An Analysis Of Steve Salerno's 'Ignorance Of Bliss'

Many people normally call the moment of satisfaction and joy happiness, but they cannot properly define what happiness is and how to pursue it. Happiness is not measureable. Happiness can be shared with others, but cannot trade. Once people are in a stage of being happy, they enjoy their work, achievements and even feel better than others; however, how are they sure that they experience happiness? Is crying an emotional expression of enjoying happiness? In the article “Ignorance of Bliss,” Steve Salerno, a freelance writer, discusses about the value of happiness and explains to people about the feeling of being happy. He interprets his arguments and provides examples to enhance his ethos, but his ideas are not sufficient enough to persuade

He uses several interesting examples, which lead his audience into his arguments about the unclear definition of happiness. From the beginning, Salerno starts with Ed Diener’s study about the broken link between achievement and happiness. Normally, people would expect students with higher GPA’s to be happier than those who have lower GPA. However, from Diener’s work, the result is opposite, students with high GPA are less happy than lower GPA’s students. Lower GPA’s students are happier because they don’t feel stressful with school work. Therefore, happiness cannot be determined by achievements in school. In addition, he uses another study by New Economics Foundation to prove that having high levels of resource consumption increase the “well-being” of citizens but not their happiness. Nowadays, people eat more packaged and fast foods than fresh and home-cooked foods; those are the best option for people who are lazy to cook and ones who have no time. Salerno shows the readers that even the amount of consumption grows dramatically, the consumers are neither happy with the food quality they eat nor happy with their own health issues. Beside major achievements, a smallest change in life can also lead to happiness. Salerno also uses an abusive relationship as an example to illustrate his idea of “well-being”. When a husband hits his wife every

He mentions Gilbert’s claim and other’s studies about children-a negative aspect of happiness-who take away parents’ joie-de-vivre or their enjoyment of life. Salerno states “children are an extreme source of negative affect, a mild source of negative affect, or none at all. It’s hard to find a study where there’s one net positive” (56). His claims are not completely wrong. Even though raising kid is a difficult job, it is not always negative, which brings down the joy of life. Most parents believe children are gifts from God to make their live more joyful and valuable. Children lighten parents’ life with happy memories. Parents would not want a child if they consider children bring them a miserable life. So children are not a negative aspect that affects happiness, it just takes a longer time for the parents to realize the true happiness from their children. Moreover, Salerno tends to hide the positive side of happiness and only focus on strengthening the negative side of happiness. Thus, his article is less persuasive for hiding all the good side of