A while ago, Time questioned whether our general happiness comes down to genes, and is therefore unchangeable.
Inferring, of course, that creating misery through the idealisation of happiness is a different ball game than chasing after plain old happiness (which, ha, I get to say is) … I can’t help but extrapolate from this a potential future where a new corporate conglomerate is built around the desire for happiness.
Pure happiness, that is, and not a figment of it obtained through your local Target.
Firstly, after it’s irrefutably proven that we’re stuck as Depressives or Cheshires …
… some marketing genius will decide to blitz society with the exact opposite message – that you can change your not-so-set-in-stone mental state! All you need to do is acquire – say, for the sake of an example – as many hoola-hoops as you can, and the longer you can walk around while spinning them around as many personal appendages as you can, the happier you’ll be!
(See: solariums, skin bleaching creams, butt lift surgeries, any youth replenishment procedure involving leeches, any financial enablers allowing the purchase of aforementioned horrors and half of the things in your typical home)
Cue the media hysteria
The press, seeing two polar opposites easily relatable to and recognised by the public, goes ‘ooh’, and promptly grants itself a decade’s worth of empty rhetoric long-spieling about the reduced life-expectancy of anyone with a happiness quotient less than that which grants them the ability to walk around with the corners of their mouths staple-gunned upright. Brain lobotomies fail to be mentioned at any time.
(See: the [anything you can imagine] ‘epidemic’)
And, ‘think of the children!’
Parents who refuse to conform to the idea that nothing less than absolute happiness is bad, especially since choosing and working towards it is possible and is awesome, are given the parental custody banhammer.
(See: geez, poor wee little Scots)
Happiness self-help products become all the rage
Politicians espouse how they learnt to discard the lure of ‘larding around all that other junk on my person’ (ie. public non-nudity) and embracing the hoola-hoop-jigglin’ lifestyle. Celebrities give page spreads touting the latest hoola-hoop brands. Students are given lessons by government workers on the dangers of ‘hoola-hoop-abstinence’.
Oh, humanity
Proving that something which common-sensically should be malleable by choice actually, well, isn’t always seems to be a surefire starting-point of a new, useless focus for the world at large.
And proving this will create a fresh new market when the happiness consumers inevitably fade out. I imagine this market will somehow involve learning how to have fun while at the same time being a fatalist with a malfunctioning imagination.
