Happiness is a phenomenon that encompasses a person’s inner and outer feelings that affect the society as a whole from day to day. The idea of happiness in America is that it can be measured by a person’s income, success, and assets. Others measure happiness as the love that they receive from others, the environment, and their inner day to day emotional state. Happiness can intensify a person’s inner feelings and positively translate those feelings to a counterpart, which can lead to societal success. This would lead to a influx in productivity for employers, because verbal and non verbal communication affects the manner in which their employees do their jobs.…
Happiness, expressed in an everyday sense, is a mental or a psychological state of being sound and well defined by positive energy or joy. One may feel happy in a different manner, and due to a different reason than another. For example, one may be happy to win a million dollar lottery, whereas another may be happy to just to be alive. It is subjective when it comes to interpreting happiness as it differs with every individual. As a matter of fact, happiness compels an individual to embrace their passion and do what they truly believe in.…
Happiness is a word that is seen in a multitude of different ways by a multitude of different people. Everyone has their own idea of what happiness means to them, but it is a word that has no set definition. The author of “Happiness and Its Discontents”, Daniel Haybron views happiness as an entire emotional spectrum that is affected by several factors such as life satisfaction and being exposed to both pain and pleasure. Whereas Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener the authors of “Can Money Buy Happiness”, describe happiness as the emotion someone feels when they obtain an object they believe will improve their life and can be acquired within their means. An example of this would be the joy someone might feel when they are able to buy a car…
In the article, Happiness of Pursuit, Jeffrey Kluger discusses America’s ongoing strife with happiness. Kluger states that it is common for American’s to be ambitious in their pursuit of happiness. Unsure of the cause, Kluger explores different plausible reasons that could be attributable to the desire of happiness. Kluger's analysis ranges from influences of socioeconomic background, social media and genetic predisposition. He provides three different research methods: 1) surveys 2) experiments 3) naturalistic observation.…
As humans, we often assume that our sole purpose in life is to be happy at all times. Consequently narratives such as our physiological system, experience and culture systems on have taken advantage of this assumption and marketed happiness to vulnerable people who desire to attain happiness. In the article, “Immune to Reality” by Daniel Gilbert, the author discusses with the readers how our psychological system markets positive thoughts during negative situations in order to make us happy. Also, Evan Watters, the author of “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” explores how pharmaceutical companies market happiness through the sale of pills in Japan.…
What comes to mind when people think of the word happiness? Is it community, materials, wealth? In our society we define happiness as having all the money and materialistic things that the heart desire. Our society bases happiness of having more things instead of spending time on family and community. Arthur Brooks wrote an article titled “Love People Not Pleasure”, in this article he explained that our society focuses on our extrinsic goals like financial and material success, instead of focusing on intrinsic goals like community and family.…
Author of Against Happiness, Eric Wilson, tested “books on how to become happier,” to see if they work (Begley 454). He tried to wear a smile, took up jogging, watched uplifting television shows, and began using “great” and “wonderful” in his conversations. However, none of these things made him happy. Wilson argues that the happiness movement “‘leads to halflives, to bland existences,’” (Begley 455).…
Andrew Guest writes an article about “Pursuing the Science of Happiness” where he leads to answer that same question while analyzing the consumerist culture in which we live in today. While these texts come from different backgrounds and contexts, the overarching theme of happiness being searched through consumerism is present and brings them together. Andrew Guest focuses on the question “what it means to be happy” and explores the pursuit of happiness in an interesting and complex perspective. Having studied the social science of being happy, and undergoing in-depth research on that exact subject, he states that being happy is much more complicated than it sounds. With his first theory on “positive psychology”, he explains the scientific research done by Martin Seligman on how “psychology and maybe psychiatry will increase the tonnage of happiness in the world.…
What is happiness? You can ask this question to a thousand people, and you’ll get a thousand answer . These answers are usually versions of one another, tweaked ever so slightly to custom fit to our own personal lives and experiences. That’s the thing, there is no one definition of happiness, no key, no shortcut, no one ultimate explanation, everyone has their own adaptation. “Happiness is not having any expectations.”…
One Important standard for living is being able to be happy. Happiness can be found in many different types of forms. It can be found with the purchasing of specific objects that can improve our living styles, it can be found with someone else that we communicate with, or it can be achieved by doing actions that we choose to do. The latter is the more imperative of the designs of happiness. Happiness is a thing that everyone is striving for.…
My take on happiness deals more with perspective and the basic goods. Meaning, we live in a world where approximately 3.1 million children die from hunger each year (worldhunger.org). The simple fact that my myself and family do not have to worry about where our next meal is coming from is a blessing which keeps me happy. Therefore, knowing that I’m in a good place in the world and knowing that I have the basic things to survive like food, water, and shelter, keep me happy. One could say that I was lucky to have been born in a country that offers so much.…
Summary and Reaction to ‘There’s More to Life Than Being Happy’ Emily Esfahani Smith’s article ‘There’s More to Life Than Being Happy’ (The Atlantic: June 2013) discusses the ideas in a book written by Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist who was a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl concludes that camp prisoners who had found meaning in their life were more satisfied and therefore more likely to survive. Those that had merely been happy in life found it harder to keep a good morale and were less likely to survive. Smith goes on to cite many different sources that give statistics as to how more and more Americans are finding happiness in their lives, but no true meaning.…
Happiness, a form of wellness that comes from within the soul, an expression of gratitude, kindness and a form of close relationships that form around a static drive for happiness. The American dream, being able to achieve your goals and live in prosperity, to render a greater level of happiness. The wealthy is recognized by a majority of people at the moment of time as delighted and stress-free. Yet the statistics the film provides disproves this hypothesis and presents evidence, from non-wealthy individuals, that they have all their needs from close friends,family support, and activities that involve physical exercise. Each interviewed individual enlightened the idea of happiness by concluding that close family relationships and social gatherings…
Personally i find happiness in playing basketball, writing poetry, and cooking, which I know will be different than the next person. In a song by Kid Cudi called the “Pursuit of Happiness” he describes how he was searching for happiness and says, “Everything that shines ain’t always going to be gold”. (Kid Cudi) He is describing how he wants to be happy so he tried to get it from spending money and buying shiny expensive items, but he learned that the happiness he seeks can’t come from expensive things. He even goes on to display that he has been smoking Marijuana to achieve happiness, but he has a feeling that his happiness needs to come from another source to be true happiness not a forced version.…
Happiness What is happiness? There can be many different definitions of the word happiness. My definition of happiness is when you have a good emotion towards something. To be happy you need to work hard to get to where you want to be.…