Declaration Of Happiness Research Paper

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When asking the question of whether happiness is the most important thing in life, it is important to understand what happiness actually is. Happiness can mean a great many things; financial security, enjoyment in life, a successful career, a loving family, or changing the world or perhaps a combination of these things. However, can those things actually make a person happy? A survey conducted in 2017 says that only 33% of Americans consider themselves happy. That’s up one from 2016 and two below the all-time high of 35% in 2008. That is a staggeringly low amount for a country that has the pursuit of happiness on its Declaration of Independence. An answer to this seeming contradiction could be found in the idea that no one is sure what they …show more content…

Happiness to a man born in the rural towns of the midwestern United States could have a dramatically different conception of happiness that a woman born in the bustling city of Hong Kong. To get past this problem, one must shrink happiness down to its most simple and generalized form. The easiest way to look at happiness as it applies to everyone is that happiness is the state of experiencing positive emotions, which is essentially saying that happiness is when you are happy. Rather than debate over what quantifies a positive emotion, it is more important to recognize that simply having positive emotions does not mean you will never have negative emotions. However, this does not make a person unhappy. A well rounded, stable, and happy person can experience the full spectrum of emotions-negative, positive, and in between-just like any other person, but the positives will outweigh the negatives. This does not necessarily mean that the frequency of which they experience happiness is higher, simply that those happy moments make them happier. It could also mean that people who are considered happy process negativity differently. By this reasoning, it could mean that one could live a truly miserable existence in the eyes of others, but still be …show more content…

Sometimes they feel happy, sometimes not, sometimes neither happy nor unhappy. But at least some people, at some moments of their lives, are happy, i.e., satisfied with their lives as a whole, and some are unhappy, i.e., unsatisfied with their lives.” What this means is that happiness is a transient thing that is not easily quantified. There isn’t one single event that one can point to as a measure of happiness. It is a collection of events and emotions over a passage of time that can be used as a gauge for happiness. It also shows that happiness is directly related to how we feel about our situation, both current and past, rather than the situation

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