Article

Culture

Fun & play

Holidays/vacations

Mental Health

5 August 2025

5 min read

I disobeyed Disney’s command to 'celebrate happy’

You don’t have to live your best life

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

Disneyland.

I’ve just got back from a wonderful family holiday in California. And, of course, we couldn’t take our teenage daughters to California and not go to Disneyland.

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of Disneyland, the Californian theme park conceived and built by Walt Disney, which opened in 1955. We forget now that this was a revolutionary concept in its time and wonderfully founded on the wholesome notion of creating a place where families could immerse themselves in an imaginative world; where parents and children could play and have fun together. In our screen-obsessed, individualist, loneliness-epidemic age, that continues to be a very good idea.

We spent two days at Disneyland which proved enough time for me to have a chat and selfie with Iron Man; become a Space Ranger firing lasers alongside Buzz Lightyear; go on a turbulent adventure through a dangerous lost temple with Indiana Jones; and even join the Rise of the Resistance to be chased by some mean-looking Storm Troopers. Good times.

However, a point of friction for me, ironically, was the theme for Disneyland's 70th anniversary celebration: "Celebrate Happy". 

I think Disneyland is great. A place designed for families and friends to have fun together absolutely gets my jaunty thumbs up. But I got increasingly annoyed by being told I should be happy all the time. Apart from anything else, the motto was clearly coined by someone who has never experienced the greatest irony of all: Disney Leg.

Disney Leg (grown-up name Cutaneous Vasculitis, also experienced when playing golf) is a form of small blood vessel inflammation resulting swelling, a purplish rash, burning sensation and itching caused by walking or standing for hours at a time in high temperatures. It occurs most commonly in women in their late 40s or early 50s. I was one such woman. And I can tell you for nothing that Disney Leg is no celebrator of happy.

Disney leg may have made me more Eeyore than Tigger, but my Disney experience was also framed by reading Kate Bowler’s wonderful book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved. I love Kate Bowler. I want her to be my best friend, forever. I want to be her when I grow up.

I first met her when I listened in to the Seen & Unseen Live that featured her in conversation with Graham Tomlin. She introduces herself saying, “I’m Kate. I’m a Duke professor, podcaster and author with a single mission: giving you a little more permission to admit that you’re not always ‘living your best life’. After years of being told I was incurable, I was declared cancer-free. But there’s no going back. I am forever changed by what I discovered: life is so beautiful and life is so hard.”

For everyone.” Kate is leading her own Rise of Resistance as she resists the tyranny of the wide and pervasive culture of extreme positivity that could also be summed up as “celebrate happy”.

If my life is a failure because I’m not happy all the time, then how do I find the courage and hope that I need when faced with suffering or challenge?

If Kate had been there, she wouldn’t have insisted that I celebrate happy, she would have found some shade and a bucket of iced water for me to immerse my Disney ankles in. She would have listened to me describe my discomfort with compassion and empathy such that I would then also feel able to tell her about how much I was enjoying myself.

You see, I believe that the way towards “happy” isn’t through denial of suffering. It can’t be. We all know that life can be unbearably hard as well as achingly funny. To deny one is to negate the reality of the other. And to make “happy” our life goal is to exclude so much else that is beautiful in its complexity. If my life is a failure because I’m not happy all the time, then how do I find the courage and hope that I need when faced with suffering or challenge? And suffering and challenge are an everyday part of life that we simply cannot choose to ignore. The unpaid bills, the cancer diagnosis, the broken relationship - these things don’t go away or hurt less when I insist that I’m living my best life.

Some of the best times of my life have occurred at exactly the moment when life has been hardest. Because that’s when I’ve had to acknowledge that I’m not in control of everything; that there is something, Someone, bigger and more powerful and more glorious than anything this world can offer me. If I insist on making happiness my god, I might easily miss out on the God who loved me so much he was prepared to suffer and die for me. My best life is found not in “happiness” but in the truth of God’s sacrificial love for me.

I don’t mean to denigrate Disney at all. I think the Disney DNA of fun and a warm welcome give the rest of us much to learn from. Did you know that the people who walk around Disneyland dressed up as the famous Disney characters are highly trained, including the golden rule: when a child hugs you, you don’t let go until they do. Isn’t that beautiful? (I wonder how that would play out if I insisted on that in my church?) But I do want to take the focus off the demand to “celebrate happy” and be free to celebrate the wider experience of life as well.

What I took from my Disney/Kate Bowler sandwich is that the best of life comes from embracing the highs and lows; being honest about and unafraid of mixed feelings.

Life is, as Ronan Keating once said, a rollercoster, just got to ride it. But also, I would add, life is getting fed up in the queue to get on the ride. Life is also feeling too hot or tired and needing to sit down. Life is also looking at your photos afterwards and realising that Tinkerbell has photobombed you. And I believe that all of that is to be celebrated, along with the happy.

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Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

1 May 2025

6 min read

The rights and wrongs of making money with meme coins

When does investing become speculating, or even addictive gambling?

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A montage shows Trump with a raised fist against other images of him and the phrase 'fight fight fight'.

$Trump coin marketing image.

gettrumpmemes.com,

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs may have driven sharp swings in global financial markets, but his actions in markets a few months earlier were in some ways even more peculiar.

On the Friday before his inauguration as the 47th US President in January, the Republican surprised many with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin, described by its website as “the only official Trump meme”. The cryptocurrency token, in which Trump’s family business owned a stake, initially soared in value to more than $14bn over that following weekend.

Then, on the Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin, $MELANIA, which reached a value of $8.5bn. Even the pastor who spoke at the president’s inauguration subsequently launched his own memecoin.

