Happiness Essay

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Recommended: Defining happiness

Emily Abramczyk
Section 7
Intro to Philosophy
February 27, 2014
In life, it certainly seems that for most people, happiness is the end goal. People do what they do for many reasons, but quite often their motives are simply fueled by their desire to be happy. However, happiness is attained in many different ways. As Aristotle points out, happiness is achieved through goodness, which is also very complicated. After all, life is not black and white, and our actions are not just good or bad. Rather, our actions can have ends that are intrinsically good or instrumentally good. If they are instrumentally good, then they will allow us to attain something that we can "trade" for something else that will bring us happiness. For example, if we win tickets at an arcade, they would be considered instrumentally good because although they don't bring us happiness, we can trade them in for a prize that does. On the other hand, some things are intrinsically good. We want these things simply because we want them; they bring us pleasure or security. When we obtain these things, we are satisfied with them and we experience happiness.
As mentioned before, happiness is a very complex subject matter, for it means something different to each and every person. In Aristotle's opinion, one needs to have realized and lived up to their potentialities in order to be happy. He notes that since human beings have the unique gift of reason, they are required to fully develop this skill in order to be happy. Yet, we must stop a minute and ask ourselves, "Is this too much of a pretentious assertion?" How do we know that our full potential can only be met if we learn to use the gift of reason? Can we ever be sure that knowledge is not simply an inst...

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...confident, they may be perceived as cocky, and if they are not confident enough, they will be completely ignored. These are cases where the virtue of confidence has been turned into a vice that most definitely will not bring happiness.
Obviously, happiness is quite hard to attain. There is no fairy godmother to wave a wand and grant us happiness. We must go out into the world and seek it out for ourselves. What most people fail to realize about happiness is that it is different for everyone. There is no formula for happiness, only a set of guidelines to help us on our way. We should follow the golden mean and strive for goodness, whatever that may be. In the end, it seems that if we try our best to be good and moral human beings, we might just stumble across happiness in the process. Hey, what can I say, love it or hate it, that is just the way life works.

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