Bright-Sided, First few chapters

This book is largely a history of "positive thinking" and various movements to get people to be irrationally optimistic on the premise that it will yield dividends.  I don't have it in me to blog every detail, but there's one bit that stands out:

Apparently a lot of the enthusiasts for various "positive thinking" remedies, whether pushed by religion, psychologists, or business consultants, are sales people.  On one level this seems like an utterly obvious and unremarkable observation.  Salesmen and saleswomen are cheerful and personable.  Of course they're upbeat!  However, Ehrenreich points to interviews in which salespeople (and the "positive thinking" enthusiasts who shill to them) often find it difficult to project that persona.  They buy these books because they need constant infusions of kool-aid to keep up the appearance.  In private, many of them are unhappy with their lonely lives on the road, surrounded only by people whom they want things from, and who in turn want only free samples and low prices.  That frankly sounds like a hellish life.

When I think more about the people in my profession who are most publicly adamant about various "positive thinking" approaches (even if not in so many words), I realize that some of them wish they weren't professors, or at least that they weren't in STEM fields.  I won't use a public blog to identify them or say why I think they regret their choice of field, but I've seen enough to make me quite certain that they wish for something else and don't know how to escape.  For myself, I hate many things about the current direction of my profession and institution, but I am quite certain that I want to teach physics and do research in physics.  So I pity them, and I start to understand why they are desperate for the quick fixes peddled in pop psychology.  And I see the overlap between their restlessness and that of the people who buy self-help books and attend motivational seminars.