"A large part of happiness to me is about feeling secure about my life including: relationships, finances, work, and school because these things help my pursuit of a good future for myself..."
This is part of my first definition and still what I consider happiness to be but my definition has certainly evolved. Originally I thought of happiness as being different for every person but in reality the same basic things make all people happy. Everyone wants to have security through relationships, finances, work, and school because these things create less reasons for people to worry and more room to be happy. Along with security, I think happiness is being accpeted. Of course not everyone cares if everyone loves them but they certainly need somebody to love them. So I think happiness is a mixture between feeling secure (not having to worry) and also feeling loved. Everyone wants these two things.
-Christine Woods
Tanya's Revised Happiness
ReplyDeleteSORRy! I was having a hard time trying to figure out how to post this, so I decided to send it as a response to yours Christine
My definition of happiness has changed drastically throughout the semester. At first I just accepted the fact that maybe happiness is different for everyone; what makes you happy might not make me happy. However, because of the push to wallow in complexity, I began to think about what made a person truly deeply happy. I decided that happiness is something we feel when attain our desires and that if our deepest desire was attained, than we would feel the deepest form of happiness. I read a quote earlier this semester in my Psychology textbook by William James that read, “The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” When I read this quote, it dawned on me that to gain the deepest form of happiness is to feel appreciated by others. This was a very interested discovering because it made me understand that true happiness wasn’t something that we can experience or gain on our own- it is experienced through relationships with others.
Coming to understand and define what happiness means took a look of work and a lot of brainstorming which was something I didn’t exactly want to do at first, but I’ve learned the importance of these things throughout the course.
I think this is a great definition of what happiness is but don't you think that there are certain people whom feel more secure by themselves? Some people feel more secure being by themselves. Just something to think about. I very much like your idea on being accepted though. I agree one hundred percent with that because that is the one thing that all people long for, being accepted.
ReplyDeleteChristine: I agree with your claim about security--this is a good way to identify why certain things make us happy. You say you try to gain that security through "relationships, finances, work, and school." Do all four of these work together to provide security? Does one give more security than another? Are there better ways to gain a sense of security?
ReplyDeleteTanya: I agree that we all want to be appreciated--and I like the idea of gaining appreciation as a way to approach happiness. How do we go about gaining this appreciation?