The Magic Button

Barney Stinson says in the TV series How I Met Your Mother, “Whenever I’m sad, I just stop being sad and be awesome instead!” However, for the rest of us, it’s not so simple. We obviously don’t come with built-in switches to turn off the sadness, but it seems someone has created an online button to do just that.

When browsing online, one must be wary of phony web sites, as anyone could create them. We’ve been taught to question the credibility of online publishers, but I don’t believe the same precaution applies to this site, which is specifically intended to help us in times of despair. It’s called make-everything-ok.com.

The site claims the button in the center of the page is a magical one. It promises to make everything OK with a click of the button, and once clicked, a loading bar pops up with the words, “Making everything OK is in progress.” When the process is complete, a message reads, “Everything is OK now. If everything is still not OK, try checking your settings of perception and objective reality.”

In other words, the message states that if you’re not OK by now, it’s your own fault. Sadness is a state of mind that hinders our objectivity, so how do we ignore ourselves long enough to see the reality of a situation? What this button hopes to accomplish is relieve us of the burden of ourselves; it offers us clarity, if we wish to accept it.

Of course, one could say that the button doesn’t really do anything and it’s all in our minds, similar to the placebo effect. We take from it what we want to.

But does it really matter? So what if the button isn’t magical? As mentioned earlier, it’s not the authenticity that makes the button meaningful to its audience. On the contrary, it is the hope that the button could possibly work.

So who knows? Maybe there are magical fairies that hear your distress call and immediately work to solve your problems – or maybe we just need permission to be OK.