The unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy

I came across this photo of Victoria Huggins, of American Idol fame, while searching for an image of an annoyingly cheerful person. It was on a relatively new blog called Media Studies, written by Andover media student (I presume) Kristina.

Kristina describes Victoria as “Possibly the most annoyingly loud, optimistic, cheerful person you will ever encounter. With an incredibly high-pitched, overly exaggerated Southern accent and a specialty in church music, she is the poster child for America.”

Fortunately, I missed the episode of American Idol when Victoria appeared and was promptly eliminated.

Another post on Kristina’s blog caught my attention, as the subject is close to my heart: How media/advertising images of the ideal body have … how shall I put this … messed us up. She comments on how her college-age contemporaries found the cast of MTV’s Skins so ugly they couldn’t watch it, when these young people are in fact – Kristina says — uniquely attractive. I agree. (Click here for image.) Kristina’s comment:

What is beauty anymore, anyway? What have you done to our standards? You have raised them to an impossible high that will never be met without a computer unless eating disorders and cancer-causing beauty products become common practice.

Precisely.

Anyway, all this by way of introducing the following video. It’s been around for a year, but I just discovered it (thanks to Psychiatric Times). It comes from The Onion and has had a million and a half viewers on YouTube. Production level is high, as is the humor level.

For more on this subject (the subject of excessive happiness, that is), I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

I’m also looking forward to reading a recently translated book by Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy. From the product description: (emphasis added)

Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion–one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn’t yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment–the right to pursue happiness–become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy–and what might we do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness.

Is being human a mental disorder?

Here’s another video recommended by Psychiatric Times (it’s good to know psychiatrists enjoy laughing at themselves). It was posted on YouTube only last month and has had under a thousand viewers. It’s a send-up of both the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric profession. Not as clever and not quite as funny as “Depressants for the Annoyingly Cheerful,” though it has a few excellent moments.

Resources:

Image: Media Studies

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy