“… honor, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves … but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that through them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.” —from Book 1.7 of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” translated by Sir David Ross
In one way, the rapid rise of the phrase “Choose To Be Happy”—the chord it strikes and, if retail experts are right, its potent marketability—should perhaps come as no surprise to New Canaan residents Matt Konspore and Mike Shullman. On a basic level, the longtime friends became its first adherents and converts—its first “customers.”
A chance remark uttered by a loved one in need nearly two years ago, those four words and the powerful, empowering message they carry took root for the men, and quickly became a kind of byword between Konspore and Shullman at a time when each, in his own way, had been searching for some inspiration. The friends began texting “Choose To Be Happy” to each other and then, on a lark, Konspore ordered up about 10 T-shirts with the phrase printed on the front, had his wife and kids don them and surprised Shullman at his home—one for every member of each family. Immediately, anyone who saw Konspore wearing the T-shirt—say, at Zumbach’s Gourmet Coffee on Pine Street, a regular hangout—had a strong, positive reaction, he recalled.
