Happiness Revisited Summary

I read your essay about how you lost your happiness when you first came to the United States. I read it with my eyes wide open because I could connect the feelings I had when I came to U.S. I would like to get more details about your family. Did they feel the same as you? I think your main point is to show how meaningful relationships give you happiness. I like your decision that finally you learn how to blend to the society and you get your happiness back.

The film The Pursuit of Happyness is a biography based on the life of Chris Gardner, who is played by the actor Will Smith. Will Smith portrays a hardworking father who is struggling to sale bone-density scanners to the local hospitals, while trying to make ends meet for his family. After his wife leaves, he is left to raise his 5-year-old son Christopher alone. Making it clear to those around him, it is obvious that he is among the working poor class and cannot meet the basic human needs (absolute), he can barely pay bills to keep his home, can hardly provide food, and has a rough time being able to keep his son in daycare. Being a part of the working poor class means that you have little power, income and prestige. There were many sociological

Lazy fall days, colorful leaves, cooler weather, birds singing, frogs croaking, crickets chirping, relaxing to the sounds of the outdoors. Waves of water crashing upon each other, fishing, telling stories around a campfire, making s’mores, memories with family and friends; this is what happiness is to me. Happiness is in the eye of the beholder, what brings happiness to one person may not bring happiness to another person. When I think of the word happiness, I think of descriptive words like Contentment, enjoyment, satisfaction, delightfulness, something that makes a person smile. I have always looked at the word happiness as a feeling, an action, never have I thought of happiness as an overall affect. However, it is a proven fact, that happiness can affect the over-all health and longevity of human life. Happy people live longer than those that are lonely, stressed, or depressed.

Mahatma Gandhi one defined happiness as “when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Barring any better definition of happiness from either positive psychologists, self-help gurus, or any other academic source, I tend to think this is a great summation of the definition of happiness. Gandhi doesn’t say anything about how these things make you feel, rather looks at it from a point of view of harmony between thoughts, expressions, and actions. Since one single accepted definition of happiness doesn’t seem to exist, and happiness is different for everyone, this begs the question; how can you increase your own personal level of happiness?

Is there possible proof or evidence of where happiness comes from?Ask yourself am I able to be happy?For starters, we're often told that happiness is an up temporary illusion and what we tend to let ourselves believe, based off of past experiences in our life.It’s clear that happiness in not a dream but a feeling of emotion.If you think about points, you’ve had z that has been happy moments you have no realize that you have been happy with parts of your life.

In the Eating Chapter of The Happiness Myth by Jennifer Hecht, she quotes the Ms. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book of 1883. She introduces the site by describing the happiness that comes from a mother’s home cooked bread and uses the topic of baking in order to ease into the quote. Hecht quotes the phrase,“Nothing in the whole range of domestic life more affects the health and happiness of the family than the quality of its daily bread.” In response, she says, “what an extraordinary and bizarre claim.” (Hecht 186). Also, how she believes that households today do not depend their happiness and health on how good their bread is, contradicting the quote.

What is Happiness? Well, In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (great book by the way), the people that lived in this dystopian world, called World State, had a motto/goal that they believed that it provided them happiness; “Community, Identity, and Stability.” Which basically meant that you have no individuality, so that your community has stability. In addition to that, all they did was have sex and drugs which made them oblivious to how their “perfect” society is not so perfect. They also scientifically altered how humans reproduced, so instead of being born from the womb, people were being “born” from tubes, and in those tubes, they prepare you for the job or role you will be forced to do for the rest of your life. The best part? They use

Happiness is the one thing we all seek unfortunately not everyone finds. In A Brave New World the author, Aldous Huxley, uses two different types of characters to portray someone as happy and someone who is not. The State uses different forms of Soma, technology, and everything but the truth to make their citizens “happy”. This book does suggest that happiness is all that really matters in life and that you should seek happiness in your own way and not through someone else.

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.

In Steven Donoso’s essay Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness, Ekhart Tolle makes his views concerning how individuals attempt to establish and define their personality clear. He constantly emphasizes the points that “life and Now are one” (6) and that “we live in a world of mental abstraction, conceptualization, and image making – a world of thought” (6). Essentially, what Tolle states is that one usually do not have much say in who they are or who they are becoming, people are merely conditioned by external forces such as family and the past, society, technology, and religion to think the way they do and unless they can see the conditioning in themselves they will be unable to get free of it. According to Tolle, one of the biggest influences that help to define who we are is our family.

Immediately, Lewis expand his answer “they meant to pursue happiness by all lawful means” (229). Lewis proclaim on marriage’s happiness once you get marriage you are not enabled to pursues happiness with someone else. Your happiness should derive from you partner. In the same way, Lewis describe on the book, “Mr. A.’s “right” to desert his wife is one of “sexual morality” (230). On the other hand, Lama claim that sex only brings pleasure not full happiness because is only for a moment and later is gone.

The book I read was The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. This book was published by HarperCollins Publishers in the year of 2010. It is a non-fiction book that contains 320 pages. This book was about a woman who decided she wanted to increase her happiness. She set resolutions for each month that she thought would help her to achieve happiness and better her mental/emotional, social, and physical health.

What is being happy actually like? With the money, school, work, friends, family, etc. issues, how is it possible to become fully happy if there is always something that could be interfering with it? We live in America that promises us to to be all equal and can experience the “life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But every news show that’s turned on, we hear about a 13 year old “entertaining” child who’s trending on every social media network about her disrespecting her mother more often than the issue on two American adults making terrorist threats and waving a confederate flag at a black child’s birthday party. We Americans get the free education until we graduate to find out that we actually don’t know what

The person’s genetics and childhood or the person’s family and culture are things that influence a person’s happiness. Happiness is a mindset that is created by a person’s surroundings and their origins.

When you hear the word happiness, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Do you think of material possessions like designer clothes and accessories, the newest iPhone with the highest possible storage capacity, or a shiny red supercar? Do you think the amount of money you have or your current financial status has an effect on how happy you are? Plenty of college students, myself included, would associate happiness with possessing items like these or just having a lot of money in general. In today’s society, one common belief about social class is that the richer and more money or things that one has, the happier this will make them. This belief is reinforced by countless advertisements we see and hear everywhere, whether that be on