“Follow your bliss.
“Think positive thoughts.
“You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.”

When times get tough, it seems, there is a jaunty, buoyant cliche for any challenge, as the cheery and upbeat among us shift into overdrive.

But then, so do the curmudgeons.

“Sixty is not the new 40; it’s 60, you morons! shouts Lewis Black, a comedian, who is enraged about becoming a sexagenarian. Not that he was any less cranky at 22. That is the age when the decline begins, he declares in his film “Stark Raving Black. His solution? Don’t celebrate birthdays after that age because there’s nothing to look forward to except misery, decay and death.

And don’t expect an effervescent attitude to reverse the decrepitude, according to Barbara Ehrenreich. In her new book, “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” she tells of how, when she was a cancer patient, she was deluged with “sappy pink ribbons,” and rosy slogans like “When life hands out lemons, squeeze out a smile.”

All of which infuriated her. The message was “that you had to be cheerful and accepting and that you would not recover unless you were,” she told The Times. Ms. Ehrenreich and a few like-minded contrarians have dubbed themselves the Negatives. They believe positive thinking that is ungrounded in reality even led to the subprime bubble and subsequent financial collapse.

Micki McGee, a sociologist at Fordham University in New York and a charter member of Negative, took aim at the language of the self-help culture. “If you dream it and believe it,” she told The Times, “it becomes reality. That kind of thinking contributes to the economic bubble that we just saw explode in enormous ways.”

The Negatives, Ms. Ehrenreich added, hope to “awaken us to this mass delusion.”

In a brutal job market, many young workers have already woken up. Ron Alsop, author of “The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace,” told The Times that the current generation “have always been told they can achieve anything they can put their minds to.”

Not anymore.

Optimists of all ages have been shaken. Alina Tugend wondered in The Times if workplace passion has been “oversold.” “Are we falling into a trap of believing that our work, and indeed, our lives, should always be fascinating and all-consuming?” she asked.

Especially, she added, when so many are losing their less-thanperfect jobs.

And if some of those laid-off workers do manage to reinvent themselves in a more inspiring career, there is an illtempered adage just waiting to be borrowed from the curmudgeons themselves: “Success is the best revenge.”

Although a true curmudgeon might be too grouchy even for that.

The British comedy troupe Monty Python are so influential that they are even acknowledged in the Oxford English Dictionary. But as the resident Python malcontent Terry Jones told The Times, “We wanted to be unquantifiable. That ‘pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the O.E.D. means we failed utterly.”


PYTHON (MONTY) PICTURES LTD. / Terry Jones of Monty Python is still grumpy even after the fame and fortune.

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