Love People Not Pleasure By Arthur C Brooks Analysis

At what point in our lives do we begin to sit back and think about what makes us happy or perhaps what makes us unhappy? For years our society has been trying to solve this problem; however, we have only focused primarily on the negatives such as depression and/or severe unhappiness. While depression and unhappiness may be an important topic, it typically only covers a pessimistic viewpoint. People constantly reinforce the negative events that happen in their lives instead of praising the good ones. For example, most people would rather spend the entire day moping about how they cannot find a boyfriend/girlfriend instead of focusing on what they like about themselves and how they could fix what they don’t like. An article titled “Taking Pills

Brooks, author of the article “Love People, Not Pleasure”, makes his case that happiness is something that can only be found within intrinsic values, rather than extrinsic ones. In other words, he believes that people who tend to focus their lives on the more materialistic things tend to end up unhappier, whether they have succeeded in life or not. Likewise, from a similar perspective, the movie/documentary Happy stresses the idea that happiness can only come from within one’s own motivations and desires to be so. Based on the movie and these articles about the idea of happiness, similar advice is given that needs to be adapted by our society if we want to change. As individuals, we essentially become happier the moment we realize that we should be focusing on our values more intrinsically rather than our values

Lama and Cutler start out by comparing the lives of two friends: One friend, at 32 years of age, was able to retire with enough money to last a lifetime while the other friend of the same age had found out he tested HIV positive. The lady with the early retirement found herself unhappy because after a short while she had already fulfilled all of her external needs and had nothing else to look forward to. On the other end, the man who developed a disease showed signs of greater happiness levels solely because he saw his life as a blessing in that his case wasn’t any worse. Lama and Cutler sum up this comparison by determining, “Both these people illustrate the essential point that happiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than by external events” (Lama/Cutler 22). By emphasizing state of mind, the authors are saying that it is all about how we view certain situations that either make them better or worse than they really are. Similarly in Fraser’s article, this story goes to prove that happiness cannot be forced, but must be done internally. External events in which Lama/Cutler is referring to would be any events that physically affect us or any of our surroundings. Internal events refer to our inner selves and how we stay happy through our own motivations and thoughts. It is important to remember that what happens