Emily Smith's Article 'There's More To Life Than Being Happy'

Emily Smith is author of Atlantic website, she published the article ‘There’s more to life than being happy’ in January 9, 2013. Her points of the article argue different perspective of happiness, her claim “Meaning comes from the pursuit of more complex things than happiness” (Emily Smith, 2013) suggests live in a meaningful life is what human beings should pursue rather than being happy. Author builds her credibility by proposing logos of many psychologists, revealing an ethos of human character, and using analogy to compare life between meaningful and happy. Emily Smith’s article became effective because it is not only insisting the facts of meaningful life, but also persuades readers with strong credibility from many famous psychologists …show more content…
Happy life and meaningful life can be related, people will question the author’s claim ‘There’s more to life than being happy’ like “If one is being happy, then isn’t it better life?” and author answers the question with compare between a happy life and meaningful life, that a meaningful life is what define true of yourself and happy life is just the sudden feeling of being fulfilled. Also Emily used several psychologists’ research about the differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. Live a meaningful life is human’s uniqueness; “Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy” (Emily Smith, 2013). The point is since human possessed the uniqueness, then we should pursue more of it. Another difference is while happiness brings fulfilling, meaningful life can be unsatisfying and suffering, but it reveals true potentiality of human beings. The analogy between a happy life and meaningful life is very effective because readers can misunderstand and not clear about the message in the article, but the author pointed out what she is going to tell so readers can easily track the