[Content Note: Emotional policing.]
"If you're not happy, you can become happy. Happiness is a choice. That's the thing I really feel. Like with friends who refuse to get happy, who refuse to rise above the discomfort of where they're at."—Jennifer Aniston, in a new interview for Glamour.
Neat advice, Jennifer Aniston! You're the COOLEST therapist since Gwyneth Paltrow.
I imagine if I had a chance to ask Jennifer Aniston about this quote, our conversation would go a little something like this:
MM: Hi, Jennifer Aniston!
JA: Hi. You look like you need a cleanse.
MM: Ha ha I totally do. My liver is totally ensconced in preservatives. But what I want to talk to you about today is your aggressively ugly quote in Glamour about how happiness is a choice.
JA: Okay! Wait—what?
MM: First, I just want to confirm that you do not suffer from chronic chemical depression?
JA: No. Hey, I see what you're doing—
MM: And also that you are still a multimillionaire?
JA: Now wait just a second—
MM: Oh, don't worry—there will be plenty of time for you to try to defend being an almost undilutedly privileged person who indefensibly asserts that happiness is a choice at the end of the interview, after I walk away. Do you not find it at all troublesome for someone with your extreme privilege to assert, particularly at a time when fully 80% of adults populating the nation you call home are unemployed, near-poverty, and/or dependent on welfare to survive, that happiness is a choice, and that people who unhappy are just refusing to be happy, just refusing to rise above the discomfort of their lives?
JA: That's not what I meant!
MM: Oh, I'm sorry. What did you mean then?
JA: I meant that people who have the choice—
MM: Whooooooooooops let me read your quote back to you. You said: "If you're not happy, you can become happy. Happiness is a choice." You did not qualify that you meant people with your privileges only.
JA: You're twisting my words!
MM: Am I?
JA: You're taking them out of context!
MM: Am I?
JA: I bet you write for one of those terrible internet blogs, don't you?
MM: Yes, one of the worst, in fact.
JA: I knew it! I don't have to take this!
MM: Is being held accountable for your careless words that contribute to the marginalization of people whose psychological disabilities and/or situational anxiety make them unable to magically conform to an unrealistic and oppressive social standard of extreme emotional dishonesty designed to assuage privileged people's feelings of guilt that their happiness comes at the cost of others' misery making you unhappy?
JA: Yes!
MM: Oh. Well, that can't be right. Happiness is a choice, is it not?
JA: I hate you.
MM: Have a nice day, Dame Happypants!
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