Mental Illness: A Summary And Analysis

When one regards his or her happiness, it is with little relationship to their actual emotional condition. When asked if happy, most people generally respond with what they think the listener wants to hear. There’s some outlying circumstance that makes it so that happiness is not in that moment. There is taxes to pay, cars have broken down,or slanderous things were spoken about a person. Attributing happiness to the impact of situations in one’s life is an unintelligent thought . Granted there may be a correlation, there is not a causation. There is a helpful cultural norm that it is an individual's fault if he or she is unhappy. In a place like the United States, where daily needs are usually met, there’s no true reason to be unhappy when …show more content…
we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we would not want to have, and they are deeply happy.” (Steindl-Rast) People with misfortune, who could be living in squalor, can be happier than a man in a penthouse who drives a Lamborghini Aventador. This is due to a matter of personal perspective and thus mindfulness. When faced with unsatisfactory things in life, one can still choose to be happy. “We cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement...we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity.” (David Steindl-Rast, …show more content…
The one constant with a meaningful life is happiness. Due to the meaning of life being an person’s own opinion, it can be well inferred that it is an individual's fault if he or she unhappy. Meaningful lives involve stress and challenges that test us. Yet just due to the fact that there is stress and challenges does not mean that we cannot be jubilant. If someone has and enjoyable but stressful job, they very well can be happy due to doing something they love, having a source of income, and presumably a form of housing to go home to at the end of the day. If that person is unhappy with their lives as a result of their job requirin too much, or their neighbours are loud then it is a choice to look at the negative in their life instead of the positive meaning their life has found. Their life has a meaning in that they go to work, help the community, go home and then help themselves and maybe their neighbors. Their work is their meaning and thus their happiness. Yet, even with meaning in their life people can be unhappy, and that is okay. Accepting sadness makes way for happiness to be even more convivial and realizing that happiness and sadness can