Mady Brand

Happiness
Section 1
To Find Happiness
We all strive to achieve happiness and wonder what it takes to find it, but before you can
find happiness, you need to understand it. Happiness, defined by Oxford, is the state of being
happy. Happy can be simply defined as feeling or showing pleasure, pleasure can be defined
as feeling satisfied, and satisfaction can be defined as fulfilment of ones wishes,
expectations, or needs. So, you need to dig deeper into what an individual needs and what an
individual wants as well as the significance of meeting personal and social expectations. Martin
Seligman in the video The New Era of Positive Psychology said, It consists of knowing what
your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger
than you are. Individually, we all have our passions and desires that motivate us, through those
passions we can set goals for ourselves and set out to achieve something that is important to us,
to lead to finding a purpose and then lead to having a role and being as well as feeling as a
destined part of society. Giving into purpose to have a meaningful life, to work towards what you
hold important, and unite into a community may be what it takes to be happy.
Devoting your life and the little things you do every day to meaning, can act as a
necessary sacrifice to achieve happiness. Theres More to Life than being Happy, an article
written by Emily Esfahani Smith, says that Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is
associated with being a taker while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a giver.
At first glance, it may appear as though meaning and happiness are two very different things, but
having meaning in your life may be used as a tool to gain happiness. When you have given in
order to get something, you appreciate it more than if someone were to just hand it to you,
because youve worked for it, you deserve it, you have sacrificed something to have it. Having
meaning and giving can open opportunities and allow for you to have worked toward what it
takes for you to be happy. In the same article, it says, Happy people get a lot of joy from others
while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others. The truth is you can
have both, when you lead a meaningful life not only are you getting pleasure from such a life,
but you also open up the possibilities for others to want to give to you which if you so desire,
you may take advantage of and use to lead a happy life. Meaning, having a purpose and feeling
as though there is something that you are working towards, can unlock a chance at happiness.
Allowing yourself to work towards getting better at something, particularly something
you value, can lead you on a path to happiness. When looking into the core of the book Mindset
by Carol Dweck, Brian Johnson wrote an article explaining his findings in which he says,
"Growth-minded people focus on their love for the activity, and it helps them succeed... Adopting
a growth mindset is the first key to building more happiness and success." Doing what you love
and having the desire to get better at it, can gear you towards achieving happiness. Its not about
wanting results for others, to behave as an exhibitionist; its about wanting results for yourself
and wanting to improve, to better yourself. In the documentary Happy, it said, "The research is
clear, people who experience flow on a regular basis are happier than those who don't." Flow is
basically when in a moment, you have the desire to keep going and have full, yet blind, focus;
when you experience flow, you're constantly working towards something, you're allowing
yourself to practice whatever it is youre doing and that is what enhances that skill, that pursuit.

When you shift to having a growth mindset, you are allowing yourself to devote effort to
improvement and in the act of working towards improvement, you become engaged with what
you are doing and you experience flow. Working towards our goals, the goals that hold personal
importance to us, allows us to work towards our true happiness and in the act of doing so, we
may discover happiness in the act itself.
Throughout the years, people have looked at the relationship between being part of the
community and socializing, and between happiness; time and time again they have proven that
they do connect. Charles Darwin once said, For firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take
pleasure in the society of his fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to
perform various services for them... In a timid man, on the other hand, the instinct of selfpreservation might be so strong, that he would be unable to force himself to run any such risk,
perhaps not even for his own child. We, as living beings, are meant to survive and evolution has
granted us the tool of sociality in which we gain pleasure from social experience and having
compassion. Forget Survival of the Fittest: It is Kindness that Counts by Dacher Keltneer
states, We have found that activation of the vagus nerve is associated with feelings of
compassion and the ethical intuition that humans from different social groups share a common
humanity. People who have high vagus nerve activation in a resting state, we have found, are
prone to feeling emotions that promote altruism - compassion, gratitude, love, happiness.
Studies have proven that being social, using the natural social quality within you, can encourage
feelings not only associated with meaning, but also happiness itself. Allowing people to
interactively work together as a community will not only provide them with natural pleasure, but
also give them the opportunity to feel dedicated to being a member of society and provide them
with a sense of social meaning.
Happiness is an intention that we all strive for and understanding it, as well as us, can
allow ourselves and our society to achieve it. In the Constitution, we are granted the of right to
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, but it is up to us, as individuals, to take advantage
of that right and discover what it takes to do so for ourselves. As a society, we desire happiness,
but often times we steer clear of what we can do to become happy because of what our society
has become. Often, we push others down to raise ourselves up and dont even realize that being
pushed down damages the desire to work towards personal goals that can attain happiness. We
commonly praise independent accomplishment and overlook those who work towards the
promotion of the community; we look past the importance of working towards the betterment of
society and the importance of having a part in it. Frequently, we find ourselves only doing what
our society values as important rather than what we value as important which continually leads
to a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose and not feeling important to the self or the community.
Our society determines who is happy by what they have and what kind of life they lead, but true
happiness is not found through conforming to a standard, it is something that only we can create
and only we can critique. Think about your happiness and consider whether you feel you have
purpose, whether you are working towards something for yourself, whether you feel as though
you play an important role in society, consider these and question if you are truly fulfilled.