Craig,
You’re most gracious.
I admit I’m probably better materially situated than you are, though also modest. I was born in the same room as my mother in a council flat in London, second of five.
We caught the boat to Australia in 1970 for ten pounds apiece, settled in Inala, Brisbane, and I started work in 1975, aged fourteen, just as recession was ending the postwar Trente Glorieuses.
I think that’s the difference between the generational poor then and now; jobs were plentiful for my mother and father, with little or no expertise necessary, thus plenty of encouragement for the upwardly mobile working classes. No such vistas are in prospect for our consumptive poor now, who are bred for indolence and would be difficult to inspire with your ascetic psychology. A difficulty psychology’s always had is its focus on the individual. Individualism suits neoliberals like Gary Johns, but the people he excoriates are part of a ‘cultural’ malaise.
I spent the next 25 years working in factories and finally went to uni when my wife died and I had four kiddies to raise. I now have a few letters, BA(Hons) PhD after my name, but make ends meet mostly as a cleaner/handyman.
“Should I mope because Gina Reinhardt or Frank Lowy exist? To what end?
I enjoy my life and I take pride in living it as well as I can. We have all we need to be comfortable and to thrive as a family”.
No, we shouldn’t ‘mope’. But the passive stance you take, however apparently admirable, is not real independence. You’re in receipt of government assistance and live at the sufferance of the State, whose patronage is increasingly questioned and ‘rationalised.’
As things stand, we in the West ‘do’ mostly live well enough thanks to welfare—I said myself I had little sympathy for ‘rich mendicants.’ But democratic capitalism means a constant battle to maintain minimum standards, arbitrated ultimately by the ‘health’ of the economy—ailing since 1975.
You’re likely to find your circumstance even more straightened in the future, while the rich get richer:
http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Capital_in_the_Twenty_First_Century.html?id=iv0HngEACAAJ&redir_esc=y
TBC

This is not simply a matter of envy. You say you’re not religious—so the meek shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven? Without this religious carrot, surely our priority must be renewal?
The current system, which affords all you “need [modest as ‘tis] to be comfortable and to thrive as a family”, resents the expense. You can’t rely on it. Meanwhile, the crumbs are much thinner away from the apron of the table. The system that ‘supports’ thrift, exerts the same indifference where thrift will not suffice.
Even supposing there was sufficient for us all to live adequately, our economics is premised on limitless generation of wealth, garnered via ‘endless material expansion in a closed system’ (it amazes me how few people are truly confronted by this insuperable contradiction!), where signs of exhaustion are already clear.
Even if we rationalise this, what of the global destruction wrought by the capitalist juggernaut which suffers the emergence and humble subsistence of countless millions more? Capitalism doesn’t pull millions out of poverty—as if they’ve been waiting around to be rescued! It literally cultivates them, breeds them to feed the engines of growth.
Supposing we can live with this dystopian reality, tutor ourselves to enjoy life—take up woodwork; comfort from philosophy/psychology/religion—and ignore the manifest insecurity of a social existence which was initially adopted for precisely that, the security of the group?
Even then, what finally of the ethics of our forbearance? We know of all this: obscene wealth/poverty; beaurocratic control and denigration of what it ‘potentially’ means to be human; rape and pillage of the planet; species extinction; living beyond our means—in spite of enforced thrift for the vast majority.
This again is my challenge to your otherwise inspiring position. The great religions offer no hope in ‘this’ world. And this is why, imo, this world has always been treated with such contempt.
Enchanting oneself with a healthy mental attitude when our material circumstances are so imminently dire, amounts to culpable neglect of the human enterprise and spirit—along with whatever morality we claim to support.
Another time perhaps…

Squeers, I really have to correct you on a couple of things which you have quite wrong.

First, the positive psychology of Seligman et al is specifically about the functioning of communities of individuals acting to create positive outcome for themselves and the group into the future. It is far from ascetic and anyone who knows me will tell you that label doesn't fit me at all.

Second, passivity is not a part of my makeup. I closed a business which failed in 2011 and I immediately sought work, leaving a decent job to undertake study, as a positive, active choice. No hard feelings, you had no way of knowing.

