There’s no word yet on whether taking selfies actually makes you happy. (In fact, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting it encourages us to think way too much about our faces and not enough about our happiness.) But some people behind the hashtag #missionsmile believe selfies make you happy, so they sent two handsome young men to Miami to take loads of selfies on a beach.
As the video clip gears up, the text ‘be happy for this moment, this moment is your life’ flashes up, and an evocative (slow, waily) version of Zedd ft Foxes’ Clarity begins to play. The boys grin and prepare their best selfie-smiles. So far, so cringe.
Mark E Miller and Ethan Hethcote, who are so excited to be taking all of these selfies in Miami that their words are reduced to garbles so it’s nigh on impossible to detect their accents, talk lots about how excited they are, then set up on the beach with a representative of the Guinness Book of World Records. They then parade around interrupting sunbathers to take selfies with them.
According to The Miami New Times, within an hour they manage 355 selfies, breaking a Guinness World Record, perhaps proving little more than the Guinness Book of Records has a category for just about everything. Not to be a Debbie Downer on all of this, but what would really make us smile is to see the perturbed faces of the people who just don’t want to have a selfie taken with these Jedward-hyper jocks. (Full disclosure: yes, they are really fit.)
The whole thing is supposed to get us all thinking about #missionsmile, which is an organisation promoting happiness. According to #missionsmile’s website, we should ‘come back in June to see who’s behind #MissionSmile’. Our guess is it’s a mobile phone company looking to get hype behind a new product/service, or it’s an actual organisation of those bros who’ll spend entire festivals lungeing up to strangers and barking ‘FREE HUGS’ in their faces, getting cross when anyone shirks away from their musty-armpitted emrace, flinging their straw trilbies to the floor in mock horror.
Just us? Well, as one of the YouTube commenters put it: ‘My dream is to one day be skinny and find a love like you guys have im so happy for you guys.’ We hope that’s sarcasm.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.