I thought I’d add a theme music to this post, Röyksopp’s Happy up Here so you can listen while reading.
I took the train from Prague to Vienna last weekend, I’d never visited and it seemed like a good opportunity to catch up with old friends who live here. It was also a good excuse to take the train for a few hours, I always love a good train ride. It was a chance to see what that little part of the world between the Czech and Austrian capital cities looks like while editing some podcast recordings.
I walked around Vienna in the morning a few days ago, and was glad to stumble upon a Stefan Sagmeister exhibit at the MAK, the Austrian Applied and contemporary arts museum. Knowing the famous designer is Austrian by birth, and having seen some of his work on happiness in TED Talks, it was a perfect opportunity to check it out.
It is called The Happy Show and collects the designers thoughts, research, experiments, and ideas about happiness. He famously closes his studio every seven years to take a year off as a sabbatical and many of the works in the exhibition were produced during that time off, some of it while he lived in Bali for a year, which seemed to have been in 2008 or around that time. He shows some of this work in his TED talks, I recommend checking them out.
It was a fantastic and happy morning for me, I’m always happy to walk around the streets of a new city and it was sunny so just that put a smile on my face. The Christmas markets were open with friends and families of locals and tourists walking around having fun and gathering around small high tables to drinks warm mugs of the Christmassy spiced, slightly boozy, and variously flavoured local pünsch.
I also love checking out the food of course, and was surprised to see stalls serving warm soup in bread bowls. While I loved the idea, it didn’t occur to me as a practical kind of street food to eat on the go. I stopped to watch some people order and see how they ate it, they turned out to stop at some tables I didn’t see were there at first. More reasons to smile while walking around.
I’d been walking around the centre of town for about two hours when I came across the exhibition, a good time to stop and get warm in the museum. The exhibits also put a smile on my face. One of my favourite pieces was the “How happy are you?” yellow banana flavoured bubble-gum dispensers. Ten of them are lined up in a colorful display, numbered 1 to 10 and asking people to self select how happy they were and take a bubble-gum from that machine. It’s playful, and as Stefan wrote in comments about the piece; it might sound silly to ask though research has shown that people stating they were happy actually made them happier. I enjoyed noticing there were a lot less gum in the 8-9-10 dispensers than in the ones numbered 1-2-3, which were almost full. I stayed around a few minutes and it was fun watching people select it, visitors watched each other and smiled. Happiness, or at least smiles, are pretty infectious.
I mentioned playful already, and to me this was a recurring theme throughout the exhibition, playfulness and happiness are intertwined in their crafting.
I came across a brilliant article, a thanksgiving acknowledgement for the advertising industry by Tom Demetriou, it’s an interesting and fun read I could relate to having lived similar situations in my work too.
He shares this award acceptance speech from Jerry Seinfeld, also a lot of fun. Cynical perhaps, though I mention as relevant in the same post it because he talks about the small moments of happiness advertising can provide.
“In advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. […] In between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I’m happy”
I’m not sure I see it as happiness when I’m in the thick of working on advertising or marketing a product, though typically a common thread with all great and memorable pieces of advertising is that they put a smile on people’s faces regardless of the product or service being advertised.
Beyond the ironic humour, there is definitely something to be said for appreciating happiness moment by moment, and then to be able to laugh at the irony of the often nonsensical things I do in the world of advertising, which I think also holds true for a lot of people in other lines of work.
The quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off comes to mind as a good way to complete this post:
“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.”
