Sarah Ahmed in her essay “Why Happiness, Why Now?” a brief excerpt from her book The Promise of Happiness talks about the underlying problems with happiness today. Ahmed sights that happiness is a business rather than a subjective feeling readily obtained by all. Ahmed’s display of happiness, along with others like it, is the reason the perception of happiness by society is skewed in today’s world. In new cultural texts of today we see a shift occurring, as seen in the song “I hope you Dance” by Lee Anne Womack. Womack uses the song to convey happiness as love and success in life. We are beginning to move away from the business of happiness that Ahmed sights in her essay and we are moving toward a new understanding of happiness that is defined by the individual not by big business of today. This new objective happiness tends to include love, adventure, and making others happy as Womack shows in her song.
“I hope you Dance” by Lee Anne Womack uses dance as a metaphor for happiness throughout the song, saying that “when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance”. She is saying that we have a choice to be happy through our lives or sit on the bench and watch our lives pass us by. Alternately, Ahmed sights in her essay that we cannot escape the happiness ideals that the media sets for us (3). These objective views on happiness are defined by equating happiness to material objects to be bought. Womack’s song confirms that we are seeing a shift away from Ahmed’s beliefs of media ruling societal views on happiness in culture today. This is an example of a movement toward a cultural shift to more subjective forms of happiness. These new subjective forms can include success in a career, love, family and adventure. This is important because the media discounts other emotions making them less valuable than happiness and because media portrays unrealistic examples of happiness through items rather than feelings.
Happiness is supposed to be different for every person; it is supposed to be based on how they feel about their life. Happiness is not something that can be bought, as most big businesses try to tell us we can. Ahmed stresses the involvement of big business in the happiness of societies today. She shows readers the pull that business has to manipulate society into thinking buying things will make us happy instead of the choosing of your own route to life happiness. She makes this argument because big business is manipulating media to show happiness only coming from materials being bought. Womack sights loving, adventure and opportunity as being pieces to the puzzle of happiness. She ignores completely the need for objective things in the process of obtaining happiness. Instead of sticking to the usual socially acceptable examples of happiness Womack challenges that, saying that happiness is adventure and life fulfillment rather than the accumulation of things. This is an important change because manipulation of feelings to rely on materials is dangerous.
The most important line of the song is “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean” this teaches us that it is okay to feel small and see the vast amount of space in the world and how little we really matter. Feeling small is a beautiful thing to be able to do. In our culture today so many people are self-centered with the mentality that the world revolves around them, putting into question if those people are truly happy. A huge part of happiness is being able to make others happy as well when you are missing that piece I feel as though it is hard to fully achieve any form of life long happiness. Being humble is a characteristic that not many achieve in their lifetime and it is a beautiful thing to see this characteristic finally is noted by someone who can make an influence on the public.
In conclusion society needs to make a change. We need to begin steering away from the business and objective views of happiness. We need to stop letting media, heavily influenced by business, show us what happiness should be. Society as a whole needs to begin seeing what really makes each one of us happy and begin steering our lives to achieve that, rather than staying stuck in the circle of corporate happiness. When we die, it does not matter how many items we have in our house or how much money we have in savings. What matters is the moments spent with the people we love and the people we can positively influence on the way.