Declaration Of Happiness Research Paper

When asking the question of whether happiness is the most important thing in life, it is important to understand what happiness actually is. Happiness can mean a great many things; financial security, enjoyment in life, a successful career, a loving family, or changing the world or perhaps a combination of these things. However, can those things actually make a person happy? A survey conducted in 2017 says that only 33% of Americans consider themselves happy. That’s up one from 2016 and two below the all-time high of 35% in 2008. That is a staggeringly low amount for a country that has the pursuit of happiness on its Declaration of Independence. An answer to this seeming contradiction could be found in the idea that no one is sure what they

mean or want by the phrase “happiness”, or have a preconceived notion of what happiness is and they believe themselves unable to attain it. To understand this question, the phrase “happiness” must be defined.
The problem with this approach is that most ideas of happiness can’t be boiled down to one or two concepts that will apply to every person in the world across different cultures and outlooks.

Happiness to a man born in the rural towns of the midwestern United States could have a dramatically different conception of happiness that a woman born in the bustling city of Hong Kong. To get past this problem, one must shrink happiness down to its most simple and generalized form. The easiest way to look at happiness as it applies to everyone is that happiness is the state of experiencing positive emotions, which is essentially saying that happiness is when you are happy. Rather than debate over what quantifies a positive emotion, it is more important to recognize that simply having positive emotions does not mean you will never have negative emotions. However, this does not make a person unhappy. A well rounded, stable, and happy person can experience the full spectrum of emotions-negative, positive, and in between-just like any other person, but the positives will outweigh the negatives. This does not necessarily mean that the frequency of which they experience happiness is higher, simply that those happy moments make them happier. It could also mean that people who are considered happy process negativity differently. By this reasoning, it could mean that one could live a truly miserable existence in the eyes of others, but still be

happy.
The Polish philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz said, “(...)happiness is certainly not something that could be exactly ascertained and measured; many people cannot decide whether or not they are happy in this sense.

Sometimes they feel happy, sometimes not, sometimes neither happy nor unhappy. But at least some people, at some moments of their lives, are happy, i.e., satisfied with their lives as a whole, and some are unhappy, i.e., unsatisfied with their lives.” What this means is that happiness is a transient thing that is not easily quantified. There isn’t one single event that one can point to as a measure of happiness. It is a collection of events and emotions over a passage of time that can be used as a gauge for happiness. It also shows that happiness is directly related to how we feel about our situation, both current and past, rather than the situation

itself.
This leads to the Stoic ideal of happiness. The Stoics believed that happiness was contained in controlling what one could control and letting go of the rest. They would say that we could control our thoughts, opinions and desires are all things that we can control and to not worry about things like wealth, reputation, health, and death, as all of those things are out of our hands. If one accepts that we can only control a few things, they believed that one could never come to harm, as no outside force can affect things under your own direct control. The only thing that could make someone unhappy would be themselves. A proverb from Epictetus’ The Enchiridion says “If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?” This means that one should not allow themselves to be enslaved to others by allowing their thoughts and minds to directly affect how one view themselves and their happiness. One’s happiness should be completely self-contained and well walled off from the problems that come from outside one’s self.
To restate this ideal would be to say that happiness is an inner quality. It is determined by your state of mind, by how you process events and emotions. When you define happiness in this way, it would seem to be completely correct in saying that happiness is the most important thing to strive for in life. In a way, a person with a healthy mindset would be continuously striving towards this idea of happiness, since the goal of a healthy person is to experience things positively. Happiness could be seen as a sort of equilibrium in a person’s inner life, unshaken by the world around them. If this state is achieved, one could consider themselves happy no matter what situation they found themselves in. This is not to say that negativity will never be felt, or that everything will go in a considerably easy or manageable manner, but rather that even within those hard times, happiness could be found.