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How to define happiness
What happiness really means
How to define happiness
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From the beginning of time, humans have always endeavored to be happy. During this time, thousands of different people have given their interpretation of the term happiness. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the simplified definition of happiness is feeling pleasure or joy because of a certain situation. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Controller, Mustapha Mond, conceals the truth in order to keep everyone happy. He gives people drugs and brainwashes them into believing that life is good. Satisfying. When John the Savage is introduced to the World State, he questions all things pertaining to “civilization.” The civilized people are willing to do everything in their power to hide from the truth. Throughout the story of Brave New World, every character craves happiness in some way, shape, or form; similarly, our society today concentrates and will …show more content…
Although our world is not extreme as the World State, we are closer than we have ever been to Aldous Huxley’s future prediction of the world. In this dystopian novel, people want what they want, but never what they can’t have. They live through meaningless relationships, extreme censorship, and a substantial amount of soma. Writer, Frances Tapon, says, “Psychologists believe that there are seven factors that influence your happiness: wealth, education, personal freedom, equality, health, social position, and positive life events.” The only difference between what makes us happy and what makes them happy is conditioning. In the World State, people are conditioned from the day they are decanted with chemicals, hypnopaedia, and Neo Pavlova. Humans today have always been told “money is power” and “go to college, get a good job, then you will be happy.” Even though we feel emotions, people will do anything to feel happy just like the World State. Brave New World is our world with a surplus of drugs, sex, and people conditioned to think that their life is happy and
Taking the following questionnaire: Satisfaction with Life Scale, Approaches to Happiness Scale, and Authentic Happiness Inventory, helped me evaluate my life. Many times due to circumstance we forget in what positon our life is standing at the moment. We forget how much we have accomplished in the past and how much we have invested to make our future a good one. For the Satisfaction with life scale, I score a 33(love their life and feel that everything is going very well). People may might say well she is living a perfect life, but to be honest is not that is being perfect, is that one day years ago I made a decision of not letting anything take away what I have worked hard for. According to Earl & Carol Diener, because positive moods energize approach tendencies, it desirable that people on average be in a positive mood (1996). If I make a mistake, which is possible because am human, what I do is learn from it. It’s like what the Apostol from the church I go to says” you control life, not life controlling you.”
As analyzed by social critic Neil Postman, Huxley's vision of the future, portrayed in the novel Brave New World, holds far more relevance to present day society than that of Orwell's classic 1984. Huxley's vision was simple: it was a vision of a trivial society, drowned in a sea of pleasure and ignorant of knowledge and pain, slightly resembling the world of today. In society today, knowledge is no longer appreciated as it has been in past cultures, in turn causing a deficiency in intelligence and will to learn. Also, as envisioned by Huxley, mind altering substances are becoming of greater availability and distribution as technology advances. These drugs allow society to escape from the problems of life instead of dealing with reality. With divorce rates higher than ever in the past few decades, it has become evident that lust has ruined the society's sexual covenants. People are indulging in their sexual motives; lust runs rampant, thus strong, long-lasting relationships are becoming a rarity.
How does one achieve happiness? Money? Love? Being oneself? Brave New World consists of only 3 different ways to achieve happiness. Each character of the brave new world will have his or her different opinion of the right way to achieve happiness. In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explains many people achieve happiness through the World State’s motto – “community, identity, stability”, soma, and conditioning.
The society uses one’s happiness to seek their own. Starting with the ancient Adam Smith’s theory of a market economy where commodities are sold and bought in a market freely, where sellers and buyers exchange to achieve profit, and happiness is derived from profit. Thus “happiness is both produced and consumed” (Ahmed 3). Happiness is a matter of research for corporates of big companies. They try to figure out which product makes the buyers feel the happiness they need, so that they can produce more for their own profit. So, they cunningly make commercials with people having a good time. Which when watched by the buyers they get the false sense that their life would be so much better if they bought that small bottle of happiness. Once they buy their “Pandora’s box” they hope that underneath all the unnecessary objects there will be happiness, but they are dispirited at the end. Unknowingly the markets are making the society a more dull and sad place rather than distributing
One of the most important philosophical questions that World State citizens in "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley is whether truth is more important than happiness. In the novel the World State believes happiness is the key to a successful life rather than telling the truth. The characters in the novel don’t want anything more than the actual truth. They want to keep every mental and physical emotion they have ever felt bottled up. In order to hide from the truth, they take soma. "There is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon". (Huxley 55). The Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons all base their lives off of happiness. The reason on why each group in the World State is happy is because they were programmed to be. They are always going to feel happy no matter the damage in their lives. Even though each group has individual characteristics, they still are not known to be individuals. The government hides them from the truth of their own identities because they want everyone to be
George Santayana once said, “Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.” In life, there is no such thing as a “complete utopia”, although that is what many people try to achieve. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is an attempt at a utopian society. In this brave new world, mothers and fathers and family are non-existent. Besides being non-existent, when words of that sort are mentioned, ears are covered and faces of disgust are made. In a report to the Controller, Bernard wrote,”…This is partly due, no doubt to the fact that he heard them talked about by the woman Linda, his m-----“(106). Words of the sort cannot even be written. Art, history, and the ability to have emotions are shunned. This utopia is shown as a perfect world in which everyone is happy. If this was true, the people would not need to take soma, an equivalent along the lines of a cross between one of today’s “designer drugs” and Prozac.
