Role Of Happiness In John Ciardi's Essay

Superior Essays
Happiness. We can’t trade or sell it. So why does everyone seek happiness? In today’s society many will go to extremes to reach this state of being. Happiness is not tangible, so how would anyone know if they possess happiness? If you were to ask 100 people what makes them happy, you would get 100 different answers. We all see happiness in many unique ways. Happiness, according to the dictionary, is a feeling of pure bliss that comes from your soul. If it’s just a feeling, how can we achieve this warm and tingling feeling everyone sees to talk about? Scientist would respond that happiness involves chemical process in the brain that makes you happy. Others would say that money is driving factor that makes us happy. So how do we know we have happiness? How do we achieve happiness? …show more content…
We all have different false views of happiness. These illusions are influenced by American commercialism. Ciardi believes media makes us believe we need materialistic things in order to be happy has tricked us. It is rare not to want something due to the fact that throughout all our lives we have been told that we need these items to be happy. Our country 's constitution has inscribed in the document that we have the right to pursue happiness. So as a human we must try to reach happiness. Therefore, the easiest way to achieve happiness is to buy it. Women 's magazines especially, are ads that provide false illusions of happiness. Ciardi describes, “Advertising begins as poetry and ends as pharmacopeia”. However, it seems we cannot get enough. Once we get that one item that made us believe we would be completely happy, we wind up wanting something else. So it seems that we can only get a glimpse of happiness and then it’s gone. Ciardi says “happiness is never more than partial”. There are never pure states of happiness with materialistic

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