Second-wave positive psychology
These include the "tyranny" of positivity and the lack of balance between positives and negatives;[13][14] failing to cover the entire spectrum of human experiences;[15] failing to recognize the importance of contextual variables;[16] and assuming that the Western individualistic culture represents the universal human experience.
It is open to insights and wisdom from both the East and the West and research findings from all sources regardless of the paradigm of truth claims.
[27] It may be argued that positive psychology is intrinsically existential because it is concerned with such fundamental questions about human existence as: What is the good life?
[5][28] A comprehensive positive psychology cannot be developed without taking into account the reality of death, the only certainty for all living organisms.
Therefore, EPP advocates that the proper context of studying well-being and the meaningful life is the reality of suffering and death.
[18] Thus, PP 2.0 provides a big tent that allows for multiple indigenous positive psychologies[17] and a much broader list of variables that contribute to well-being and flourishing.
[37] In other words, PP 2.0 denies that the positivist paradigm is the only way to examine truth claims, especially when we research the profound questions of what makes life worth living.
Dialectical thinking represents a simple but powerful conceptual framework capable of integrating a great deal of the literature relevant to well-being.
Yin represents not only the dark side of life but also the conservative and passive modes of adaptation, such as acceptance, letting go, avoidance, withdrawal, disengagement, doing nothing, and self-transcendence.
These dialectical principles constitute the foundation of PP 2.0 and ensure that the dark side of life serves the adaptive functions of survival and flourishing.
From Aristotle to William Shakespeare, literature has always recognized the existence of tragic heroes—powerful and successful individuals who are eventually ruined by their character flaws.
All one's talents, character strengths, and efforts will eventually come to null, with disastrous consequences to oneself and others, when one pays no attention to one's own Achilles heel.
[47][48][49] It hypothesizes that meaning is the best possible end value for the good life and offers the best protection against existential anxieties and adversities.
A perspective shift to the meaning mindset helps eliminate one primary source of human misery related to the striving to achieve material success or worldly fame.
Cultivating a meaningful mindset may yield a better payoff than positive psychology exercises of enhancing happiness and character strengths because the perspective shift reorients one's focus away from egotistic pursuits to self-transcendence and altruism, which benefit both the individual and society.
[34] Meaning management of the dialectical principles is sensitive to individual and cultural contexts but is, at the same time, also cognizant of the common good of humility and self-transcendence.
This big-picture perspective of PP 2.0 avoids many of the excesses associated with the egotistic pursuits of happiness and success in positive psychology, as usual.
