Notes On ' Life ' Greatest Treasure '

Hedonism is the belief that pleasure is the most important thing in life and everything else is trivial as long as you are getting pleasure, the goal being to accumulate the greatest amount of net pleasure in ones lifetime. I disagree with the thought that hedonism is the correct view of well-being for people. Life is more than breaking down acts into something as simple as level of pleasure and then determining happiness off of that. By examining Nozick’s experience machine, Issues on morality, and the paradox of pursuing happiness. We will see there are many flaws with this way of thinking leading it to be a poor choice for the well-being of mankind.

The filmmakers really amplified the idea that everyone can become happier. They filmed people from many different cultures around the world, to show that there are no barriers for being happy. Rather than starting the film with an interview from an average American, Happy began with an Indian rickshaw driver sharing his daily lifestyle. Although it may have seemed like a hard, tiring, and anticlimactic lifestyle to the audience, he was happy. The narrator reports, “Research shows that he was as happy as the average American.” This may seem unrealistic for the audience at first, considering the audience is still discovering this principle that happiness is diverse for other individuals. Especially for an audience member who finds that a majority of their happiness is related with money, this moment in the film may have not been easy for them to comprehend. This part of the film really amplifies the main claim from the director that happiness is mainly influenced by our ecology. The Indian rickshaw driver found most of his happiness when he came home, and interacted with his son. The idea of ecology has a lot to with the social interaction between individuals of the same species, in this case, it was the interaction between the rickshaw driver and his son. Not only did the interaction with his son brighten his mood, but his interaction with his neighbors also brought him to be happy.

This myth is the idea that the more positive and pleasurable things in our life, the happier we will be. Also, that with lots of money comes happiness. Ed Diener and Martin Seligman studied two-hundred graduates in order to compare their happiness levels. The most happy individuals did not experience a greater number of positive events than the least happy people. Another study over a group of employed women found that positive life events did not have much correlation with their happiness. Their amount of sleep and proneness to depression had a major impact on their happiness, though. Research also supports the hedonic treadmill, which is a hypothesis that our moods adjust to life events like our legs adjust to the speed of a treadmill. This

Have you ever been through something very stressful or upsetting that made you want to give up? In the song Complicated and the poem The Treasure of Life, they both tell a story about going through things and what was needed/done to resolve the problem(s). Life is full of ups and downs and that is exactly what these two pieces are about.

I was able to relate to the idea of these things causing happiness more so than the idea that living a just life causes happiness, due to the fact that I do not approach questions such as these in my daily life with a philosophical mindset—if I was an interviewee as opposed to the interviewer, I probably would have given a simplistic, somewhat shallow answer as well.

Awash in happiness, a life devoid of strife, where every endeavor is enjoyable and whose achievement is the highest order of pleasures with no quarter for pain. According to hedonism, this would be the perfect state of well-being and who, at the face of it, could disagree with them? Many have, not so much with the utopia presented but with hedonism's terms for such a perfected welfare. Perhaps the most famous of these detractors was Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick when he took this concept of an idealized life and put it in a box with his thought experiment, The Experience Machine. However, given a description of hedonism and Nozick’s compellingly illustrative refutation, an apparent ‘out’ for the hedonist can be found.

Haybron defines hedonism as ‘Happiness, so constructed, reduces completely to a subject’s balance of pleasure over displeasure. Happiness is merely the condition of having a favorable balance of pleasure over displeasure.’ This suggests that in order for humans to remain in a favorable state of mind, they simply must have a larger amount of pleasure than displeasure in their lives. Happiness is therefore a purely episodic experiential state. This sort of shallow, fleeting happiness still exists, for example

The term "hedonic treadmill" was first coined in 1971 by Brickman and Campbell to describe the now widely accepted notion that though people continue to collect experiences and objects that cause them happiness, or unhappiness, their general level of well-being tends to remain consistently stagnant (Diener 306). The logic behind this argument stems from Adaptation Level theory created by Helson, a renowned psychologist, in 1964, which argues that people don't perceive objects

34) Taken altogether, would you say that you are happy, pretty happy or not too happy? (GSS code: HAPPY)

“approach desired end states and avoid undesired end states,” which are phrases that explain the hedonic

Opinions are what keep life interesting. With everyone’s thoughts about logic and what is ethical, it is the differences that keep us individual and important to society. Wolfe makes a point about humanity and an individual’s importance in society in his work, The Death of Dr. Island (2009).

