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Angelique Vasquez Professor Susan Lago English 1100-41 09/19/13 The Appreciation of Sadness Both Kingwell and Seniors essays pondered on the question what is happiness? and how can you determine your happiness? These questions have found their ways to our heads at least once in our lives. Even after all the researching we do to find the answers we are unhappy with the outcome. We learn there is no single answer good enough for these questions. Mark and Seniors passages agree that the search, the questioning, of happiness can only result in unhappiness. It seems to me were asking the wrong question. Maybe the question we should be asking is is sadness a necessity in our lives? Chris Peterson designed a test called the Authentic Happiness Inventory. This test determines your happiness on a scale from 1 to 5 based on age, education level, gender, occupation, zip code, religious vies and your own brain chemistry. I scored a 2.96. My score was below average for all categorizes except for educational level, where I stood on the 50% mark. Chris Peterson warns that these are not representative respondents, these are just people who had logged on to their website and took the happiness measure. Jennifer gives an example of what Peterson meant, hundreds of mental patients from Chicago could have decided to take the test, while only fifteen Buddhists in Baja did the same, which would result in a very skewed perception of the well-being of Chicagoans and Bajans (Senior 422). Even after knowing this

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information I am still content with my personal score. For some reason, it reassured me that I am happy and that I am a pretty happy person. It turns out that we define and remember our experiences by their highs, lows, and how they end. This point in my life is what Ill remember as the lows. I have always put this idea in my head that when I turn 18 I will finally be able to move out of the house and get to enjoy my life as an independent college student. Moving in day I was so happy, so full of excitement because this is what I have been waiting for, for so long. But this is not what I was expecting at all. My friends know me as talkative, energetic and as forever smiling. But my friends are not here, Im on my own and I feel alone. The late Christopher Reeve once said I didnt appreciate others nearly as much I do now and Jennifer Senior says no matter where they live, human beings are terrible predictors of what will make them happy (Senior 426). I made the decision to leave home and all that I know and love, thinking I would be happier somewhere else. My imagination had carried me away and got the best of me. In contrast to Jennifers finding of Chris Petersons Authentic Happiness Inventory, Mark Kingwells passage briefly writes about two psychologists from the University of Illinois named Edward and Carol Diener. The two reported in Psychological Science magazine that their study of surveys from more than forty countries demonstrated that money, education, and family background were less important in determining ones level of happiness than was basic genetic predisposition. In 1996, several genetic and behavioral studies appeared in specific journals that offered evidence to support the conclusion that ones achievable degree of happiness is genetically determined (Kingwell 414). In other words they believe that your happiness level is already set in stone and nothing you do will change when or of how much emotion you will feel.

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Other studies show that someone who goes to work in overalls on the bus can be/feel just as happy as a person who wear suits and ties and drives a Mercedes. Everyone thinks they know something about what happiness is; very few people manage to convince anyone else that they are right (Kingwell 413). Theres an untold distance between knowing happiness and knowing about it (Senior 475). Maybe there really is no direct answer to what happiness is or how we can measure it but I believe in these two authors search for happiness they realized to just enjoy when youre happy and when youre not because that makes it all better.

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Works Cited Berhrens, Laurence, and Leonard Rosen. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum 12th Edition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2013. Print. Kingwell, Mark. In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac. New York: Crown Publishers, 1998. Print. Senior, Jennifer. "Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness." New York Magazine 17 July 2006: n. pag. Print.