Humans are conditioned to pursue happiness, but we overall we seem to never reach the finish line. The question is should we actually strive to be happy? If so, what is true happiness? According to the Merriam- Webster dictionary, the definition of happy is “feeling pleasure and enjoyment because of your life, situation, etc.: showing or causing feelings of pleasure and enjoyment: pleased or glad about a particular situation, event, etc.” Based on the definition, being happy is actually about enjoying things, but I believe that being happy is a byproduct of contentment. The enjoyment of what a person has is a major part of being happy, but eventually our enjoyment for things wears off, which is referred to as hedonic adaptation. Instead of …show more content…
I have seen firsthand how people who do not have much are the ones who live to be what is considered happy. I have also witnessed people, who had everything they could ever want, living in a very unhappy state. One of the most humbling things I have experienced that helps to shape my views is helping tornado victims. Being from Alabama, I have experienced a lot of bad tornados and even been a victim of them myself, but never as bad as Mrs. Ticker. Mrs. Ticker was an elderly woman, widowed for a short time, who lived in a beautiful home. Everything that Mrs. Ticker knew was in that home, but it, along with most of her belongings, was taken by the tornado. We were all so devastated to see this, but she smiled and told me “it is not about what I had, it was mostly junk anyways, it’s what I remember about it all.” I could not understand how she managed to smile, but now I see what she held dearest to her were the memories rather than the …show more content…
If you want to be happy, practice compassion” Dalai Lama. Compassion is a kindness like no other, it is a way of sincerely caring for things and others. Based on the video Happy, scientists learned that people who care for others in a mental and physical sense tend to be happier than those who do not. Compassion does not always come easily to some of us, which is why I find it so important to understand. I believe if we do all things compassionately, then we give off positivity which allows us to get a seemingly high feeling. This feeling comes from the sense of pleasure we receive from doing things for others, and the pleasure they get from our actions. I get my thoughts on this from an internalist view. “The former identifies pleasures in terms of a quality intrinsic to all pleasurable experiences. On this sort of view, pleasure is a kind of sensation, feeling, or quality of experience” (Haybron, 62), and I believe that this is what causes us to feel so good when we are compassionate for