Amira Aquarian

Section 2

Class Source 1 : ​Happy

Citation:
Belic, Roko, director. ​Happy​. H
​ appy​, 2011.

Summary:
The main argument of the movie ​“Happy” ​is, that the world has perceived happiness as
money, success, and fame, but the happiest people have the closest connects with family and
friends, and they do what they want to do in life. In this movie, they visit different countries and
communities, they ask if they are happy, and if so why. In the video, they say, 50% of people's
happiness is from genetics, 10% is from jobs, money, etc, and the last 40% is from intentional
activity. They also talk about the concept of a treadmill and intrinsic vs. extrinsic. The treadmill is
how we always want more, how we want the new things, and how it only keeps us temporarily
happy. Extrinsic is basically our outer selves, how much money we have, our image, and our
status. Whereas, intrinsic is the opposite of that, it focuses more on our inner selves, our
personal growth, relationships, and the desire to help others around us. In conclusion, this
movie was talking about how what we believe makes us happy really is only 10% of the reality,
and that doing the stuff we love and care for is what creates true happiness for a person.

Assessment:
This is a very strong and reliable source about happiness. They interviewed many
different types of people in this movie in order to get a lot of different data, but at the same time,
they were getting the same results. They are able to prove strongly backup their information
with evidence. They used statistics, people's life stories, research, etc. to be able to back up
their argument, which to me creates a very strong source.

Reflection:
This movie has helped me to start answering the essential questions, “what is the truth
of happiness?” by, proving that what the world has had us to believe of what makes us happy is
a lie. They use life stories, statistics, and research to prove that happiness is not from money or
success so much as relationships with family and friends, enjoying what you are doing in life,
and doing things for yourself, not for money.

Evidence:
1. “Each person has to be what they want to be.”
2. “Surfing for me is religion.”
3. “I don’t understand, and I don’t need to understand, that’s ok.”
4. “There isn’t pleasure without pain.”
5. “Business if more important than relationships.”
6. “We are all brothers and sisters”
 Class Source 2 : There’s More to Life Than Being Happy

Citation:
Smith, Emily Esfahani. “There's More to Life Than Being Happy.” ​The Atlantic​, The
Atlantis Monthly Group, 2015,
www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/26
6805/​.

Summary:
The main argument of this article is that meaning and happiness are two very different
things, and that they both have key components that tie into them. In the article they say that
meaning improves you mental and physical health, develops flexibility, increases self-esteems
and lessens the chances of depression. It also interpreted meaning as being a giver. Where as,
happiness is defined as being a taker. They argue that having meaning in your life can help you
more than having happiness. And also that having more money actually decreases how happy
and meaningful you life is, it has more of an affect on your individual happiness. They compare
humans to animals, and have come to a conclusion that it’s not the “pursuit of happiness” that
sets us apart but more of the “pursuit of meaning”. One last thing they said, was that you can’t
have true happiness on life without suffering first.

Assessment:
I do think that this is a well backed up article, but I disagree with alot of what it say. It
seems as though the author is really biased. She does state her points well, and did use
evidence to back up her reasoning, so I do think it was well written, but I just don’t agree with
the content. She is a reliable source since she has appeared in ​Wall Street Journal, New York
Times, The Atlantic, The New Criterion, ​etc., as well as a former managing editor of the ​New
Criterion​ and is an editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Reflection:
The article ​There’s More to Life Than Being Happy​ by Emily Esfahani Smith has helped
me answer the essential question, “What is the truth of happiness?”. Even though it argues that
meaning is different from happiness, while reading it, it made me think about the fact that having
meaning in your life can be an essential part of happiness for someone. They also brought up
the point that you can’t find or have true individual happiness without suffering in life first, which
I totally agree with and think that that’s a part of true happiness.

Evidence:
1. “To the European,” Frankl wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again
and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be
pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’”
2. “...the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but
are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated
with beina “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a “giver.”
3. “”Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even
selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or
taxing entanglements are avoided,” the authors wrote.”
4. “Happiness, they found, is about feeling good.”
5. “While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider
your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness.”
6. “People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want.”
7. ““Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving from others while people leading
meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving others,” explained Kathleen Vohs,...”
8. “Happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away.”
9. “”If there is meaning in life at all,” Frankl wrote, “then there must be meaning in
suffering.””
 Class Source 3 : The New Era of Positive Psychology

Citation:
Seligman, Martin, director. ​The New Era of Positive Psychology.​ ​The New Era of
Positive Psychology​, TEDx, www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology .

Summary:
In the TEDx, “The New Era of Positive Psychology”, Martin Seligman talks about the “not
good enough” psychology and how it can be turned into “good enough”. He talks about how
they have been using psychology to make miserable people less miserable and working on
repairing damage instead of making normal people happier. He makes a point that people don’t
always get happy from the absence of sadness. During the Ted talk, he asks two questions,
how do miserable people differ from the rest of us?, and how do extremely happy people differ
from the rest of us?. He proves that the extremely happy people are social, usually engaged in
romantic relationships, and has a good range of friends. And last, he brings up the topic of three
different types of “Happy Lives”, those being: the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful
life.

