Happiness and Cultural

Happiness and cultural memes go hand in hand. Some are created for humorous purposes to entertain or created to convey the messages of a community. For Wasik, he created the fad of a flash mob which has been seen across the world. This is an example of a passing trend, one that was created from boredom and ended by boredom. For Wasik, he was bored as well. He had nothing to do and from that he came up with flash mobs. This is a simple and harmless idea to alleviate the illness of being bored. Yet, he never had a message to convey or a political plea from these flash mobs, it was “…intramural play…using the outside world as merely a terrain for private games” as well as “transitory, ten minutes or fewer, and thereby not exactly suited to standing their ground and testifying…and couldn’t become political, or even make any statement at all” (Wasik, 36-38). The flash mobs were not a means of a political statement but more of like a boredom reliever, to bring happiness to people’s lives. There is another fad such as the silly bands. They, too, do not bring harm to anyone and are worn by virtually everyone everywhere. They were also a fad; they had a good one year run before people stopped buying them. These are examples of fads that people participated in because it brought joy to them. Gilbert even mentions that if one person buys a silly band or joins a flash mob, and it brings them happiness, odds are that the people around them would do it too because they want to be happy as well. Gilbert states that “Most of us want to fit in well with our peers…” which means that if one person does something popular or accepted in the cultural society, then others will follow to fit in (Gilbert 182). Basically, The two ideas are similar because if there is a fad, and one person starts to do it, others would want to fit in so they too would participate in the cultural meme. Even “psychologists have confirmed that people's influence on a person could