Chris Gardner's Ethos In The Pursuit Of Happyness

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As you know these words come from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps one of the greatest documents ever written. However, I do have a little problem with the last four words sentence, “the pursuit of Happiness” because I believe it actually sends an easily misinterpreted message.

The society’s happiness is very artificial and many pretend to be joyful. The way they express happiness is very synthetic and fake. Montag expresses his feelings like

As human beings we are naturally wired to seek happiness wherever we can find it. When we don’t, we may enter a stage of anger, anxiety, or distress. That’s why it is our personal goal to look for happiness and preserve it once we acquire it. Many have explored ways to find what triggers this feeling of “happiness” and what we can do to keep it; nonetheless, the evidence found is hardly sufficient to make a public statement on how to find happiness. For this reason, most of the time we speculate what might provoke this feeling of contentment. “Happiness is a glass half empty,” an essay written by Oliver Burkeman, highlights the importance of happiness and discloses how we can find delight through unorthodox methods. The prime objective of this piece of writing is to inform the audience about the effect of happiness on their lives and how their usual attempts of becoming happier can sabotage achieving this feeling. Furthermore, he wants to promote the benefits of pessimism and describe how it can help us in the long run. The author utilizes pronouns, logos, and pathos in order to prove his point and draw the audience into his essay, in an attempt of making them reconsider the way they live their lives and adopt this new pessimistic way that would greatly boost their level of happiness.

Within The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, he mentions that there are two ancient truths concerning how the mind works. The first truth is the foundational idea of the book: the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict with each other. The second truth is Shakespeare’s idea about how “thinking makes it so.” (or, as Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.”) Like a rider, on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the cause of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work as a better team. We can improve this ancient idea today by explaining why most people’s minds have a bias toward seeing threats and engaging in useless worry. To change this bias, we can use three techniques to increase happiness, one ancient, and two very new.

The theme that one cannot have happiness without pain is expressed with the literary elements foreshadowing, symbolism, and imagery in

In the essay, the author appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos very well. Although she

Have you ever truly sat and considered what makes you truly happy? Often times, people answer directly with the response of money. We say this without deeply considering all that we have to be grateful for. Happiness is not achieved through wealth instead through experiences, the family we love, and the nature that surrounds us, literature has created a great impact upon the ideals we consider to create our happiness.

Sacrificed the truth, beauty and the right to think, happiness and comfort is just indulgent, it is the discomfort brought by the misery, responsibility and the bonding give us the weight of life. The world is full of people who try hard to gain happiness, and we all have at least one time the idea of living in a perfect world, a world without pain, without misery, without getting old and without cancers. We always ignored the importance and the beauty of uncomfortableness, just as a quote in this book said, “Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand”. After read this book, I started to be more objective at those bad things I used to hate, to understand the significance of art and to be grateful to this imperfect world we are

In order to be happy, people must have a purpose in life. This theme is demonstrated through both symbolism and mood in the passages “Andy Lovell” by T.S. Arthur and “The Song of the Old Mother” by William Butler Yeats. Through these literary devices, the authors show that by not following your passion, you will eventually become miserable. Because of their powerful words, the reader gets a firm grasp on the importance of objectives in life.

Happiness is a person who experience positive emotions, share and received love, someone who is always laughs and has a smile on his face. Not all the people has the pleasure of having those feelings. Can be hard in life finding happiness when people around, are not happy either in life. In the book “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer deals about Chris McCandless who had a long life to live but, dies in the wild pursuing his happiness. Christopher Johnson McCandless come from a wealthy family and a brilliant man with perfect grades. He had everything in life, but he was not happy at all so, he decides to leave everything behind and start on a journey. Even though he did not went into the right path to reach his happiness, at the end he died for consuming the wrong seeds to survive in the wild. Jon Krakauer identify a lot with Chris McCandless’s life that he decided to write a book about Chris’s life. Joh Krakauer applies into the book the rhetorical situation and rhetorical appeals.

Eighner wants to send his readers a message how people are able to live by the minimum resources being happy. People who try to find happiness in “material

The short story, “The Happy Man” by Naguib Mahfouz, discusses the human condition, presenting existentialism as its central theme. Specifically, the story seeks to illustrate unhappiness of the common man and the effect it has on his life. It is an allegorical piece, in which the unnamed protagonist showcases the state of the human as unhappy; only scarcely finding joy. Indeed, the euphoric feeling the protagonist feels is contrary to what he usually feels and has adverse effects on his lifestyle. Mahfouz uses happiness to show that people are intrinsically unhappy as the protagonist ultimately seeks to remove his euphoria. He

Another clear example that uses a connection between visuals and the text to illustrate that working a job merely for the money will not provide happiness is Beryl Simpson’s interview about being an airline reservationist. Beryl Simpson “hated it with a passion getting sick in the morning, going to work feeling ‘OH MY GOD! I’ve got to go to work’” (122). A visual shows her struggle of trying to get out of bed to go to a job that she hates. Her face looks wrinkled, worn down, and depressed (122). Beryl admits that when she was working for the airline she had a high status and “was always introduced as Beryl Simpson who works for the airline” (124). However this high status did not provide her with happiness. She felt as if she was a computer when she went to work and had no free-will. This repetitive work that she hated wore away at her, and even though it provided her with a salary and high status, she was not genuinely happy.

In The Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt talks about how our brains work and how best to find happiness with the different ways it works. Haidt describes the different ways a positive and negative person’s brain works and how each can find happiness through various and different methods. He also discusses different aspects of society that can affect our level of happiness. All of these things can be considered to find the best way to raise your level of happiness.

Not even me!” in an attempt to make his son believe he can become whatever he wants. The scene captures the intensity of emotions within Chris.