by Dennis Dunleavy
When my son was younger, I once asked him what made a McDonald’s Happy Meal so happy? With only the wisdom a 6-year-old could share he responded by saying that a Happy Meal is only happy when he gets one. In other words, the Happy Meal cannot be “happy” until his desires are met. So the Happy Meal sits in a state of readiness, an ideal, waiting to be consumed. The Happy Meal is, because we have come to accept the conventions of fast food and little plastic toys as normal.
Adults know better than children about what should or shouldn’t make us happy. Adults know that experience teaches us that happiness is temporal. Happiness has become as abstract a concept as love. People buy into the Happy Meal mentality because it feeds the insatiable need to be immediately satisfied.
McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal to the public in 1979 as a way to cross-market “entertainment products” such as movies and games with popular fast food. The innovation has helped to transform how we think of pop culture. The Happy Meal was a marriage of the sublime – food and entertainment became the ultimate commodity of self-indulgence.
Generations of Americans were, and still are, culturally conditioned at an early age to expect to find happiness in a bag promoting the latest Disney film along with the ubiquitous McFries and McBurger. While the “You deserve a break today” jingo expounds the virtues of happiness and self-fulfillment, our culture has become increasingly sedentary and obese.
Brand marketing impinges on our every day life – we cannot escape it. There’s even a guy in Nebraska who rented his forehead out as advertising space for $37,000. We have become a culture that only knows happiness when we aren’t happy. Part of the problem is that our culture, through self-indulgent consumerism, makes it difficult for anyone to ever feel completely satisfied. We are always left with wanting more. We try to teach our children the difference between needs and desires, but the external pressures are relentless, especially on commercial television and in social interactions with others.
The cultural pathology of happiness coincides with how identity is shaped by persuasive media images. The advertising industry spends millions on the development of products that appeal to our desires. But how are those desires constructed for us? Studies show that marketing products for many children starts at as young as six months. As soon as a baby is old enough to be propped up in front of a TV – wham – here comes the barrage of messages. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics reports, “Young people view more than 40 000 ads per year on television alone and increasingly are being exposed to advertising on the Internet, in magazines, and in schools.”
Happiness is embedded in the American Dream of the iWant it now — iWant it all mentality pervading the consciousness on so many levels. The average consumer is exposed to more than 3,000 advertising images daily. Through text messaging, emailing, web browsing, picture making, and listening to our favorite tunes we are fully enveloped in the age of instant happy. My iPhone is today’s Happy Meal.
But I may never be happy really, because happiness is an illusion. I may never be happy, because there is always this idea banging around in my head that reminds me of a big “if” – that is –If I did this, or, if I did that, or, if I had this or if I had that.
With all the Happy Meals and iPhones Americans have today, one might think that we would be happier and less stressed out. Fact is, a recent study shows that people are no happier now than they were 30 years ago.
Today’s technologies elevate the status of the “I” – everything is individuated with the click of a mouse of the stroke of a thumb. I am only happy if I am loved, and love comes in the form of a text message.
Howard Rhinegold in his book Smart Mobs quotes a 17-year-old college student about her use of text messaging. “If I don’t receive a text when I wake up or I receive only a few messages during the day, I feel as though nobody loves me enough to remember me….”
The truth is that our society has advanced to a point where it seems that we are so busy trying to make ourselves happy, that we are, in the end, never really happy.