Positivity is everywhere. Just scroll through your social media feed and you’ll come face to face with the Instagram highlight reel: upbeat stories of success and posts chanting the millennial mantra of “good vibes only”. The #goodvibes hashtag has racked up more than one million posts on the photo-sharing app alone, but what happens when you encounter an experience that leaves you feeling … not so good? The impulse to cling to happiness in difficult situations, such as a global pandemic, is an understandable one, but this outpouring of relentless optimism is creating a spike in toxic positivity.
Trend-forecasting platform WGSN described the term in its 2022 Future Consumer trend report as “the concept that keeping positive, and only positive, is the right way for
