The Happiness Hypothesis By Jonathan Haidt: Textual Analysis

“Hello. I’m Haybie, what’s your name?” I asked a girl sitting in front of me one day in seventh grade during a dull explanatory class. The girl turned around, smiled warmly, and replied with, “Mika. Nice to meet you.” Little did I know that one seemingly trivial introduction in class would lead to a lasting friendship that would survive many years of hardships. Mika and I have been close friends ever since that moment. Although we initially bonded only over our mutual hatred of the class, our friendship blossomed as we went through middle school drama, sleep deprivation in high school, terrible AP teachers, and graduation. Our relationship displays many of the concepts from Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, a book in which the author states his thesis on happiness and life with support from ancient texts and modern psychology. After reading the nonfiction book, I have realized that some concepts, such as reciprocity, cortical lottery, progress principle, and misguided pursuits of happiness, explain the origin and strength of our relationship; although we have never noticed them before, the concepts have

In the book, the author refers to the cortical lottery as a chance that one is born with a natural predisposition to either be happy or not. Happy people win “the cortical lottery—their brains were preconfigured to see good in the world” (33). This idea affects my relationship with my friend because we are two different people. Mika is an easily stressed out person; she worries about the opinion of others, and as Haidt states, she is born with greater cortical activity on the right side of the brain. Meanwhile, although I am anxious sometimes, I consider myself to have more cortical activity on the left side of the brain because I am more optimistic than she is. I worry about what others think, but I try not to worry too much about uncontrollable