As mentioned before, Hedonic adaptation is also called the Hedonic Treadmill due to its comparison to a treadmill. Like a treadmill, to maintain Hedonic Adaptation a person must keep working in order to maintain a his or her set point level of happiness. This comparison was first said by Brickman and Campbell in an article in 1971. In order to use a treadmill, a person must keep a constant speed to his or her stride. This is very similar to how Hedonic adaptation relates to a person 's life. The person must keep a set level of happiness to continue to survive and not fall on their face, like on a treadmill. Other psychologists have compared the mechanism to a thermostat, thus claiming it has the ability to always be constantly changing, like temperature. The comparison shows that happiness has an average level, like temperature, but also has the ability to rise and fall. Further

In life, we all desire to seek after the things that bring us true pleasure. Whether it’s playing a sport, watching a movie, or making a family dinner. However, the majority of us actually spend less time doing the things that bring us satisfaction and spend more time working endlessly to be stable and secure. When you think about it, most of us Americans are well fed, surrounded by our friends and family, and all of our “needs” that is, the things we need to stay alive are always provided. Yet Americans rank among the lowest compared to other industrialized nations on the happiness index. People often associate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of money when actually, our financial circumstances play a minor role in our happiness while our heredity and our intentional activity accounts for 90% of our happiness. After watching this documentary I had to know whether or not this was true. Is there more to life then seeking wealth? Does money and happiness really go hand in hand? I believe that we should never accept anything as truth until we have done enough extensive research on the subject; with that said, after researching outside sources I side with the Documentary, Happy, and it’s exploitation of the falsehood motto: the American Dream. Money does not bring us complete and true happiness.

“Worldly fame, power, and money are all great values in life; but the greatest value of all, in life, is love.” Christian muse’s to himself as he walks down the stairway of the San Francisco airport terminal. He makes his way to the taxi ward for a ride to the Sunshine cruise liner. It will be en route from San Francisco, California to Honolulu, Hawaii. It will pass through vast seas, emerald tropical islands, and reflect the beauty of the ocean life. For all this Christian will walk down its planks, as liken unto a rich man. In reality, he is a low class, paycheck to paycheck, average built, tall, just maybe over six foot, dark-haired, ordinary, country guy. He would have likely never done this, had it not been for her. Rose is the tall, slim, beautiful Thai girl that came into his life and finally, can take her hand, as they walk their way to this Pacific honeymoon. Unknown to Christian and Rose, this voyage is will bring them the adventure, Golden Ties, and love of their lifetime.

The national broadcast network of China has once produced a popular TV show, "Are You Happy?", More than 3500 people were interviewed by answering the question, from garbage collectors to public servants to Nobel winner, the 90% of the respondents which claimed by the produced said they were "happy" (Chinadaily, 2014), and the result may sound too good to be true. According to another official survey conducted across 24 cities in 2010 had showed that 75% of Chinese urban resident felt either "fairly happy" or "very happy" (Xiangwei, 2015). Why the Chinese feel so happy? One of the reasons were concluded by the Chinese researchers in the national survey claimed the Chinese salaries increased from a low base (Chinadaily, 2014), people feel happier as they made more money; the report from Financial Times also suggested that average incomes of Chinese have more than tripled over the past decade (Docin, 2015). Here comes the question, there is a tendency of the society is in an atmosphere of chasing wealth, money comes first, which directly or indirectly caused a serious of severe issues, the corruption, the food safety, the moral crisis and so on, the worst of all, people seems to be accustomed to the Scandals over pork disguised as beef, recycled waste cooking oil and other demoralization acts which have made headlines. The issues described above raised several questions about which the author curious. This essay will help me to understand those queries around me according to