{"id":38418,"date":"2018-08-23T06:12:12","date_gmt":"2018-08-23T10:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=38418"},"modified":"2018-08-23T09:13:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-23T13:13:21","slug":"the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of the Viral “Feel-Good, Feel-Bad” Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I recently came upon a Think Progress article titled \u201cThe \u2018feel-good\u2019 horror of late-stage capitalism<\/a>\u201d by Jessica Goldstein. In her article, Goldstein puts her finger on something that had bothered me for some time, but which I couldn\u2019t quite articulate.<\/p>\n

You know those posts and articles that go viral on facebook that are sold as heartwarming stories but leave you\u2014or me, in any case\u2014feeling like something is off?\u00a0Goldstein says she\u2019s figured out what\u2019s off, and I think she\u2019s right. She calls them \u201cfeel-good feel-bad\u201d stories.<\/p>\n

As Goldstein explains:<\/p>\n

Have you heard the one about this guy in California? He\u2019s unemployed right now, and he\u2019s currently homeless. But instead of asking people for money, he\u2019s out there on the street handing out copies of his resume. The takeaway from this story, according to Channel 7 News: #NeverGiveUp.<\/p>\n

How about this one, from Good Morning America<\/i><\/a>: \u201cThe new trend is to give a pregnant coworker some of your own vacation time to add days to her maternity leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have federally-mandated maternity leave in the United States, making us one of the only nations on the face of the Earth to deny our citizens this basic and vital<\/a>\u00a0thing.<\/p>\n

But that is not the focus here.<\/p>\n

The point is not the broken system that created the need for this collective, self-sacrificing workaround. The point is that a woman\u2019s colleagues are so, so generous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Goldstein offers other examples of this phenomenon as well (and I\u2019m certain that any reader can think of many more):<\/p>\n

The sunshiney announcement about the GoFundMe for the guy with leukemia who can\u2019t pay for his own medical costs<\/a>. (He is employed by an organization whose owner has a net worth of $5.2 billion<\/a>.) The dad who works three jobs to support his family\u00a0saving up to buy his 14-year-old daughter a dress for an eighth grade dance<\/a>. The college student who ran 20 miles to work after his car broke down and whose boss rewarded him for this effort by giving him his own car<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Finally, for her analysis:<\/p>\n

Do you get a sinking feeling when you read these stories? This feeling like, while of course you are impressed by the tenacity and generosity on display, you still want to vomit?<\/p>\n

Behold, the rise of the feel-good feel-bad story.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

In the feel-good feel-bad story, irrefutable proof of an institutional failure is sold as a celebration of individual triumph. And it\u2019s the desperate, cloying attempts to trumpet the latter as a means of obscuring the former that gives these pieces their distinct, acrid aftertaste. These headlines, and the stories beneath them, attempt to\u00a0distract you by shouting, \u201cLook over here at this shiny act of kindness, bravery, and fortitude!\u201d so that you do not turn to your left to notice and question the structures that made such kindness, bravery, and fortitude necessary in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a lot more in her piece, which you can read right here<\/a>. I am extremely grateful to Goldstein for her analysis, which gave me a framework and language for understanding my discomfort.<\/p>\n

Goldstein has tapped into something important. The problem with these stories is that the challenges they show individuals solving\u2014on an individual level, or by coming together as individuals\u2014are systemic problems that shouldn\u2019t have existed in the first place. Furthermore, the solutions these stories tout as heartwarming leave those underlying systemic problems in place.<\/p>\n

I remember wondering, after reading that the homeless guy who was passing out resumes got hundreds of job offers, about all the other homeless guys out there. This guy got those job offers because his story went viral, not because he passed out resumes. This isn\u2019t something that could simply be replicated.\u00a0Passing out resumes is not a workable solution for homelessness<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And yet, people were lauding it as though it were.\u00a0The whole story felt sour to me, and Goldstein offered me a framework\u2014and a label\u2014for understanding why. It\u2019s the feel-good feel-bad story, a story that papers over huge systemic problems in our society with solutions built on individual sacrifices that should not have to be made<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The woman whose coworkers donated their vacation days shouldn\u2019t have had to save up all of her vacation days<\/em>\u00a0for after her baby was born in the first place. She should have had paid maternity leave<\/em>. Her coworkers shouldn\u2019t have had to donate their vacation days\u2014vacation days they can now no longer take\u2014and this solution isn\u2019t something that will work out there across the board.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t heartwarming. It\u2019s bullshit.<\/p>\n

Then, only days after reading Goldstein\u2019s article, someone posted his headline in my local mom\u2019s group:<\/p>\n

Superintendent Worked 90 Hour Weeks All Summer Repainting School To Save $150,000<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The individual posting the story offered only one line of commentary: \u201cWe need people like this in our district!\u201d My eyes went back to this line of commentary again and again, disbelieving. How could the individual who posted the story not see that it was deeply, profoundly sad?<\/em><\/p>\n

The travesty is that the district was so strapped for money that its superintendent felt he needed to spend his summer repainting the school\u2014time he should have spent making sure everything was lined up for the next school year (an administrator\u2019s job responsibilities do not evaporate when school is out), and time he should have spent recharging his batteries for the new school year.<\/p>\n

