Pills for Happiness?

We Happy Few was released on 10^th August 2018 and I, like many others, was hugely excited for this release. The dystopian elements of the plot intrigued me as a self-proclaimed Orwell obsessive, with changing the mental state of citizens as a key means to social control.

As a brief summary (not to spoil anything) in order to live in the best part of town, have the nicest clothes and food, and generally, live your best life, the citizens take ‘Joy’ – a miracle pill that makes you feel as though you’re on Cloud 9 permanently. What if you take too much? Not to worry! You’ll lose your memory but that’s not really important, is it? When you can always pop another to make yourself feel better.

The game segregates the population into those who can take Joy, and those who cannot, creatively naming them ‘Downers’. As a new downer, you travel through the game as Arthur, a man who is trying to reclaim his memory and has an entirely new perspective on the world.

By viewing the world with a permanent happy filter, it is not dissimilar to the filters our society has today. With platforms like Instagram, where you are encouraged to filter literally everything, people constantly look happy with a caption about how wonderful their life is, yet in reality, no-one’s life is perfect. We don’t talk about the bad days. They are taboo. Much like a downer people either ignore it entirely, or want to remove it from their feeds, making dystopia more attractive than reality.

The concept of taking a ‘Joy’ pill is much like ‘soma’ in Brave New World, where you take it to have a ‘holiday from reality’ and people depend upon it to remain happy. The pushy nature of takers of joy and soma highlight the human desire to conform. You want to be happy because everyone else is happy, not because you actually want to be happy. To be seen as ‘other’ is to be outcast, and seen as a threat to this perfect world.

So next time you are on Instagram, have a look for the joy and soma takers, (even if you are one yourself) and try to imagine the unfocussed, unfiltered, single reality behind the carefully selected and edited façade we see.