Finding the level of ultimate contentment and life satisfaction can be challenging, but the perception of situations or powerful social connections strengthens the level of happiness within a person. Topic Significance: In recent years, the rate of depression in young adults has increased as people struggle to find the meaning of happiness and how they can achieve happiness. As people continue throughout their life, it is important to recognize what makes them happy.
Technology has advanced a lot and has been greatly impacting our lives since the Industrial Revolution. The appearance of the mobile phone, the computer, and the tablets have all changed our ability to communicate with people around the world. Although technologies have greatly improved our lifestyle, they have brought many negative effects on our relationships and happiness as well, for instance distorting people's views on one another and bringing more loneliness to people's lives. Many people believe that benefited by social media platforms such as Facebook, it is now not necessary to talk to someone in person in order to effectively communicate with one and know one’s life. Others, however, believe that technology alone cannot replace
Before we look into specifics, we’ll examine the history and development of “happiness” as a philosophy. Of course, the emotion of happiness has always existed, but it began to be seriously contemplated around 2,500 years ago by philosophers like Confucius, Buddha, Socrates and Aristotle. Shortly after Buddha taught his followers his Noble Eight Fold Path (which we will talk about later), Aristotle was teaching that happiness is “dependent on the individual” (Aristotle).
The future of the world is a place of thriving commerce and stability. Safety and happiness are at an all-time high, and no one suffers from depression or any other mental disorders. There are no more wars, as peace and harmony spread to almost every corner of the world. There is no sickness, and people are predestined to be happy and content in their social class. But if anything wrong accidentally occurs, there is a simple solution to the problem, which is soma. The use of soma totally shapes and controls the utopian society described in Huxley's novel Brave New World as well as symbolize Huxley's society as a whole. This pleasure drug is the answer to all of life's little mishaps and also serves as an escape as well as entertainment. The people of this futuristic society use it in every aspect of their lives and depend on it for very many reasons. Although this drug appears to be an escape on the surface, soma is truly a control device used by the government to keep everyone enslaved in set positions.
For years, authors and philosophers have satirized the “perfect” society to incite change. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a so-called utopian society in which everyone is happy. This society is a “controlled environment where technology has essentially [expunged] suffering” (“Brave New World”). A member of this society never needs to be inconvenienced by emotion, “And if anything should go wrong, there's soma” (Huxley 220). Citizens spend their lives sleeping with as many people as they please, taking soma to dull any unpleasant thoughts that arise, and happily working in the jobs they were conditioned to want. They are genetically altered and conditioned to be averse to socially destructive things, like nature and families. They are trained to enjoy things that are socially beneficial: “'That is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny'” (Huxley 16). Citizens operate more like machinery, and less like humans. Humanity is defined as “the quality of being human” (“Humanity”). To some, humanity refers to the aspects that define a human: love, compassion and emotions. Huxley satirizes humanity by dehumanizing the citizens in the Brave New World society.
The cost of happiness is a choice a person is given, to choose between getting what you want and not getting what you want. In the novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the citizens of the World State pays a price for that happiness but they do not know that because they drown the pain away, do not care about many things and humanity inside that left of them.
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, portrays a future society where people are no longer individuals but are controlled by the World State. The World State dominates the people by creating citizens that are content with who they are. Brave New World describes how the science of biology and psychology are manipulated so that the government can develop technologies to change the way humans think and act. The World State designs humans from conception for this society. Once the humans are within the society the state ensures all people remain happy. They program these humans to have needs and desires that will sustain a lucrative economy while not thinking of themselves as an individual. Huxley describes the Worlds State’s intent to control their society through medical intervention, happiness, and consumerism which has similarities to modern society.
Its aim is “universal happiness” because if people are happy there’s more likely to be social stability. People must be made to “like their unescapable social destiny”, as the novel insists. One modern-day politician is also pretty obsessed with boosting the masses’ happiness levels: David Cameron. He has pumped massive amounts of cash and staff into something called a “happiness agenda”, through which he hopes to create a “more content, happier society”. In Brave New World, it examples similarities “speeches about liberty, liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.” Which translates to, people will be unhappy when free so control is
After reading the Atlantic article “There is More to Life than Being Happy” and “Life in the Iron Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis, I could understand how the character Hugh strives to find meaning in the iron mills through his art. In the Atlantic article the main point was that the key to a fulfilled life is ‘meaning.’ This article is about Viktor Frankl who was a Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna who was later sent to the Nazi concentration camps. Through his experiences with suicidal patients he realized that it is not about being happy. He concluded that the one thing that fuels people and keeps them going is their meaning in life.