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The pursuit of happiness summary essay
The pursuit of happiness summary essay
Happiness in the brave new world
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The word happiness comes from the word happy, which means to feel or show pleasure or contentment. In the novel, “The Joy Luck Club”, two daughters of the mothers in Joy Luck Club begin to compete with each other. Waverly Jong, is a child chess prodigy. June Woo, struggles to master the piano. The rivalry reflects values of success and worth depicted in the novel, “The Joy Luck Club”. In this novel, happiness does not truly come from the word happy. The daughters in the novel, are constantly being pushed by their mothers to do good in life. June Woo, does not want to play the piano. She does not want to be famous, or do what her mother wants. June Woo does not do what her mother wants. She does not practice piano. She does not succeed.
In the essay Why Happiness, Why Now? Sara Ahmed talks about how one’s goal in life is to find happiness. Ahmed begins her essay with skepticism and her disbeliefs in happiness. She shows her interest in how happiness is linked to a person’s life choices. Ahmed also tries to dig deeper, and instead of asking an unanswerable question, “what is Happiness?” she asks questions about the role of happiness in one’s life.
In this paper this author will introduce three different characters in the movie The Joy Luck Club. The characters that will be analyzed in this paper are June, Lindo and Rose These characters will be in different life stages of their life with different challenges. This author will identify the life challenges the character is facing at that point in their life. Then the author will identify the cultural challenges each character facing and how they impact their life in the movie.
Before we look into specifics, we’ll examine the history and development of “happiness” as a philosophy. Of course, the emotion of happiness has always existed, but it began to be seriously contemplated around 2,500 years ago by philosophers like Confucius, Buddha, Socrates and Aristotle. Shortly after Buddha taught his followers his Noble Eight Fold Path (which we will talk about later), Aristotle was teaching that happiness is “dependent on the individual” (Aristotle).
Jing-Mei was forced to take piano lessons; this only further upset her as she felt that she was a constant disappointment. Her mother was mad at her on a regular basis because Jing-Mei stood up for herself and explained to her that she didn’t want to be a child prodigy.
The Joy Luck Club, is a film that shows a powerful portrayal of four Chinese women and the lives of their children in America. The film presents the conflicting cultures between the United States and China, and how men treat women throughout their lives. People living in the United States usually take for granted their roles as a male or female. The culture of each country shapes the treatment one receives based on the sex of the individual. Gender roles shape this movie and allows people, specifically the United States, to see how gender are so crutcial in othe countries.
Kenzie Kress English 10 Sem. 2 The Joy Luck Club The difficult struggle of finding true identities ate the energy of these young women. “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan is about a group of young mothers and their daughters having issues with their identities as Chinese women in an American world.
A Brave New World is a thrilling combination of both malicious and brilliant morals and symbols. This “Brave New World” is a dystopian society set in 2540 A.D. or 632 A.F. (After Ford). It is a novel about how happiness cannot be artificially grown or taught, it is one’s own and is different for everyone. Bernard and Helmholtz are the only people in their dystopian society to really think for their selves. The most significant characters in the book are Bernard Marx, John the Savage, Lenina Crowne, Mustafa Mond, and Helmholtz Watson. The setting of this novel is primarily in London, England, but changes to New Mexico as well. Huxley’s Brave New World incorporates characteristics of his childhood, critical
In Brave New World, happiness is a topic that is brought up often, this being evident through the constant appearance of soma within the novel. With these constant mentions of happiness, Huxley is trying to tell us what it means to be truly happy. Within the novel, happiness is an artificial emotion created by soma in conjunction with hypnopaedic conditioning. We can see that in the society of Brave New World, happiness, in its traditional sense, has become obsolete; this is evident when Lenina Crowne is in a helicopter with Henry Foster above London and she says that “everybody’s happy now,” (65). This quote shows that within the novel, happiness has become a term that is thrown around casually, just like the drug that is used to induce it. By doing this, Huxley is trying to tell us the difference between artificial happiness and true happiness, what we see in Brave New World being artificial happiness. True happiness requires sacrifice, risk and sadness. As John says, when speaking with Mustapha Mond in his office: “I don 't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want
As the story unfolds, Tan suggests that the piano symbolizes different things. For Ni Kan, it is the unwanted pressure her mother inflicts upon. She argues, “Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius! I can’t play the piano” (751). However, her mother sees it as a way for her daughter to become the best. Ultimately, the young girl decides to rebel against her mother’s wishes. During her piano lessons with Mr. Chong, her piano teacher, she learns easy ways to get out of practicing. Ni Kan discovers “that Old Chong’s eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes [she] was playing” (751). As a result, Ni Kan performs miserably in a talent show where her parents and friends from the Joy Luck Club attend. Feeling the disapproval and shame from her mother, she decides to stop practicing the piano.
