Hiroshi Castro

Corri Ditch

English 115

29 September 2020

Project Space Essay

Have you ever felt happiness and later you change moods? You keep seeking happiness

and are constantly looking how to achieve happiness. We have all at least once felt what

happiness brings to us and the benefits of being a happier person. The sensation of being

positive that introduces pleasant emotions to ourselves. The articles all deeply convey what

happiness is and compare the differences of what truly happiness brings to us. In “The Sources

of Happiness,” The Dalai Lama argues that we are seeking ultimate happiness which remains

consistent to the joy of living. In Sonja Lyubomirsky’s article, “How Happy Are You and Why,”

she states that people have the ability to control their happiness and influence people in their

pursuit of happiness. In “Living with Less. A Lot Less,” Graham Hill tells his personal life story

as a successful entrepreneur that argues living with less is what has brought him lots of

happiness. All the articles use rhetorical strategies such as pathos, logos, and ethos to make their

arguments credible, they share either their personal stories of pursuing happiness or others

personal stories and also the comparisons of happiness. The Dalai Lama includes all the

rhetorical strategies which already makes his argument way more effective and reliable than the

other two. “The Sources of Happiness” presents the most effective argument because it discusses

the comparisons of pleasure and happiness, how our feelings of contentment are strongly
influenced by our tendency to compare and our human bond that becomes our source of

consolation.

The Dalai Lama strongly believes that the purpose of life is for each individual to strive

for happiness. He writes an article “The Sources of Happiness,” in which he expresses his beliefs

of what “Happiness” is. He calls happiness a sense of deep satisfaction in which he expresses

that happiness, and satisfaction are what is important to life. The Dalai Lama uses ethos in the

first paragraphs to show his credibility toward the simplicity and compassion of life. The Dalai

Lama serves his community as a Buddhist monk and promotes a life of simplicity and

compassion through lectures, books, and social media. This detailed summary boosts his

credibility toward his audience making his claims true to the topic of happiness. The Dalai Lama

mainly uses pathos to share his personal stories and insight toward people’s inner worth and

contentment. Throughout the article The Dalai Lama tells stories about different people’s

lifestyles and how they seek happiness on a daily basis. He compares two different people’s lives

at different times of their lives showing how one person’s financial success never brought the

happiness she expected, to someone who had been diagnosed with a virus and who is living his

life everyday like it is his last. He believes our emotions can easily dictate our decisions that lead

to temporary destructive pleasures in life. “The simple reminder that what we are seeking in life

is happiness” (The Dalai Lama 26). Our emotions and values must stay in tact in order to keep

the harmful experiences away and the momentarily pleasures that don’t last eternally. He uses

logos for a way to compare people at the state of their lives to either motivate in a positive or

negative way. “Our feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to

compare” (The Dalai Lama 17). This generally means that our life satisfaction depends on who

we compare ourselves to, either the less fortunate or the success of other people’s achievements.
In conclusion, The Dalai Lama keeps his rhetorical strategies consistent throughout the article

which allows his argument of pursuing ultimate happiness and not momentarily pleasure the

purpose of life.

In Sonja Lyubomirsky’s article, “How Happy Are You and Why?” she argues that people

have the ability to control their own happiness. She uses ethos to show her credibility and

confidence in her topic. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California,

Riverside. She earned a Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University in 1994. Sonja

Lyubomirsky uses pathos to share personal stories of others that are seeking happiness and their

experiences on how they achieved it. Emotional stories are also told at the beginning of each

story to convey sadness for the reader. The story she tells is when, “Randy lost two people close

to him to suicide, at age twelve his father and age seventeen his best friend” (Lyubomirsky 143).

This evidence grabs the audience’s attention and makes the audience feel grief for Randy for

losing two important people in his early life. She supports her claims with interviews of happy

people and their stories and scientific studies shown to detect people’s level of happiness. Logos

is used for proof of statistics throughout the book to back up her evidence with bits of logic on

how happiness is determined. “In a nutshell, the fountain of happiness can be found in how you

behave, what you think, and what goals you set everyday of your life” (Lyubomirsky 157). She

states steps on what people can do in order to help themselves achieve happiness. She explains

sustainable happiness and to maintain it while also seeking happiness despite all the difficulty

someone may encounter in their life.

The simplicity is superior to elaborate embellishment which also refers to less is more. In

Graham Hill’s article, “Living with Less. A Lot Less” he tells the story of his personal life and

the journey he discovered that living with less materialistic things is what brought him
happiness. Graham Hill uses pathos to represent emotion and values that are told in his personal

stories throughout the article. His personal stories of his life and how he went from selling his

company into living in a big house, then traveling the world with his significant other who later

eventually ended the relationship. This made him realize how happy he really is living in a small

home instead of having lots of obligations on his shoulders. “Intuitively, we know that the best

stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships, experiences and meaningful work are the

staples of a happy life” (Hill 257). The realization that materialistic things and holding onto

things isn’t meaningful, but the happy life is the experiences and relationships that comes with it.

He also uses ethos to credit reliable sources that feature studies about mother’s stress hormones.

The study shows that, “... all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent

dealing with their belongings.” (Hill 256) This study represents that lots of women who usually

like holding onto things have the tendency to stress about their personal belongings. Logos is

used to compare his argument that material things aren’t the key features for happiness in life,

instead the experiences and relationships are the ones that bring happiness. “It took 15 years, a

great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the inessential things I had collected and live a

bigger, better, richer life with less” (Hill 254). He compares big material things to small things

that are essential in life. He argues that the lifestyle of living with less will promote and benefit

more happiness to people with more personal belongings than others.

In conclusion, seeking happiness is the most important part of life. All the other authors

used these strategies effectively, but they didn’t use it as the Dalai Lama did in his article sharing

personal stories of how happiness changed the perspective of someone’s life. He compared the

difference of pleasure and happiness which he advised that looking for temporarily pleasure is

not what will ultimately make you happy in the future. In the Dalai Lama’s article, he proved
that his credibility and stories were more dependable on how he used his insight on all these

strategies that effectively grabbed the audience’s attention. Lastly, his argument of achieving

ultimate happiness is well constructed by implementing all the rhetorical strategies amongst the

other three articles which did not effectively use the strategies.

Work Cited

Hill, Graham. “Living with Less. A Lot Less.” Pursuing Happiness: a Bedford Spotlight

Reader, by Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan

Learning, 2020, pp. 254–258.

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. “How Happy Are You and Why?” Pursuing Happiness: a Bedford

Spotlight Reader, by Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford/St. Martin's,

Macmillan Learning, 2020, pp. 141–158.

The Dalai Lama. “The Sources of Happiness.” Pursuing Happiness: a Bedford Spotlight

Reader, by Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan

Learning, 2020, pp. 15–27.