In the first paragraph of Yolanda Ypres’s article, “What Makes People Happy?”, she answers her titular question with the following: Taking each step in turn through “the route to happiness”, which is made up of good education, a good job, and marriage without children, is the best way to ensure that happiness in one’s life goes up in the long term. She explains that what matters most people’s happiness is the “overall pattern” of their experiences over time— lives which are the happiest being those that follow an “upward trend”. Ypres then speaks of the time intervals regarding this pattern. Also, she follows up this “upward trend” by saying that, as those who seek happiness in life, we must “find out what they could add to our lives to make …show more content…
She effectively explained this upward trend in happiness over large interval of time, and what contributes to it. This argument seems to also spark a curiosity of what lies in between these large intervals in the upward trend of happiness, which can be summed up with a testimony from Dan Lerner of New York University, “I spent about ten years as a music agent. Along the way, I became very interested in how my clients handled success. Some of them were tremendously successful but quite unhappy. Others seemed quite content with their success. The subject interested me so much that I went back to school to study the science of happiness, and now I teach the subject at NYU. Happiness doesn’t necessarily mean you have a smile on your face. It’s more of a mixing board with several different dials: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. Everyone’s mixing board is set differently. There’s no one way to be happy and there’s no wrong way to be happy. I may draw my happiness from relationships, while somebody else may need to be constantly engaged in the pursuit of a