As the story explains:<\/p>\n

After hearing how much it would cost to have professionals come in, [Dr. David] Harnish was concerned that the payment would get taken out of the cut needed to pay teachers and fund student supplies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat $150,000 would have taken away from kids, or the potential for us to take care of our staff,\u201d he said in an interview.<\/p>\n

So instead of jeopardizing the students and teachers at his school, he decided to roll up his sleeves and get to work himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

School districts should receive enough funding to pay teachers, purchase school supplies, and fund basic maintenance and upkeep. Adequately funding one of these things should not mean slashing the others.\u00a0This is not a heartwarming story. It\u2019s a story of systemic failure.<\/p>\n

And everyone was praising it, including the moms in my local moms group. Was I the only one who could see the fault lines here? Clearly not\u2014Goldstein had. But surely others saw them, too?<\/p>\n

I was relieved, a few days later, to stumble upon this article: \u201cPlease stop with the \u2018heartwarming\u2019 teacher stories: this is no way to treat professionals<\/a>.\u201d The author, Mitchell Robinson, began with a takedown of the story of the principal who spent 90 hours a week painting his school this summer.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the real truth:\u00a0that painter-superintendent spent 90 hours a week over the summer *not* doing his real job of running the district, and then hired students for a fraction of what professional painters would have been paid\u2014thus denying those workers an opportunity to make the money they need to support their families.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

No other profession is expected to do this kind of thing.\u00a0If you asked the CEO or VP of any small- to medium-sized corporation to spend 90 hours per week repainting the company\u2019s offices, that person would laugh in your face\u2013and explain to you that it\u2019s not their job to paint walls; it\u2019s their job to manage the operations of the business. And they\u2019d be right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mitchell hits the nail on the head.<\/p>\n

When an educational professional spends the summer painting a school rather than doing the job they are trained for\u2014and hired for<\/em>\u2014they are wasting school resources. No one else is doing the job that superintendent was actually supposed to be doing\u2014running the district\u2014and work that was supposed to get done presumably goes undone.<\/p>\n

The district didn\u2019t hire the superintendent to paint schools. They hired him to run the school district. If he\u2019s spending all summer painting the school, he\u2019s not doing the job he was hired to do.<\/p>\n

It is probably obvious to most people on first glance that if a CEO spent 90 hours per week for three months repainting his offices rather than running his company, important work would go undone and his shareholders would have good reason to be upset. Is it that hard to see that the same applies to a superintendent who spends 90 hours per week over the summer painting a school?<\/p>\n

Somehow we\u2019ve come to see school districts as so inherently undeserving of adequate funding that we have come to a point where we prefer lauding educational professionals who spend their time doing work they were not hired to do\u2014work they probably are not qualified to do\u2014to actually fixing the broken circumstances that pushed them into this situation in the first place.<\/p>\n

And we all<\/em> lose out.<\/p>\n

The students at that superintendent\u2019s school lose out when the school year starts, because the superintendent spent the time he should have spent charting the course of the district and the school year painting the school. The students whose parents are professional painters who might have otherwise been hired to paint the school lose out.<\/p>\n

The coworkers of that pregnant woman lose out, because they no longer have the vacation days they need to rest and recharge. Other pregnant workers lose out when we come to see coworkers donating vacation days as a viable course of action and fail to vent our energies on pushing our lawmakers to create paid maternity leave (something every other developed country already has).<\/p>\n

Feel-good feel-bad stories, to borrow Goldstein\u2019s label, aren\u2019t simply something we read or share or tell ourselves to make us feel better. These stories contribute to a malaise that paints systemic problems as things for individuals to fix, through pluck or drive or hard work,\u00a0rather than as things society has an obligation to fix<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In other words, these stories aren\u2019t just annoying or sappy. They\u2019re actively harmful.<\/p>\n

I have a <\/b>Patreon<\/b><\/a>! Please support my writing!<\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Goldstein has tapped into something important. What bothered me about so many of these stories, I realized after reading her piece, was that the problems these stories show individuals solving—on an individual level, or by coming together as individuals—are systemic problems that shouldn’t have existed in the first place—systemic problems that are never actually solved in the viral stories.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":38421,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-justice"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Rise of the Viral "Feel-Good, Feel-Bad" Story<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's the feel-good feel-bad story, a story that papers over huge systemic problems in our society with solutions built on individual sacrifices that should not have to be made.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Rise of the Viral "Feel-Good, Feel-Bad" Story\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It's the feel-good feel-bad story, a story that papers over huge systemic problems in our society with solutions built on individual sacrifices that should not have to be made.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Love, Joy, Feminism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-08-23T10:12:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-08-23T13:13:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/166\/2018\/08\/ladder-1977946_1920.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"768\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"550\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html\",\"name\":\"The Rise of the Viral \\\"Feel-Good, Feel-Bad\\\" Story\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2018-08-23T10:12:12+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-08-23T13:13:21+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\"},\"description\":\"It's the feel-good feel-bad story, a story that papers over huge systemic problems in our society with solutions built on individual sacrifices that should not have to be made.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2018\/08\/the-rise-of-the-viral-feel-good-feel-bad-story.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Rise of the Viral “Feel-Good, Feel-Bad” Story\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/\",\"name\":\"Love, Joy, Feminism\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\",\"name\":\"Libby Anne\",\"description\":\"Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the Christian Right. 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