Third, if for some reason I feel the need to increase my income, I will get work. I prefer not to at the moment, because it allows me to support my children's schooling and properly pursue my own studies. FWIW, I have collected unemployment benefits for a grand total of 10 weeks in the last 20+ years and for most of that period I've been self-employed.

Fourth, there is no good reason for any government to reduce individual student stipends or, for that matter, to reduce unemployment benefits to adults, although there may be a case to make out for reforming some eligibility rules. Every cent paid as a benefit is returned to the economy as personal consumption spending. It's a highly efficient stimulus measure, without even considering the social welfare aspects.

If you'd like to have a discussion on economics, it would be interesting, I think. I agree with you that the capitalist expansionary model is fatally flawed, but we differ in our views of the implications.

Craig,
I don't think your corrections amount to much as our personal circumstances are not important, except perhaps in as much as they influence our thinking.
The 'passive' stance I allude to is one of contentment under the patronage of a rapacious and unsustainable system. How you or anyone else perceives you is beside the point. The point being that the system is doomed to fail and 'positive psychology' is thus a mode of blinkered naivety naive.
The self-help movement has always had a big following, but as I say it puts the onus on and rewards the individual. Apart from the egotism, there's not enough prosperity under capitalism to go around, just enough for unethical entrepreneurs, the charismatic, the lucky, and the ruthless.
Group self help still passively condones and accepts prevailing institutions, notwithstanding as I say that they are corrupt, inequitous, unsustainable etc.
Your forth point is contradicted by austerity measures around the world, and the fact that the federal government is currently trying to get cuts to welfare and privatisation of the tertiary sector through the senate.
My daughter begins her degree this year and will receive about $215 per week in 'youth allowance'. How is she supposed to live on that? But even this is hard to get and the government has lots of wriggle room based the student's family's means.

I do not complain about the dispensation, however, which is to importune and so legitimise the tyrant/system. I condemn it as irredeemable.

Squeers, with respect, it seems to me that one making the choice to be helpless in the face of great forces is not me.

I'm going to be a little personal here, but please don't take it as an insult, it's not meant that way. You have a higher research degree and yet you work in a menial job, full of resentment directed at things you cannot change, but refusing to even consider changing the things that are within your gift.

That is a form of learned helplessness and it is pervasive within our society. A common misnomer for it is the 'sense of entitlement' which is only half the story.

The social welfare model we have allowed to be constructed is a large part of the problem. Not because redistribution is unneeded but because it teaches people that their own welfare is best managed by someone other than themselves, even people who by any objective measure are well off. It goes further, explicitly and implicitly impugning the capacity and will of people to make decisions about the simplest aspects of their lives, such as looking for a job without being compelled by the threat of an impersonally administered punishment that isn't the product of a judgement, but of a process designed largely for the convenience of its administration.

Screw that for a sick bloody joke.

We need to be teaching people to look at themselves as products of their own decisions and to do that we have to teach them how to gather and evaluate information and make good decisions they can live with. Critical thinking isn't enough, what is needed is purpose and determination to do what can be done.

Near enough can be good enough and if it's not, then work out how to make it better. You are your own most important project

Craig,
you're no more in a position to make personal speculations than I was. Your own potted history seemed quite romantic and invited my response; the fact that you are much more pragmatic than that was difficult to infer.
I also do part time teaching--not easy finding a permanent position in the sector once you're over fifty, but I'm working on it. I've also had a successful if modest work history as a printer, and The 'menial' work I do now is my own business and quite successful. I don't have to do all the 'menial' work so manage to keep my chin up.
My position has nothing to do with resentment, but learning, and what is within my gift I most certainly work on, having weaned my self on the self-reliance advocated by Montaign and Emerson long before I went to university.

I agree that the welfare model we have is large part of the problem; this is implicit in my posting above, though unlike you I see more deeply than the need for people to find a job (often non-existent or merely 'menial'), pull their socks up etc.
People are not merely products of their own decisions, and not everyone has the kind of drive you recommend.

"...what is needed is purpose and determination to do what can be done."
To do merely what 'can' be done is capitulation, and that's what keeps the system going.

Thank you for the interaction, but I do urge you to look at the limitations of the world view you're advocating.