In 2021 I embarked on a challenge to never be sad.
I felt I wasnât allowed to. Iâm a white male in a first world country, Iâm the definition of privileged. The only minority I belong to is being an Australian Rules player in a rugby state. Besides quips that I play âGayFLâ, I donât know what discrimination is.
I found myself equating being sad to being ungrateful.
Not wanting to become a âNorth Shore Princessâ I devised a simple plan. Anytime I felt my mood drop, Iâd think of some kid who lives in a mudbrick house in the slums of Africa. It acted as a reminder of how fortunate I am, that any complaint was my privilege having a tantrum.
Reference Points
The idea was inspired by the role reference points play in the toxicity of social media.
Reference points are âa salient standard against which all subsequent information is comparedâ. The problem with social media is it distorts these standards from our immediate environment to the highlights of people around the world.
One moment Iâm perfectly content with my (slightly overcooked) supermarket steak. The next, after opening Instagram, Iâm left underwhelmed as I see someone eating a steak with salt sprinkled on it by this guy:

Reverse Reference Points
My plan to never be sad was to reverse the concept of reference points. To reset my standards to a situation much worse than mine.
Sortaâ geniusâŚright?
Unfortunately, I couldnât have been more wrong. Rather, these âreverse reference pointsâ bred their own form of toxicity.
Brene Brown explains we are not logical beings. We are emotional beings that think. Meaning when feeling negative emotions, no level of logic is going to make you feel better. In fact, the best way to work through the emotions is through having them validated.

In my Dadâs training at Lifeline, a crisis help-line, youâre taught that the people who call are sitting in a âsandbox of shitâ. They donât want to be helped out of the sandbox by someone who tries to reframe the situation theyâre in for the positive. Thatâs a prime example of toxic positivity.
What they really need is someone to lead with empathy and is willing to go sit in that sandbox with them. To validate the negative emotions they are feeling.
Empathetic statements become mantras. There is no reframing, only statements like, âyouâre right, it must be so hard dealing with thatâ.
Lead with Empathy
But why are âreverse reference pointsâ toxic? They breed a lack of compassion.
Our instincts, when someone is sitting in the metaphorical âbox of shitâ, is to reframe it in a way that it doesn't seem so bad: âwell on the brightside the shits dry so it wonât stick to your clothes when you get outâ.
Or to compare it to an even worse situation: âwell at least youâre not like the people in Ukraine who also have to sleep in shitâ.
Itâs only through an extreme example like this that we see how futile reframing is. It doesnât change the fact youâre still sitting in a box of shit yourself.
However, it happens everyday.
At a dinner party recently we were speaking about private school kids and the problems they face. A comment was made about how they should get over themselves, they donât have ârealâ problems.
When you compare the kids' problems, to the problems this person faced growing up in regional Australia, theyâre right, relatively, the problems today arenât ârealâ.
But to those kids they are. They have not experienced any worse.
If you begin to play the comparison game, where do you draw the line? To everyone affected by the war in Ukraine and currently living in a train station we are those âprivate school kidsâ. Does this mean none of us are ever allowed to feel negative emotions?
This is what I tricked myself into believing and where I led myself awry. I now appreciate that reverse reference points only become toxic when they are used to invalidate emotions.
Lessons Learnt
It should come as no surprise that my experiment failed. But I did learn a valuable lesson about suffering. One that is captured by Zadie Smith, âSuffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individualâit cannot be easily mediated by a third term like âprivilege.â If it could, the CEOâs daughter would never starve herself, nor the movie idol ever put a bullet in his own brain.â
I now remind myself when those around me (including myself), find themselves in a sandbox of shit, to not reframe it, but lead with empathy. To share the moment with them, rather than compare it.
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