"Woman Laughing in Chewbacca Mask" is the newest Facebook infatuation. In case you haven't seen it, it consists of a mother sitting happily in her car and informing the audience [video camera] about her trip back from Kohl's.
"I'd like to say that I bought this for my son that would really, really, want it. And let's be honest, he'd probably confiscate it from me—con-fi-scate? That's a word, right?"
Perhaps the woman has poor elocution, but she is very cute, very admirable and child-like in a sense that we squeal with happiness simply because she is happy.
After two minutes, the woman puts on her Chewbacca mask and laughs with genuine mirth for the remaining minute and 55 seconds. It is contagious.
Scrolling through comments, I expected to find negative remarks about being childish and deriding her physicality. Instead, there was only positivity with statements such as, "Can this woman be our friend please?" and "We all need someone like her in our lives."
I began to think about happiness and it's subjectivity. In accordance to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to be "happy" is defined as feeling pleasure and enjoyment because of your life, situation, etc. But, happiness is more than semantics. How is it possible to create a singular definition for such a universal, heuristic emotion?
With such a conventional word, we are all familiar as to what happiness is. In relation to the video, there is evident dichotomy between what the woman deems as happiness and what I perceive it as. This raises the question as to what genuine elation really is.
Had I been at Kohl's and passed a Chewbacca mask, I would not have given it a second glance, nonetheless exalted it via social media. Similarly, it is improbable that she would achieve the same amount of fulfillment doing what makes me truly happy (writing, finishing a poem, etc.) Are either of the two lesser than the other? Taking all factors into consideration, such as our differing age, domesticity, etc., is it plausible that we are able to feel the same mirth, despite our polarity?
The answer is patently yes. There is no hierarchy of happiness, and although the definition may not pertain to each individual based on how we achieve it, we can universally agree on how it feels. Creating a singular definition that attempts to fully encapsulate what happiness is is completely infeasible. The answer is that elation is inexplicable, magical in a way. It is somehow possible that a video that pertains to the minority of interest can go viral solely because we are feeding off of and enraptured by this woman's simple joyousness. Despite being a palpable target for immediate criticism, positivity is enforced instead because we exercise hedonism as the audience, regardless of how it is obtained.
Happiness is like an art, fantastical in a way. It's definition will never suffice; it is not without difficulty for a writer to merely execute a sliver of genuine euphoria, nonetheless create a concrete definition. Whether it be buying a Chewbacca mask at Kohl's or being able to write about said consumer, it is futile to argue which happiness is true, but to rather acknowledge the universality of happiness itself.
