This guy really wants you to feel good

McGill club aims ‘to increase feel-good-ism and to lessen feel-bad-ism’

SARAH COLGROVE THE MCGILL DAILY (MCGILL UNIVERSITY)

MONTREAL (CUP) — Every Monday morning, Zak Miller gets out of bed and heads to Costco to buy bags of candy. He spends the rest of the day giving it away.

He has spent at least one rainy winter evening outside, alone, putting up posters for a Feel Good Day fundraiser that would allow him to keep buying candy. He devotes around 15 hours per week to sending out encouraging e-mails, refilling popcorn bowls, and handing out neon flyers with messages like “you’re beautiful,” all to make people feel good.

“That’s my life philosophy,” explained Miller, the Feel Good Day club’s president and a student at Montreal’s McGill University. “My outlook on life is to make people feel good, to make myself feel good, to increase feel-good-ism and to lessen feel-bad-ism.”

With a $500 grant from the Students’ Society of McGill University, Feel Good Day provided board games, free candy, cheap pizza, and indiscriminating accolades to anyone who wandered by on a Monday afternoon last semester. A few members of Feel Good Day also held events at nearby Concordia University and Dawson College, and delivered candy to local businesses.

According to Miller, the point is to reduce stress and give people a boost in self-esteem. Feel Good Day began as a campaign for McGill’s body-image awareness group Liberated Bodies two years ago, where he sought to address the root cause of eating disorders.

After a few successful events, Miller compiled a membership list and split off from Liberated Bodies to take on a broader, “more constructive,” and much vaguer agenda: increasing happiness.

“I don’t expect that someone will get this and it will change their selfesteem totally, but it will do a little bit, for that day, for that moment, even,” he said, adding that the agenda has shifted toward reducing stress and anxiety, and building a sense of community at a school where classes can have up to 600 students.

So far, Feel Good Day appears to be a success: the Facebook group boasts 222 members and people smile and hold on to the flyers telling them to “celebrate your uniqueness.”

But while it boasts an official membership of several hundred, has a core group of about 10 volunteers, and is garnering interest at Concordia and the University of Western Ontario, Feel Good Day is still mostly a oneperson show.

Miller sends the e-mails, sets up the events, buys what’s necessary, and donated his parents’ old ping-pong table to the event. He has even deferred graduating in order to give the club the momentum it will need to run itself when he is gone next year.

“I have to be at all the events all the time to make sure that things are going properly,” said Miller. “Other people help out, but they have to leave; they have other commitments.”

The success, explained vicepresident of fun Maris Kalnins, has depended on Miller’s enthusiasm and the help of core members and friends, since club membership is about “taking what you want.” Anyone can be a member of Feel Good Day in whatever way they see fit, and no one is required to attend regular meetings or perform specific tasks.

Both Miller and Kalnins denied having any vision of sweeping societal changes, but stressed that the club was just about increasing happiness.

“Community needs to be less focused on making money and high profits, and add a focus to promoting happiness, towards itself and bettering itself,” said Kalnins. “If you can make someone happy, make them feel better about themselves, they’re more likely to break apart and be confident.”