Happiness And Its Effect On Our Nation 's Declaration Of The Holiday Season

Happiness is a state of existence that Americans have perused since the founding of this great country. It’s such an important part of American life that “The pursuit of Happiness” is even “laid out in our nation’s Declaration of Independence” (McMahon 783). Happiness is something that may come from many aspects of life: one’s children, employment, financial wellbeing, sports, hobbies, and many other things. Ruth Whippman tells us that "Americans as a whole invest more time and money and emotional energy in the explicit pursuit of happiness than any other nation on earth". Are Americans happier today than they were three centuries ago? Does modern technology, social economic status, religious freedoms, and/or the

In her article “How Happy Are You and Why?,” Sonja Lyubomirsky argues that people have control over their own happiness. Lyubomirsky supports her claims with her interviews with happy people and scientific studies. Her purpose is to consider steps that people can take in order to become happier. She establishes an informal relationship with her audience of unhappy people.

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.

Senior compares what people think about people in other states and locations happiness, finding that usually these comparisons are untrue. Different studies and polls found that the Swiss and Canadians rank themselves among the happiest, while the Japanese are less happy. European countries tend to rank themselves the least happy, with Russia coming in last. Is happiness really based on location? I find that just because people don’t like the snowy weather doesn’t mean that they are unhappy during the holiday season. Families seem to come together and rejoice in each other’s company during this bad weather season. “And no matter where they live, human beings are terrible predictors of what will make them happy” (426). Senior discusses how we fill in the gaps, where we tend to remember only happy events and feelings and phase out bad ones. She discuss how our imaginations work in rationalizing situations and feelings, setting ourselves up for big disappointments, but deal with the successfully at the

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” (Lyubomirsky, 194). There are certain things in life that are uncontrollable and there is nothing anyone can do to change that, however there is a handful of things that are by choice. In her essay, How Happy Are You and Why?, Sonja Lyubomirsky proposes that everyone has a “genetically determined predisposition for happiness (or unhappiness) accounts for the differences between” each person (186). Lyubomirsky theorizes that everyone has a “set point” that is predetermined by genetics which represents the level of happiness a person experiences. In an attempt to offer people a way to gauge their own “set point,” she suggests a questionnaire that she has created to determine this number. The problem with this theory is that the questionnaire is subjective and reliant on circumstances. Her argument is problematic because she does not account for both happiness and

Begley argues that although everyone’s goal in life is to be happy, “too much happiness might not be such a good thing” (555). Begley believes that happiness is overrated and the media is forcing people to be happy against their will. For example, the media forces people to be happy against their will by advertising their self-help books, magazine articles and motivational speakers. The media also promotes the pharmaceutical companies that claim they are “working on a new drug to make [people] happier” (556). Begley also states that research has concluded “that being happier is not always better” and “the

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.

Discuss the way this statement reflects one or more texts you have seen or read this year.

Even if we use the word “happiness” on daily basis, has anyone ever tried to define it? It’s harder than it seems. When do you feel happy? How is it when you feel happy? Is there any way to understand how much happiness to you experience? This is the main hypothesis of this paper – Can happiness or wellbeing be measured? And if it can be measured, how do we measure it? Happiness is feeling pleasure and enjoyment because of your life, situation (Meriam Webster). Pleasure and enjoyment are very subjective and means different things to different people. This is where the term subjective wellbeing comes from. There are a lot of things that can be included when measuring wellbeing. Various studies have been conducted to assess wellbeing and how does it affect other factors. For example Earlstin(1995) and later on Ferrer-i-Carbonell(2005) have examined the relationship between income and happiness. Gruber(2004) studies the relationship cigarette taxation and happier smokers. Richard, Clark, Gerogellis and Diener(2004) analyze the effect of unemployment on wellbeing.

I started to question about happiness in America after I saw a pattern in high school that students are often confused or stressed. I started out with the question, “why is it hard to be happy when being happy shouldn’t be that hard?” To answer these questions, I found Sophie Chan’s 2011 study, “Hong Kong Chinese community leaders’ perspectives on family health, happiness and harmony: a qualitative study.” This study would help answer questions on my audience’s curiosity about other countries happiness compared to the United States. Then I started to think that there were also other issues that friction with happiness in America and

The United States experienced a decrease in the unemployment rate and a decline in the misery index. However, individuals did not experience an increase in happiness like they should’ve based on the concept of the misery index. The article successfully retells the history of

al. 2008). The second is that positive expectations would increase happiness, which their results supported. The strengths of the study include the relatively large sample size and the fact that they controlled for age, gender, prior happiness, family income, and physical health (Holahan et al.’s 2008). However, the limitations were that they did not themselves collect the data, and although they did control for many variables, their sample itself is heavily skewed toward wealthier, intelligent, healthier, in a good socioeconomic status, and generally European-descendent so these results cannot be applied to the larger portion of humanity.

As human beings, we all have the capability of experiencing emotions and feelings. People can experience happiness,

Psychologists have not located assured causes that lead people to well-being. David G. Myers in his article “The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People” published in the American Psychologist (2000) and Michael Wiederman in “Why It's So Hard to Be Happy” published in the Scientific American Mind (2007), discuss the reasons which lead people to be happy, and the factors which contribute to unhappiness.

As regards its empirical strategy, the paper follows the general idea of the Blanchflower and Oswald (2004) study which assumes that there exists a generalized reported well-being function: