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How is happiness addressed in fahrenheit 451
How is happiness addressed in fahrenheit 451
How is happiness addressed in fahrenheit 451
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Humanity has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps the greatest goal in life is to achieve happiness, which is best defined by the positive and pleasant feelings associated with a mental state being well. There is even a religion, Buddhism, dedicated to achieving true happiness through Nirvana. One of the principles of Buddhism is to assist others. This is due to the fact that helping others yields a sense of accomplishment, raises one’s self-esteem and helps build stable communities, which helps one achieve the path of Nirvana, and is the only path to happiness. Consequently, our achievements must indeed benefit others in order for us to become truly happy.
One example of an achievement which caused me to become truly happy
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For example, one of my greatest achievements was obtaining first place at a mathematics state convention in the geometry division. While it was a satisfying feeling receiving the award, I did not feel truly happy afterwards as my achievement did not benefit others in the process. As nobody else benefitted from my achievements, I did not feel like a productive member of society. Moreover, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 provides additional evidence supporting this claim. One of its major themes is happiness, rather the lack of happiness. In his novel, the protagonists Guy Montag and Mildred Montag live individualistic lives and their achievements do not benefit others in their society. Furthermore, everyone in the dystopian society live lives that are rather miserable accompanied by antidepressant medication and many suicide attempts. The characters in this society do not live lives of true happiness. Therefore, it can be said that if the achievements do not make one feel happy, then they do not benefit others in the process. Taking the contrapositive of the previous statement, if the achievements do benefit others, then they make one feel happy. This provides further evidence that our achievements must indeed benefit others in order to make us truly
Are you really happy? Or are you sad about something? Sad about life or money, or your job? Any of these things you can be sad of. Most likely you feel discontentment a few times a day and you still call yourself happy. These are the questions that Guy Montag asks himself in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this book people are thinking they are happy with their lives. This is only because life is going so fast that they think they are but really there is things to be sad about. Montag has finally met Clarisse, the one person in his society that stops to smell the roses still. She is the one that gets him thinking about how his life really is sad and he was just moving too fast to see it. He realizes that he is sad about pretty much everything in his life and that the government tries to trick the people by listening to the parlor and the seashells. This is just to distract people from actual emotions. People are always in a hurry. They have 200 foot billboards for people driving because they are driving so fast that they need more time to see the advertisement. Now I am going to show you who are happy and not happy in the book and how our society today is also unhappy.
The theme of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 can be viewed from several different angles. First and foremost, Bradbury's novel gives an anti-censorship message. Bradbury understood censorship to be a natural outcropping of an overly tolerant society. Once one group objects to something someone has written, that book is modified and censorship begins. Soon, another minority group objects to something else in the book, and it is again edited until eventually the book is banned altogether. In Bradbury's novel, society has evolved to such an extreme that all literature is illegal to possess. No longer can books be read, not only because they might offend someone, but because books raise questions that often lead to revolutions and even anarchy. The intellectual thinking that arises from reading books can often be dangerous, and the government doesn't want to put up with this danger. Yet this philosophy, according to Bradbury, completely ignores the benefits of knowledge. Yes, knowledge can cause disharmony, but in many ways, knowledge of the past, which is recorded in books, can prevent man from making similar mistakes in the present and future.
“Remember when we had to actually do things back in 2015, when people barely had technology and everyday life was so difficult and different? When people read and thought and had passions, dreams, loves, and happiness?” This is what the people of the book Fahrenheit 451 were thinking, well that is if they thought at all or even remembered what life used to be like before society was changed.
“Revealing the truth is like lighting a match. It can bring light or it can set your world on fire” (Sydney Rogers). In other words revealing the truth hurts and it can either solve things or it can make them much worse. This quote relates to Fahrenheit 451 because Montag was hiding a huge book stash, and once he revealed it to his wife, Mildred everything went downhill. Our relationships are complete opposites. There are many differences between Fahrenheit 451 and our society, they just have a different way of seeing life.
You take advantage of your life every day. Have you ever wondered why? You never really think about how much independence you have and how some of us treat books like they’re useless. What you don’t realize is that both of those things are the reason that we live in such a free society. If we didn’t have books and independence, we would treat death and many other important things as if it were no big deal. That is the whole point of Ray Bradbury writing this book.
The North Korean government is known as authoritarian socialist; one-man dictatorship. North Korea could be considered a start of a dystopia. Dystopia is a community or society where people are unhappy and usually not treated fairly. This relates how Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 shows the readers how a lost of connections with people and think for themselves can lead to a corrupt and violent society known as a dystopia.
Fahrenheit 451’s Relevance to Today Fahrenheit 451’s relevance to today can be very detailed and prophetic when we take a deep look into our American society. Although we are not living in a communist setting with extreme war waging on, we have gained technologies similar to the ones Bradbury spoke of in Fahrenheit 451 and a stubborn civilization that holds an absence of the little things we should enjoy. Bradbury sees the future of America as a dystopia, yet we still hold problematic issues without the title of disaster, as it is well hidden under our democracy today. Fahrenheit 451 is much like our world today, which includes television, the loss of free speech, and the loss of the education and use of books. Patai explains that Bradbury saw that people would soon be controlled by the television and saw it as the creators chance to “replace lived experience” (Patai 2).
An Idiot’s Life Imagine living in a society where people are not cherished, and life is not valuable. Also, all of your opinions are taken as a grain of salt. The story Fahrenheit 451, takes place in a society where there are conflicting ideas because of the censorship of the government. In this society they are not allowed to read any books that could possibly produce hate. If someone gets caught reading books then the ‘firemen’ will come and burn all the books and once they are finished burning them, they will arrest the person.
Ray Bradbury was describing the way humans depend on technology. Human connection is the ability to talk to each other; in Fahrenheit 451, the connection between humans is very slim and pointless. Throughout the book, there are many examples on how reliable the technology is for them and when taken away, has a major effect on these people. The loss of human interaction in Fahrenheit 451 leads to society where nobody thinks for themselves, is seen on the dependence of technology, and creates a false sense of emotions in an uncaring society.
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical about them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us, this is pulled from the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. 451, the temperature that a book will turn to ash, in this book one sees the true extent of a world without words, this lack of books leads to a lack of freedom. This concept is present in Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.
The idea that anyone can affect change in the world is very intriguing. So many people change the world daily with their decisions and who they share their ideas with. Where would the world be without those people? If Steve Jobs was never born, would there be the iPhone we know today? Without Thomas Edison, would the world have light?
In the novel Fahrenheit 451 all the characters play a critical role to the theme. The theme of the novel is to do things your own way, to not follow the rules but instead to make your own and live life. In the novel the rules or laws of the society are very different compared to ours, in the novel you are prohibited to have any sort of literature or any other type of educational tools. Their government controls everything including how they live, there is just about no freedom for anyone. Now there are characters who follow the laws and live like robots programmed by the government, but there are others who think and read and break the laws to live their life their way.
Buddhism is known for happiness. Happiness can be achieved by genuinely practicing meditation. Meditation is the central practice of Buddhism. Practicing Buddhism gives one a way of finding answers to deep questions about life and the nature of reality. “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What is the meaning of life?” “Why do we suffer?” and “How can I achieve lasting happiness?” As the Dalai Lama commented,
Happiness is a challenging emotion or state of mind that is hard to define. It is remarkably difficult because every person on earth has a dissimilar view on happiness. Happiness should be understood as something that fulfills the person’s abilities. If he or she achieves happiness, then that equates to a balance of pleasure, honor, and self-sufficiency. Aristotle believes the greatest good is happiness. He describes happiness as, “an activity that is guided by and exercises the human virtues” (60). Is the highest good happiness? What are the characteristics of good? Do we all require habituation to become good? Such questions as these stirs up emotional reactions among debates of the topic.
The article, How Do Simple Activities Increase Well-Being?, by Lyubormirsky and Layous starts of with an abstract that is a short summary or analysis of the research article to help the reader understand the concept better. This article was about how people can increase happiness by “simple intentional positive activities, such as expressing gratitude or practicing kindness.” Investigators have recently begun to study the optimal conditions under which positive activities increase happiness and the mechanisms by which these effects work.” The authors’ reports that happiness not only feels good, it is good. Happier people have more stable marriages, stronger immune systems, higher incomes, and more creative ideas than people who aren’t as happy.