Happiness and its Discontents was too narrow. What one man values as his happiness is totally different to another person. The work argues that we should view our life as a whole( Parfitt & Skorczewski,2016, p.131 ). We should take our entire lives into consideration however, we shouldn’t base our happiness upon it. We can change our past by looking forward while it’s great to realize how far you’ve come we can’t stay in the past. We can base our current happiness on the right now.
If we base it upon our life so far we can only deduce our mistakes, we have to look at it in a way that we can learn from. We can be happy by not making the same mistakes again and again. The work argues that happiness is the same as pleasure (Parfitt & Skorczewski,2016,p.
132). Happiness isn’t the same as pleasure because pleasure can’t be sustained like happiness can. If your feeling happy it’s based on feelings and memories with emotional tags.
If the feeling is pleasure it’s more temporary and short lived.
The work argues that happiness is the opposite of anxiety and depression (Parfitt & Skorczewski,2016,p.133). I don’t agree. What about bittersweet moments? It’s both. You can be happy and sad at the same time. There are complex emotions that aren’t just one thing but two dual meanings and functions. The work needs to expound upon what an emotional condition is, while it seems correct in the assumption that we can’t take one day to figure out why were depressed it doesn’t offer how we can then ascertain why were depressed (Parfitt & Skorczewski,2016,p. 135). Should we look at our lives at a whole?
This depression could be a different depression than last years brought on by a new event. How can we measure our happiness based upon these assumptions? Life satisfaction can be defined differently by each person. A person who has children may argue that the child makes their world go round. Someone who doesn’t have children like myself can’t base their happiness on a child that doesn’t exist. It could be depressing for someone that doesn’t have kids and wants them that wouldn’t be a source of happiness for them. Happiness is a duality, because it is bittersweet. Happiness isn’t just about feeling happy but also about feeling the right kind of happy and feeling like the way it feels is a correct way to feel about it whether it be good or bad (Tamir, M., Schwartz, S. H., Oishi, S., & Kim, M. Y. , 2017).
Works Cited
- Parfitt, Matthew , and Dawn Skorczewski. Pursuing Happiness. Boston, MA, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016.
- Tamir, M., Schwartz, S. H., Oishi, S., & Kim, M. Y. (2017). The secret to happiness: Feeling good or feeling right? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(10), 1448-1459.
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