever lived, ever. I don’t need to provide examples, because you’ve probably met at least one person in your life who acted this way. Not because of any attempt to mask a mental illness like depression, mind, but purely for business reasons:
To sell their persona.
Again, you’ve seen it. You could pull up Instagram and flick through thirty different profiles of people who fit this exact description in the time it took you to read the last two paragraphs. Projecting an image of The “You” Who Is Incredibly Wealthy, Attractive, and In Good Spirits is wildly profitable for a select few, and it stands to reason that a significantly larger chunk of people have decided to play follow-the-leader in the hopes of cashing out. So, why bother talking about it at all? If everyone already knows the deal, and can point out fake positivity as soon as they see it, an entire post about it would be as redundant as a detailed breakdown of two plus two.
But there’s a problem: most people don’t know what fake positivity looks like. Far too many people, trying to keep on top of things in an attempt to avoid being “fooled” will, at the slightest provocation, call out anyone and everyone for being a peddler of fake positivity. Had a good day at work and wanted to post about it on social media? That’s fake positivity. Publicly thanking someone for giving you a shout out on Twitter? Fake positivity. Giving someone a compliment — gasp! — unprompted, and without the expectation of a reward? Fake, fake, fake. Every last bit of it. You’re a fraud, a crook, and everyone ought to know about you not meaning a single word you say.
These constant accusations of people being “fake positive”, without my needing any further explanation, is undoubtedly more harmful than those who are actually faking their positivity.
Negative Feelings Are Not Inherently Bad
The real danger here lies in what we ask the alternatives to the alleged encroaching menace of fake positivity to be. Negativity is not, in any way, “more real” than positivity; to say otherwise would be nihilistic at best and actively sadistic at worst, pushing the none-too-subtle implication that anyone who tries to look on the bright side is a starry-eyed idealist with no understanding of how the real world works. But, by the same token, we cannot expect people to completely hide their negative emotions, either. For far too long, feelings such as sadness and anger have been characterized as “bad”, when we mean to say “negative”. A negative thought or emotion is one that we don’t necessarily want to have, but ones that we shouldn’t be ashamed to feel. A person isn’t doing something wrong by being sad, but sadness isn’t something we want everyone to feel all of the time, either.
Fake positivity operates in much the same manner, encouraging you to squash down these “bad” feelings in favor of relentlessly, performatively insisting that everything is fine, though this is almost exclusively used as a means of gaining social or monetary capital over others. It differs from the archetypal suffering in silence that plagues many individuals who suffer from depression or anxiety, in that this projecting of the positive image is not used to deflect concerns about one’s own well-being, but is instead used to build oneself up as a monument of courage, and wisdom, and success. A titan of strength and inner virtue, towering over the rabble like a shining beacon of excellence.
Our solution, then, would be to destigmatize these negative emotions, and stop classifying them as “bad”. Sadness is not a bad thing, but it is negative. Anger is not a bad thing, but it is negative. Negative emotions don’t feel good while we’re feeling them, but they aren’t inherently bad. They’re a part of being human. This, I hope, is the end goal for the Fake Positivity Inquisition, who will complain and argue and beat the drums of publicly exposing fraudsters, all to establish that feeling negative emotions is okay. But even if we assume that the mob has the best of intentions, it ultimately doesn’t matter in the slightest; the constant condemnation of anyone with the gall to preach positivity of any sort has lead to an environment where those who are genuine in their thoughts and actions are afraid to continue being positive on social media.
Fake Positivity in the Voice Acting Community
I say this because an old post on Twitter recently went viral once more, calling for voice actors to post about their unpopular opinions. The only criteria was that they be relevant to voice acting; many spoke of their favorite microphones, which anime dubs they liked the most, and rattled off the casting processes that personally bothered them. But one sentiment stood out among the rest, both for turning the critical lens back on the community itself, and for taking up a plurality of the discussion in what was supposed to be about unpopular opinions; that the online voice acting sphere is rife with fake positivity, and that voice actors aren’t allowed to be “real” under threat of getting blacklisted from the industry.
The point of fake positivity is that you don’t care if you come off as fake, because it’s all just show business, baby.
While the latter concern is almost entirely fantasy (unless one holds very public and harmful beliefs, such as using their platform to preach about how much they love racism, sexism, transphobia, etc.), the former struck a chord with many people. There are, after all, many very public and very influential individuals who are very positive on their personal pages. Is that not fake positivity? To be happy, and to encourage others to be happy as well?
Well, no. Of course it isn’t. Being happy doesn’t preclude negative emotions. Many of these positive individuals do not shy away from speaking out about issues that matter to them, whether that be in terms of inclusivity, representation, mental health, or anything else they wish to focus on. There are plenty of public figures — union-working individuals who do this full-time, remember — who are very open about their own personal feelings, the struggles they’ve gone through, and the problems currently plaguing them in their everyday lives. This, by definition, cannot be fake positivity; if they’re just as open about negative feelings as they are about positive ones, it’s impossible to argue that they’re hiding their “real” emotions.
What we’re left with, then, is a situation wherein a conspiratorial mindset has swept through certain sects within the community, and led them to believe that there’s an epidemic of fake positivity when it is, as best, limited to a strict few cases.
Now, to pretend that there’s zero fake positivity in the voice acting bubble would be a lie. But it’s not nearly as much of an inescapable tidal wave as it’s being made out to be. Off the top of my head, I can really only think of a single person I’ve seen in two years of being active within the voice acting community who’s pushed fake positivity. If you’re worried that you might be Patient Zero here, don’t be; anyone who has the forethought and candor to fret about coming off as fake almost never is. The point of fake positivity is that you don’t care if you come off as fake, because it’s all just show business, baby. Positivity, for these people, is used as a marketing tool and nothing else. If it doesn’t work, who cares? Just switch to some other promotion method and keep going from there. Anyone concerned with getting the accusing finger of fake positivity pointed at them is pretty much certain to be genuine.
This isn’t limited entirely to voice acting, but it’s one of the corners of the internet that I know best. As much as it means coming from me, I really don’t believe that the community has a fake positivity problem. On the contrary, I think that the online voice acting space has been full of people who are incredibly, genuinely positive; all of us, regardless of where we come from, what we look like, or what projects we lend our voices to, have all joined the community out of a love for the craft. Some people are hobbyists, some people are full-time workers, but all of us are here because we like what we do and we want to share that with the world. People feel good about that, which they should. It’s an open, inclusive group of artists that live to create. There’s real positivity in here, and it’s infectious. The wave of people posting about how happy they are and how good life has been to them lately comes not from them being fake, but from them being touched by the goodness of the community and wanting to give back to everyone else the same love and kindness that they were shown from the start.
That’s not fake positivity. That’s a community working together the way that all of us should aspire to, as well. We do ourselves no favors by threatening that balance with constant, baseless accusations of being fake.
All of the good things to come out of the online voice acting community are very, very real. If nothing else, let’s celebrate those.