For those wondering what exactly a memecoin is, you are not alone. In short, they are a form of cryptocurrency - an asset class that itself has attracted plenty of questions about its substance and purpose - representing online viral moments. They have no fundamental value or business model and, according to the US securities regulator, “typically have limited or no use or functionality”.

Donald and Melania Trump’s coins subsequently plunged in price, but still have a value of around $2.5bn and $214mn respectively, according to website CoinMarketCap.

There are plenty of others in existence. PEPE, based on a comic frog, has a value of around $3.6bn; BONK, a cartoon dog, has a market cap of $1.5bn; and PNUT, a reference to a squirrel euthanised by authorities in New York and about which Trump was allegedly “fired up” (although doubt has since been cast on the president’s involvement in the matter), is still valued at around $174mn, despite having fallen sharply in price.

Dogecoin, seen as the world’s first memecoin and originally created as a joke, boasts a market value of around $25bn. (There are other memecoins which may not be suitable for these pages).

Some people’s willingness to buy an “asset” with no use or fundamental value may seem strange to more traditional investors. But it can be viewed as just one manifestation of the speculative investor behaviour evident since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and, indeed, at times throughout history.

The price of Bitcoin recently rose above $100,000, despite many investors still viewing it as having little or no value (in 2023 the UK’s Treasury select committee described cryptocurrencies as having “no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good”). In early 2021, shares in GameStop - a loss-making US video games retailer that some hedge funds were betting against - rocketed as much as 2,400 per cent, as retail investors piled in, many with the aim of inflicting pain on the hedge fund short sellers (in that respect at least, a highly successful strategy that became the subject of the film Dumb Money). The huge rise in AI and other tech stocks in recent years - until the recent tariff-driven volatility - has also been described as a bubble by some commentators.

Whether or not such episodes can be compared to infamous bouts of speculative mania in history depends on your point of view (and often can only be judged with the benefit of hindsight) - be it the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania, shares in the South Sea Company in the 18th century or the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But it does give rise to the question of when investment should start to be described as speculation or even as gambling? And what are the rights and wrongs of any of those activities?

There can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources...

Gambling can be thought of as risking a stake on, for instance, the result of a game of chance or sport in the hope of a bigger payout. While often the result is purely down to chance, in some cases a strategy or an element of research (for instance of a horse or football team’s form) can be used. Investment, in contrast, tends to involve purported economic utility and assets believed to have some sort of underlying value, and holds the hope of future profit (although there are also plenty of bad investments or those that have gone to zero). While an investor must be prepared to lose their entire stake, in some cases such an event is relatively unlikely (for instance, if they buy a fund tracking the performance of a major stock exchange). Speculation is harder to define, but is generally seen as shorter term than investment, with more chance of a bigger gain or loss, and dependent on price fluctuations. Rightly or wrongly, the term has a more negative connotation than investment.

One writer who explored the ethics of these activities was Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a Jesuit theologian and economist who served as an adviser to the Pope and who was banned from publishing under the Nazis.

While he found that “one general definition cannot capture all the nuances” of speculation, he identified two different types of speculative activity - one that was purely trying to make a profit from financial market trading, and one based on trying to create a viable business. (See this article in the Catholic Social Science Review for a fuller explanation of Nell-Breuning’s views on speculation).

As the CSSR article shows, Nell-Breuning found that there can be positive effects from speculation - one might think of better liquidity and price discovery in a market, while, in commodity futures markets, speculators allow producers to hedge risk.

But he also argued that there can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources away from production.

And whereas gambling typically takes place within a circle of players who have chosen to take part, speculation, he wrote, can affect a greater portion of society - for instance, if it affects the price of shares or bonds they hold.

The Bible - on which Nell-Breuning’s faith and analysis was based - does not take a prescriptive approach to such activities. But it does provide some interesting guidance.

An entrepreneurial approach to business and investment is applauded, for instance when the writer of the book of Proverbs (traditionally believed to be King Solomon) praises the virtues of “an excellent wife”. These include investing in a field and using her earnings from business to plant a vineyard, and feeding her family from her gains.

Jesus tells a story of a master who, before going on a journey, gives his property to his servants, each according to their ability. To one he gives five “talents” (a large unit of money), to a second two and to a third servant he gives one.

The first servant trades with his talents and makes five more talents - a 100 per cent profit - and is applauded by the master on his return. The second servant also trades and similarly makes two more talents and is again applauded.

But the third servant, being afraid and believing the master to be “a hard man”, hides the money in a hole in the ground. He is condemned as “wicked and slothful”, and told that he should at least have put the money in the bank.

While Jesus’s story may primarily be about how we view God’s nature, how we use our God-given abilities and whether or not we can take risks in faith for Him, it is also hard not to see investment and indeed wise speculation as being virtuous activities here. Putting the money into a bank account is, in this story anyway, more of a fallback option.

But the Bible also warns us against putting money above all else in our lives. The love of money is, famously, a root of all sorts of evil, while we are also told to be content with what we have, and that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle”.

Nell-Breuning similarly warns that a “get-rich-quick” mindset, when this is placed above all else, can be harmful, and advises caution in situations where the lure of big profits can lead the speculator into market manipulation or fraud.

After all, both gambling and crypto trading have the potential to become dangerous and damaging addictions needing treatment.

Ultimately, Nell-Breuning struggled to come to a simple conclusion on the question of whether speculation, in and of itself, is morally wrong. It is, he wrote, a judgment call for those involved.

When making such decisions ourselves, his - and the Bible’s - warnings may be worth bearing in mind.