Emotions are key to understanding ourselves. They are a shortcut to the layers of our personality, they help us navigate through reality, and even fill the cognitive gap between our conscious and subconscious minds. Emotions can define our deportment entirely if we succumb to them, but it is possible to control them— by giving them a constructive direction instead. Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Gilbert, both highlight the importance and power of emotions. In both of their stories, they convey the fact that we are looking at love the wrong way. In Fredrickson’s Love 2.0, she claims that we should be extending our perspective of love to strangers. Gilbert’s Immune to Reality, on the other hand, acknowledges that we all have our own perspective
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Regardless of whether we were allowed, the main point is that we yearn(ed) for freedom. The rationale behind it is that, with freedom, there will be more choices presented to us and therefore we can find happiness in exploring these options. Take the American dream, for instance, people from all over the world came to America in hopes of exploring the vast amount of opportunities available. But, according to Gilbert, what people fail to realize is that more is not always better. In being confronted by so many possibilities, people oftentimes choose the wrong path and may even come to hate its outcome. For example, in a study done with college students enrolled in a photography class, it was shown that students who were forced to choose one picture to keep forever were much happier than those who were given the choice to swap their picture for another. Simply, according to Gilbert, more possibilities lead to self-doubt and lowered expectations. It is the “what ifs” and “could have beens” that ultimately lead to our downfall. On the contrast, Fredrickson claims that more possibilities lead to happiness and improved social skills. She writes that “just as our is designed to extract oxygen from Earth’s atmosphere, our body is designed to love” (Fredrickson 105). In other words, happiness is something that comes to us naturally. We do not need to venture far to obtain it. In Love 2.0, Fredrickson indirectly hints at the fact that we have all this freedom around us, and we are not taking advantage of it. Love can supposedly be obtained all the time, all we need to do is initiate simple connections with people such as, “sharing a smile, laugh, or even a common passion” (Fredrickson 113). It is ultimately up to the person to make use of this freedom, but relating back to Gilbert’s claim, we are ultimately happier with less
Regardless of whether we were allowed, the main point is that we yearn(ed) for freedom. The rationale behind it is that, with freedom, there will be more choices presented to us and therefore we can find happiness in exploring these options. Take the American dream, for instance, people from all over the world came to America in hopes of exploring the vast amount of opportunities available. But, according to Gilbert, what people fail to realize is that more is not always better. In being confronted by so many possibilities, people oftentimes choose the wrong path and may even come to hate its outcome. For example, in a study done with college students enrolled in a photography class, it was shown that students who were forced to choose one picture to keep forever were much happier than those who were given the choice to swap their picture for another. Simply, according to Gilbert, more possibilities lead to self-doubt and lowered expectations. It is the “what ifs” and “could have beens” that ultimately lead to our downfall. On the contrast, Fredrickson claims that more possibilities lead to happiness and improved social skills. She writes that “just as our is designed to extract oxygen from Earth’s atmosphere, our body is designed to love” (Fredrickson 105). In other words, happiness is something that comes to us naturally. We do not need to venture far to obtain it. In Love 2.0, Fredrickson indirectly hints at the fact that we have all this freedom around us, and we are not taking advantage of it. Love can supposedly be obtained all the time, all we need to do is initiate simple connections with people such as, “sharing a smile, laugh, or even a common passion” (Fredrickson 113). It is ultimately up to the person to make use of this freedom, but relating back to Gilbert’s claim, we are ultimately happier with less