Assessment:
I found this source was very reliable and had well backed up key points, as well as
different experiments on the topic. He brung up some really good ideas that I haven’t thought
about before and explained them well. Martin has been researching positive psychology since
the late 1990s, so he has a lot of experience and is well educated.

Reflection:
This video has helped me answer the essential question, “what is the truth of
happiness?”, because Martin Seligman talked about how people are not always happy when
there is an absence of sadness. This is similar to the article “​There’s More to Life Than Being
Happy”, ​because they both have come to a conclusion that there isn’t happiness without misery
or sadness.​ ​He also states the three things that the general population of extremely happy
people have, social interactions, romantic relationships, and friends. Many researchers have
found similar results, so I assume that is a big part of the truth of happiness.

Evidence:
1. “”Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?” Not good
enough.””
2. “Psychology and psychiatry of the last 60 years can actually claim that we can
make miserable people less miserable. And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of
it.But what was not good, the consequences of that, were three things.”
3. “We forgot about improving normal lives. We forgot about a mission to make
relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive.”
4. “But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to
its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making
 miserable people less miserable, is, can psychology actually make people
happier?”
5. “ He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness, and that's because Len, like
most of you, is enormously capable of flow.”
6. “The first path, positive emotion; the second path is eudaimonian flow; and the
third path is meaning. This is the most venerable of the happinesses,
traditionally. And meaning, in this view, consists of -- very parallel to eudaemonia
-- it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to
belong to and in the service of something larger than you are.”
7. “ To what extent does the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of positive emotion, the
pleasant life, the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you, and the pursuit of
meaning contribute to life satisfaction?”
8. “ It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction.
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. The pursuit of engagement is also very
strong.”
9. “ I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero; that they were empty.”
10. “And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life, the skills of
engagement, the skills of meaning, are different from the skills of relieving
misery.”
 Class Source 4 : Want to be happier? Stay in the moment

Citation:
“Want to Be Happier? Stay in the Moment.” Performance by Matt Killingsworth, ​Want to
Be Happier? Stay in the Moment​, TEDx, Nov. 2011,
www.ted.com/talks/matt_killingsworth_want_to_be_happier_stay_in_the_moment#t-592884​.

Summary:
Matt Killingsworth talks about happiness, mind wandering, and unhappiness. He talks
about how we have our house, car, job, technology, etc, all for happiness, but in reality, it in sot
making us any happier. Matt started to experiment with people's happiness, he connected to
people iPhones and he randomly asked them if they were happy and what they were doing. He
made sure that he had a wide range of people that he experimented with, and his results had,
over 65,000 reports, about 15,000 people and 80 countries. And last, he focuses on the concept
of mind wandering. He compares happiness the mind wandering and finds that people in the
present moment is happier than people who mind wander. He then asks the question, does
mind wandering create unhappiness or does a person's unhappiness end up with their mind
wandering.

Assessment:
I felt like this source was strong and reliable. Matt made some really good points and he
backed it up with evidence and sometimes humor. The fact that he actually experimented with
his research made it even more reliable. He collected data from people's everyday lives which
means he can connect his results to a general person's life.

Reflection:
This TEDx talk has helped me answer the essential question, “what is the truth of
happiness?” because, he talks about mind wandering, and that is something that I can
personally connect to. Knowing that mind wandering, even if it’s about something pleasant, still
makes most people unhappy can help me answer the question, what makes people unhappy,
which is a big part in solving the essential question.

Evidence:
1. “​So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else,
they want happiness.”
2. “The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our
lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier.”
3. “...happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment
experiences.”
4. “ As it turns out, people are less happy when they're mind-wandering no matter
what they're doing.”
5. “ a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about
unpleasant things, and they are enormously less happy when they do that, our
 worries, our anxieties, our regrets, and yet even when people are thinking about
something neutral, they're still considerably less happy than when they're not
mind-wandering at all.”
6. “...mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy.”
7. “...no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering at least 30 percent
of the time,...”

My Research Question:

Why does doing what you love in the long run, make you happier than success?
 Individual Source 1 : Live Happier by Doing What You Love

Citation:
Rainier, Maria. “Live Happier by Doing What You Love.” ​Undercover Recruiter​,
theundercoverrecruiter.com/live-happier-doing-what-you-love-why-you-should-change-careers/.

Summary:
The article “Live Happier by Doing What You Love” talks about, how to find a job while
being happy at the same time. Maria talks about how many people choose certain job in order
to feel secure instead of finding a job that you have passion about. She then states that 65% of
all people are dissatisfied with their lives. Also another important thing that Maria Rainier states
is, when finding a job, to mostly focus on the actual job instead of how much it pays.

Assessment:
This source states some good facts and also a strong statistic, but she doesn’t have any
major evidence backing it up which is an important component when writing a strong article. I do
agree with everything that Maria states though.

