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Mahi Wazee

Professor Beadle

English 115

18 February 2019

Project Space Essay

Have you ever been happy? Generally, most of the people in the world has experienced

the joyful feeling known as happiness. Happiness can come from many things. You could have

accomplished a long-awaited task, bought a new toy, spend time with your family and friends.

The list goes on an on. Happiness can con in two forms of spaces, internal and external. Each of

the three authors specifies happiness with one of these spaces. David Brooks who wrote, What

Suffering Does, focuses on the internal space of happiness. The same goes with Sonja

Lyubomirsky, the author of How Happy Are You and Why? These two authors focus on internal

emotions that are related to happiness. The third author, Graham Hill, who is the author of What

Suffering Does informs us on how tangible objects can affect us and our happiness, is associated

with external space. In the following paragraphs, I will be explaining each of the authors

perspectives of happiness along with the evidence they provide.

The first author we will be looking at is David Brooks. Brooks focuses on the internal

space of happiness in his paper. Brooks is a journalist, author, and professor. He had worked for

various new outlets, written five books, and taught at Duke University and Yale University. A

topic that Brooks brings up that stuck out to me was suffering and failure. From Brooks

perspective, he believes that suffering and failure will bring you happiness in some way or form.

In Brooks article, he talks about some famous examples of suffering that led to prosperity. One
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example he wrote, “Think of the way Franklin Roosevelt came back deeper and more empathetic

after being struck with polio. Often, physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s

perspective, an attuned awareness of what other outsiders are enduring.” (Brooks 284) Another

example he used was about Abraham Lincoln. He states, “Abraham Lincoln suffered though the

pain of conducting a civil war, and he came out of that with the Second Inaugural. He emerged

with this sense that there were deep currents of agony and redemption sweeping not just through

him but through the nation as a whole, and that he was just an instrument for transcendent tasks.”

(Brooks 286) This shows that suffering is sometimes required, be it short-term or long-term, in

order to achieve happiness in the future. What Brooks also talks about in page 284 of his article

about how your happiness can be maximized, and how all of this can send you on a different

route than intended. He talks about an ideology by Paul Tillich, and he states, “people who

endure suffering are taken beneath the routines of life and find they are not who they believed

themselves to be. The agony involved in, say, composing a great piece of music or the grief of

having lost a loved one smashes through what they thought was the bottom floor of their

personalities, revealing an area below, and then it smashes through the floor revealing another

area.” From what I can see from this quote is that suffering can lead you to refine yourself,

improve, and find what makes yourself happy. From what Brooks wrote about, he seemed to

really write about an internal space and the mentality affected by the suffering which could result

in happiness later.

The next article that I’ll be talking about is How Happy Are You and Why? By Sonja

Lyubomirsky. From what I read I her article, Lyubomirsky is focusing on internal space.

Lyubomirsky somewhat took a similar approach to Brooks. She seems to have related how

suffering can eventually lead to happiness. Lyubomirsky had conducted multiple interviews with
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three individuals. Two of these individuals had suffered many setbacks in the past, and the one

person had what seemed like a pretty healthy upbringing. The first person Lyubomirsky

interviewed was a woman named Angela. From how she was described, Lyubomirsky wrote

“Angela is thirty-four and one of the happiest people that I interviewed. You, wouldn’t guess it,

however, from all she’s had to bear.” (Lyubomirsky 180) Lyubomirsky then went on to explain

Angela’s situation. As a child, she was abused by her mother, she was bullied in her school due

to her being overweight, and as time went on her emotional abuse got worse as her mother

developed breast cancer. As soon as she got fed up with everything, she moved out with a man

she hardly knew and got married, soon divorcing said man after Angela give birth to her

daughter Ella. She struggles financially, getting fired, no child support, and eventually filed for

bankruptcy. But all this didn’t affect her. In the interview Angela talks about the reason why she

is happy, and that reason is her daughter. She does everything with her, and she is the most

important person in Angela’s life. The second person Lyubomirsky had interviewed is man

named Randy. According to Lyubomirsky Randy had endured a lot as well. Lyubomirsky states,

“Like Angela Randy endured a lot as a child. He lost two people close to him to suicide, at age

twelve his father and at age seventeen his best friend. When he was in fifth grade, his mother left

his father and moved the family out of state and away from everyone he knew on order that she

could live with her boyfriend, Roy.” (Lyubomirsky 181) In relation to Angela, Randy moved out

and married at a young age. Soon he would be divorced. But according to Lyubomirsky, that

didn’t affect Randy at all in the future. Randy is now remarried and has multiple step kids and is

living happily. This comes to show that suffering is in fact can lead to happiness. The third

interviewee was a woman named Shannon. In Lyubomirsky’s writing, she described Shannon as

the opposite of both Randy and Angela. She’s getting a degree to teach English, goes to a school
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in Italy, and had a healthy childhood growing up. But Shannon told Lyubomirsky, despite

everything she had, any of it didn’t really amount to anything. Lyubomirsky wrote “She found

the transition from high school to college extremely stressful and often felt crushed and

overwrought about the harder and less familiar workload.” (Lyubomirsky 182) Shannon now has

what you would call an ideal life, with a boyfriend and a dog that she adores. But in the end of

all of it, she claims that she has a hint of loneliness. From what I see, is that happiness can’t just

come that easily, despite everything may seem right. In this article, Lyubomirsky researches in

genetics is a factor in one’s happiness. It turns out that there is a gene that is associated with

depression according to Lyubomirsky. She wrote, ”It turns out that depression is associated with

short allele is undesirable to have, because it rids the brain of a substance needed to fend off

depressive symptoms.” (Lyubomirsky 192) This shows that genetics can play a role in happiness.

You could believe that Shannon even has this symptom. It seems that Lyubomirsky had written

about the internal struggles and genetics that can determine your happiness, and this correlates

with internal space.

The last article that I will be going over is Living With Less. A Lot Less. By Graham Hill.

Hill is focusing on external space. First some background information on Hill. Hill is a

multimillionaire journalist, entrepreneur, and designer. In his article, Hill talks about the misery

that comes along with having to many things. This is what Hill wrote describing how he felt,

“Somehow this stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up

consuming me.” (Hill 308) As you can see, Hill had been exhausted from maintaining all the

things he had. He had multiple cars, houses, furniture, etc. Some data Hill used was from a study

from researchers in UCLA, titled, “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century.” Practically this

data revealed that a mothers’ stress builds up when maintaining too many things and 75% of
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families participating in the study didn’t even have space to park their cars due to owning to

many belongings. More data Hill used was a study from a psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen.

Hill quotes him saying, “Professor Bodenhausen found that ‘irrespective of personality, in

situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns

in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Just shows that have too

many things could be unhealthy. Hill would later sell everything besides necessities and travel

the world like a nomad. And he has never felt happier. What Hill focused on the affect of

tangible objects and how they may affect your happiness, so it associates with outer space.

Overall, happiness can be achieved in many ways. You could have emotionally achieved

happiness, or maybe possibly, your happiness may as well come from the things you know. It

just depends on you. I just believe that Brooks and Lyubomirsky focused on internal space while

Hill focused on outer space.

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Works Cited

Brooks, David. “What Suffering Does.” Pursuing Happiness, Edited by Matthew Parfitt and
Dawn Skorczewski, 2016, pp. 284–287.

Hill, Graham. “Living With Less. A Lot Less.” Pursuing Happiness, Edited by Matthew Parfitt
and Dawn Skorczewski, 2016, pp. 308–313.

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. “How Happy Are You and Why?” Pursuing Happiness, Edited by
Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorzewski, 2016, pp. 179–197.