Rachel Walker Professor Lago College Writing 16 September 2013 Happiness Happiness can be defined in many ways, but

how one achieves complete happiness is a question as old as time. Sadness is a key component in achieving happiness and as our lives go on we will learn this. To know what it is to be happy, one must know what it is to be sad and in Mark Kingwells essay, In Pursuit of Happiness, and Jennifer Seniors, Some Dark thoughts on Happiness, the authors explain why. In order to be happy someone must feel sorrow first. I have felt sorrow and happiness. When my boyfriend and I broke up I was sad and felt lonely. The memories I had with him kept replaying in my head. At first it was hard to deal with, but after a while things got easier. I began to feel happiness again and realized I didnt need him to live my life. On the online Authentic Happiness Inventory test while my boyfriend and I were still dating. My happiness score was 3.38 out of 5.0. Which means I am a generally happy person. The desire to understand happiness, to get hold of it, that is common in our culture, central to our many daily judgments about life, love, work, politics, and play (Kingwell 413). In a social perspective we encounter sadness and happiness through each of these. Love can make someone feel butterflies in their stomach, until the person they thought would never hurt them does. A woman can go from being loved and happy to lonely and heartbroken in a matter of seconds. In Seniors essay, she tells us that the

people that seem happy truthfully arent. For example, married people are happier than those who are not. On the former point, Seligmans book cites a 35,000-person poll from the National Opinion Research Center, in which 40 percent of married Americans described themselves as very happy, compared with just 24 percent of unmarried Americans who said the same (Senior 425). Smarter people arent any happier, attractive people are slightly happier than unattractive people, and men arent any happier than women. As a species we look at other humans that are happy and become jealous, wishing we had the happiness that they have. In a poll done by the Roper organization, the Danes, Americans, and the Australians rated themselves the happiest (Senior 426). People of the Eastern European nations like Lithuania, Estonia, and Romania rate themselves the least happy. However a study shows that the people in the happiest countries are more likely to commit suicide (Senior 426).