Can Being Unhappy Be A Good Thing Analysis

Can Being “Unhappy” be a Good Thing?

In Tobias Wolff’s we follow the stories of people who choose to surrender to their unhappy circumstances and all they can do is hope things change without them actually putting work into it (Wolff). Wolff’s work triggers the question, “can being unhappy be a good thing?” Every individual has a desire to achieve a state of happiness. From a very young age, young boys and girls are told to work hard in school if they want to eventually live a happy life, without contextualizing that happiness is an abstract concept. We live in a world that everyone is in are selling all sort of products and services that supposedly provide happines because thery are looking for a way to pursuit happiness. After reading the

all the things that are considered to be the opposite of happiness. In both articles, one thing is clear, when one person goes through trying time, they will gain deeper cognition when he face this kind of situation next time, they are able to face future challenges with more wisdom and they are more likely to go through it easier. Brooks gives the example of when someone fell into the rock bottom and once they get there they discover another layer of themselves they didn’t know was there. I strongly believe that only through profound suffering or challenge that one is able to truly know themselves. That argument is similary to Oxfords argument when he is comparing Human Resource Happiness and High Performance Happiness. When one works hard and sacrifices for the benefit of the organization they work for and not for their own recognition by superiors, they get to become aware of their true worth. It is very easy for one to seek quick gratification by getting acknowledgment for negligible effort but it would be more satisfying to get recognition without looking for it after going beyond the call of

As mentioned before, happiness is relative and what one person may think makes them happy might not be the same thought. However, a lot of negativity has surrounded the idea of suffering or going through hard times. People associate it with bad lack, and presume that suffering is a form of payback for a negative deed someone did. However, according to Brooks, sometimes suffering is just that, suffering; there is no profound cosmic ecosystem in play that is designed to make people suffer at will. “Just as failure is sometimes just failure (and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs) suffering is sometimes just destructive, to be exited as quickly as possible (Brooks).” Oxford also has a similar line of thought when he compares a worker that loves dogs and allows them to compromise their work and another worker that cares about dogs but does not let them interfere with their work. I think what one draws from that analogy is that one should always have the bigger picture in mind. It is very easy to forget what is actually focus on that and avoid being distracted by what might not be actually important. If one is working towards the right goal, suffering will only be for a short while. Apple employees might not have necessarily been friends with Steve Jobs when he pushed them to their limits but what the company has been able to achieve was unfathomable at the time. There are benefits of persevering