Happiness paper

What is happiness?  Is it a true feeling or is it like psychotherapist Adam Phillips stated, “Anyone who could maintain a state of happiness given the state of the world, is living a delusion.”  Going off of what Phillips has said would happinesss be delusional or is it a state of contentment?  Happiness is a hard word to define with just a simple definition.  However, it is, ”Thinking about happiness in general what it means to you personally” (Kenyon 526).  With this statement people have different personalities and likes or dislikes.  The former poet Keyon says, ”That engaging our emotions and memories can lead towards a happiness state (526).  Going back and thinking about fun times with either close friends or family can cause us in the end to be happy. 

In the quote that Phillips gave he is saying that this world is an evil place with all the killings that go on, the wars between countries, and so many other evils that we don’t even know about.  How could someone in that kind of world be happy?  A person living in that world would have to be delusional.  As the saying goes, “People create their own happiness” (Business Insider inc 2017).  A person being happy in a world such as this is creating their own reality so I believe Phillips statement to be false.  Happiness is not living in a delusion it is being rich, not by having tons of money, but being rich with things that create a positive life style personally.  It is about the people an individual surrounds himself or herself with.  A person ultimately becomes, “A product of their own environment” (The Success System That Never Fails 1962).  This quote means the people an individual hangs around the majority of the time will gradually start acting like the people that person is around most likely. 

Not only is happiness created by the people we choose to be around but, “Happiness also follows from living a virtuous life” (McFall 527).  Having a virtuous life means setting high goals that an individual wants to achieve for themselves to accomplish something that is challenging but also satisfying which can cause happiness.  Setting goals that are ideally achievable gives us a sense of meaning that we can do whatever we set our minds to…to become our best self.  There are three constituents of happiness such as, “Pleasure or positive emotion, engagement, and meaning” (Seligman et al. 540).  Pleasure causes happiness by, “Increasing the positive emotion of cultivating gratitude and forgiveness about the past, the positive emotion of savoring and mindfulness about the present, and building hope and optimism about the future” (Seligman et al. 540).  The second constituent of happiness is gratification could be helping someone or accomplishing a task that was either challenging or simple (Seligman et al. 540).  The last constituent of happiness is meaning.  Everyone wants to have a sense of meaning or purpose by, “Using our strengths towards something larger than ourselves” (Peterson et al. 2005).

Based on Seligmans examples of happiness we can gather that there are different levels to happiness.  People can become happy from either pleasures, engagements and having meaning in the world” (Seligman et al 540.).  People are so different in personalities that what someone might like and gather happiness from that moment another person might hate it.  Living in the world today yeah it is an evil place, but in the misted of evil there can be happiness.  However, it just depends on how a person wants to go about their life either in a more positive way or negative way.  Furthermore, happiness is not delusional it is what an individual makes of the things that happen in life.

http://www.businessinsider.com/