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Promise Of Happiness

1577 Words7 Pages

Materialism is Immoral

Many happiness studies state that countries in South America and Scandinavia are among at the top of the “Happy list,” where more modernized countries are at the bottom. We surmise that an increase of wealth has a direct correlation with an increase in happiness, but these studies that Sarah Ahmed references in her introduction to The Promise of Happiness, invites us to rethink how to be happy as well as how to structure happy societies. We are led to believe that with wealth comes happiness, but is that necessarily true? In this paper, I will defend Sara Ahmed’s critique of the cultural imperative to be happy. Her thesis is that not everyone is able to participate in their society’s “happy activities” because the dominant groups use happiness to systematically exclude and marginalize certain communities, thereby withholding the socio-political conditions for happiness.The moral issue here is materialism more specifically, the belief that people can buy happiness is immoral. Ahmed makes it clear to her audience that she isn’t focusing on the ways to be happy like so many other philosophers before her, in particular Aristotle. She has a very different approach for understanding how people …show more content…

Those who are unable to participate in these activities consequently experience unhappiness. Not everyone is able to participate in “happy activity” of their culture. For example, homeless people can’t participate in happy activities because they don’t have money to buy a lottery ticket or even a ticket to a baseball game. Homeless people are excluded as a result because they don’t have the means, according to Ahmed. By expanding our understanding of happy activities we can virtually allow everyone to participate in them. Whilst also comprehending that setting up barricades to people 's happiness is

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