Post 2, week 1

Happiness is an emotion or feeling which directly impacts every single human in one way or another. However, there is a vast grey area for many people when it comes to defining or understanding the science of it. The word happiness is most commonly referred to, to describe positive emotions such as joy, contentment, or gratitude. However, there is a lot more to the word and the “emotion” than it leads on. The word and concept of happiness itself have significantly changed from how it was viewed in ancient societies. The idea of happiness started out being something that very few people experienced and was based purely on luck. This is why it is no shock that the word happiness was a cognate for luck in those times. In ancient times a happy life was one “according to virtue,” to quote Aristotle, or as philosopher Cicero says “a happy man will be happy even on the torture wrack.” To them, happiness was about living a meaningful and good life, not about continually feeling that positive emotion. They saw a happy person as someone who learned to cope with pain because they knew that true happiness and real life is not without immense pain. To be happy one did not always have to feel positive emotions, but they had a meaningful and overall good life; full of both pain and joy. For many religions, true happiness was not even fathomable on this earth. This was the overarching view until the happiness view of the 17th and 18th centuries, where the modern perception of happiness comes into play. The new perspective on happiness was to indulge in the pleasures of this world, and everyone was deserving of happiness. This is a concept philosopher john locke preached, and Thomas Jefferson uses it in the Declaration of Independence. This modern idea of happiness is fed by material things and has a much more hedonistic approach. This has caused something called hedonic adaptation, “Our ability to adapt to changes in our life circumstances or sensory experiences.” This essentially means the happiness of a being only momentarily changes because once that person is used to the new source of happiness, they revert to their original happiness levels, and it leaves that person needing more and more to feed their desires and happiness. This has created a very self-centered perception of joy. This modern perception of happiness quite often leaves people feeling less happy or even lonely.

This is why living a life to be meaningful verses with a false perception of happiness is much better for people. However, the words happiness and meaningfulness often become intertwined because a meaningful life quite often brings true happiness. Now someone may wonder, ”what is the point of following this old concept of happiness?”, “what will doing this versus the more hedonistic approach do for someone?”.The answer to this is that true genuine happiness comes with many social and health benefits, such as greater life expectancy, better physical health, Social benefits, Relationship benefits, stimulates being more creative and innovative, higher quality work, and can make people more diplomatic. Aside from this, happier people have a greater ability to adapt to new situations and challenges, as well as react to negative experiences. This is important because, in the fast-paced society which exists today, many people find themselves feeling drained and without a further purpose in life. This leads to shorter lives, weakened health, less productivity, and loneliness. When people can remove themselves from the self-centered idea of happiness, and apply themselves to a greater purpose which includes helping and giving to others, it not only increases their emotional stability and happiness, but it helps widen the range of happy people.