...ith Jing Mei and her mother, it is compounded by the fact that there are dual nationalities involved as well. Not only did the mother’s good intentions bring about failure and disappointment from Jing Mei, but rooted in her mother’s culture was the belief that children are to be obedient and give respect to their elders. "Only two kinds of daughters.....those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!" (Tan1) is the comment made by her mother when Jing Mei refuses to continue with piano lessons. In the end, this story shows that not only is the mother-daughter relationship intricately complex but is made even more so with cultural and generational differences added to the mix.
In the book, The How of Happiness, author and researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky sets her book apart from other self-awareness books by being the first to utilize empirical studies. She uses data gained through scientific method to provide support for her hypothesis. This hypothesis consists mainly of the idea that we have the ability to overcome genetic predisposition and circumstantial barriers to happiness by how we think and what we do. She emphasizes that being happier benefits ourselves, our family and our community. “The How of Happiness is science, and the happiness-increasing strategies that [she] and other social psychologists have developed are its key supporting players” (3).
June, who is one of the main characters of the story, has been born in the United States. Her mother, also known as Suyuan, has passed for such a terrible past back to year of 1949 which was a terrible year in China where many people have died because of the Chinese Revolution. After this event, Suyuan decided to immigrate to the United States in order to have a new beginning. June, who was only a little girl, started to do some things that to her mother was a big future because she wanted her to be perfect. June did many things that her mother thought it would a big impact in her life, but after some time June noticed she was not enjoying and putting so much work on the things she was “obligated” to do. The emotional grotesque made June reveal to his mother by saying she is not going to be as perfect as her mother expected her to be, and she will not be nothing that her mother wants her to be. Her mother felt hurt by the words of her daughter, and she gave up hope for her only daughter’s success. At the end of the story, Suyuan gave the piano June used to play the song “pleading child” by Robert Schumann when she was a little girl, and after playing it again she realizes that the song “Perfectly Contented” was part of the song “Pleading Child” which means she finally understood all the work she has sacrificed thanks to her
Early Modern Europe experienced several tragedies in which the citizens sensed that there must be a better way to live where happiness was more familiar. Alterations for what truly defines absolute happiness in a society during these times of catastrophe were expressed through utopian literature. Thomas More’s Utopia, Tomasso Campanella’s City of the Sun, and Caron De Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro together attempt to answer what truly creates a happy civilization during different periods of crisis within Europe. Each of these utopian literature’s suggest a different origin that happiness derives from, soundly signifying that change in Europe would be beneficial. The revolutionary ideas of change in Europe proposed by Utopia, City of the Sun, and The Marriage of Figaro through their individual utopias, demonstrated their beliefs that such change of social classes, the expression of pleasures morally, and a more unified government would lead to a happier, less corrupt society.
According to the Webster dictionary, the word happiness is defined as enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy. When people think of happiness, they think about having a good feeling inside. There are many types of happiness, which are expressed in many ways. Happiness is something that you can't just get; it comes from your soul. Happiness can be changed through many things that happen in our everyday lives.
Happiness is a feeling that cannot be broken if strong enough, no matter how much sadness or hate is around you. Happiness can come from the smallest thing, for instance, music makes me happy and can easily change my mood, or when I am doing something I love my mood is easily changed. For others it could be whenever you do something well, or right and get recognition for it. It is the easiest feeling to be spread and given out but often neglected and forgotten about which is something we should all be more aware