Happiness has been found! Repeat: Happiness has been found!
After centuries of poets, philosophers, and artists have struggled to find it. Religion, politics, and self-help, too.
It turns out, happiness has been waiting for us all along. Not in a creed or a mantra. Not in self-love, meditation, or a downward dog pose. Not even in an insanely catchy pop song by Pharrell Williams.
Nope.
We need look no further, it turns out, than a bottle of soap. Specifically, a bottle of soap purchased from Bath & Body Works.
I just placed an online order for some olfactorous delights—I mean, seriously, have you smelled the French Lavender? The Peach Bellini? The Japanese Cherry Blossom?—and I noticed on the bottom left of my screen a truly bold promise: “Happiness Guaranteed or Your Money Back.”
Happiness? Guaranteed? Really?
Wow. I couldn’t help but think of all of those great Don Draper advertising pitch scenes from “Mad Men,” always the best part of the show, and how Don would find these beautiful, romantic, nostalgic and subtle ways to make a hidden promise to consumers that if they buy this product they will, at least briefly, be happy.
Turns out, maybe the poetic and hidden messages didn’t need to be so poetic. Or hidden. Maybe the trick all along has been to slap a label on the product that says, “BUY THIS AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY.”
Poor Henry David Thoreau, spending all that time alone in his bean field. If only he had been born a few centuries later. He didn’t need to go to the woods. He just needed a fine mist fragrance that smelled like them.
Let’s be clear. Not even the founding fathers when writing the Declaration of Independence promised us happiness. Just our right to the “pursuit of” it.
Good news Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Adams, et. al. No need for us to keep pursuing. Looks like it’s time for a rewrite, or at least an asterisk and a footnote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and a pomegranate-scented foot scrub.”
Ah, yes. Much better. I feel happier just thinking about it.