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Tal Ben-Shahar's Happier

Decent Essays

In his book “Happier”, Tal Ben-Shahar talks about what is happiness, and the significant components of a happy life form chapter one to chapter five. Firstly, He uses the championship event to explain that happiness is not just a simply thing. He won the contest, but the happiness did not last, and disappeared quickly. Therefore, he began to research, and to figure out what is happiness. Moreover, he discusses the people’s usual model for happiness. He also demonstrates the importance of pleasure and meaning for happiness as well as other factors such as quantity and quality. Furthermore, he calms that happiness is the ultimate currency for human by discussing the relationship between wealth and happiness. Lastly, he advises …show more content…

Ben-Shahar defines happiness as “the overall experience of pleasure and meaning” (33). It means that people obtain positive emotion from their action while they feel their life as purposeful. Simply, pleasure is the experience of positive emotion about the present benefit. Meaning which has the purpose about the future benefit comes from people’s action. But people have either pleasure or meaning is not enough for happiness. People consume ecstasy-inducing drugs or spend their free time lay down on the beach. They cannot get the happiness even though they experience positive emotions. Therefore, people’s action requires having both pleasure and meaning in order to reach the happiness …show more content…

People need to dig deeper, and to look for things they really want to do. “Have-tos” means that things are not self-concordant, and they are short of either meaning or pleasure or both. In contrast, “want-tos”, which is self-concordant goals, usually provide people with both meaning and pleasure. “Want-tos” and “have-tos” usually are mixture in people’s daily life. For example, Ben-Shahar said that he wants to teach, but he also has to spend time grading papers and exams. Even though people cannot avoid “have-tos”, they can reduce the ratio of “have-tos” as small as possible. To reduce the ratio of “have-tos”, people can record the activities—are both pleasure and meaningful—and select those activities which they really, really want to do. In addition, people make a four layers circle divided into four level—they are “can do”, “want to do”, “really want to do”, and “really, really want to do”. As a consequence, they will recognize the things make them have the most desire and

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