Reflection:
This article helps me answer the essential question “what is the truth to happiness?”,
because the author wrote that if you aren’t working in a job that you like or find passion within,
you with unlikely be happy in your life. I think this helps answer the questions because, what I
got from this source is that you shouldn’t be as worried about money and be more focused on
doing what you love and have passion for.

Evidence:
1. “Often you choose something different than your instinctual response to that
question, either out of necessity or concern for security.”
2. If you aren’t working a job that is aligned with your passion, it is very unlikely that
you will feel fulfilled or truly happy with your life.”
3. “...doing something you love will make you happier than being paid for doing
something you hate.”
4. “Being happy is not the same as being rich.”
 Individual Source 2 : Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love

Citation:
Schesinger, Leonard A, et al. “Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You
Love.”​Harvard Business Review​, 2012, hbr.org/2012/03/choosing-between-making-money.

Summary:
The article written by Leonard Schesinger, Charles Kiefer, and Paul Brown called,
“​Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love” ​is about, answering the
question, “if you’re really passionate about what you do, but it’s not going to make you a lot of
money, should you still do it?”​ ​What they mostly talk about in there article is how people know
what they desire and have passion for, but they are just worried about the money aspect.
People are questioning if they should do what they love and then worry about money, or if they
should worry about money first and then one they have enough, then start doing what they
want. In one of the first paragraphs of the article, they state, “...lets be real, none of this
guarantees wealth, or even financial success.” I think what they are trying to say is, you should
do what you love and have passion for, but it won’t always turn into a success money wise.

Assessment:
The author’s had some good points in this article, but from what I read, they did have
one of the most important things needed to make it a strong resource; evidence. The only thing
they had to prove their point was a story about one of their friends, which isn’t a very reliable
source. If they added some good evidence to back up their writing, it would have been a lot
stronger and reliable.

Reflection:
This source has helped me answer the essential question, “what is the truth of
happiness?” because, what they are trying to argue is, even if you don’t get as much money as
you would like, you should still follow the path you want to be on. That you should be more
focused on what you love in life, then how much money you want.

Evidence:
1. “...none of this guarantees wealth, or even financial success.”
2. I have the desire, but I am pretty certain it’s not going to lead anywhere that’s
momentarily profitable. Now what? Should I still go ahead?”
3. “...people who make progress everyday towards something they care about
report being satisfied and fulfilled.
4. “...more than enough money to reconsider whether they want to continue to do
things that are not making them happy, just because it’ll make them more
money.”
5. “Once I get enough money, I’ll do what I really want to do. I won’t worry about the
money.”
 Individual Source 3 : Being Happy Is More Important Than Being Successful

Citation:
Roy, Riyanka. “Being Happy Is More Important Than Being Successful.” ​Thrive Global​,
2018,​www.thriveglobal.com/stories/12587-being-happy-is-more-important-than-being-successful

.Summary:
The article “​Being Happy Is More Important Than Being Successful”​ written by Riyanka
Roy is about, how first comes happiness and then success not the other way around. The
author makes a connection to running a race, she says that everybody is running a race, but
that most of them don’t where to stop or what the finishing line looks like. Throughout the article,
Riyanka describes what success is and what happiness is many times. For example, the first
thing she describes success as is, living a life with plans, whereas happiness is living a life with
passion. The last thing she says in her article is, “Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.”

Assessment:
I really liked this article, the author really dug into the subject at hand, she added a lot of
good points. She also pulled in quotes from multiple people that positively added to her
argument. She did connect to our 21st century world, which made it even more reliable because
it is information on our world today. One thing I do think she is lacking is, experiments and hard
evidence.

Reflection:
This article has helped me answer the essential question, “what is the truth of
happiness?”, because the author, Riyanka Roy talked about not depending on other people's
plan for your life because most likely, they haven’t planned much, instead, making your own
plans, guiding your own life and making it how you want it to be. I think that is a major
component in finding true happiness.

Evidence:
1. “If you don’t design your own life plans, chances are you’ll fall into someone
else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”
2. “Success means living a life with plans. Happiness is living a life with passion.”
3. “You’ll realize that it’s worth taking the time to get to know yourself and to figure
out what you’re actually passionate about.”
4. “...just for the sake of money.”
5. “Success is working for your own betterment. Happiness is working for the
other’s.”
6. “Success is growing alone, happiness is growing with other’s.”
7. “Happiness that you’ll experience will be priceless.”
8. “Success is striving for more, happiness is being content with what you have.”
9. “Success is having enough wealth. Happiness is having healthy relationships.”
10. “Wealth can’t be your staircase to happiness.”
11. “Money is never a guarantee of happiness!”
12. “It’ll yield you better benefits of love and shared experiences that money can
never buy.”
13. “You won’t have to sweat to get the opportunities that you’ve dreamed of.
Instead, those opportunities will come knocking at your doors.”
14. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you
love what you are doing, you will be successful.”