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Stephanie Hernandez

Professor Jon Beadle

English 114A

28 November 2018

The Truth Behind Happiness

Happiness can become a very controversial topic. Many will argue that it is all part of

nature where others might say that you make your own happiness. Everyone has their own

perspective on happiness and tend to express it in different forms. Some express it through

writing, telling a story, and inclusively by doing research on it and stating facts. The three

authors, David Brooks, Graham Hill, and Sonja Lyubomirsky present a very similar idea of

happiness but the way they present and inform their intended audience was different because

they used different tactics and persuasion methods. The similarity in the three articles is that they

tend to use rhetorical situations where they can incorporate feeling, credibility, and logic to

captivate the reader; whereas the difference in the three articles is how the authors personalize

and interpret their own happiness experiences versus gathering information on people’s

happiness.

Coping with suffering doesn’t always allow someone to preserve who they once were.

Individuals cope with suffering differently and the outcomes will differ as well. As mentioned in

the article, “What suffering does”, “Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a

disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different” (Brooks, 287). To many,

suffering has a deeper meaning which leads them to have a change that comes within. Reading

that line in the article causes the reader to reflect on their life on how they tend to feel after
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dealing with hard situations. That feeling of reflection in life and how one deals with certain

situations on life is the incorporation of emotion. The same article mentions, “Just as failure is

sometimes just failure (and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs) suffering is

sometimes just destructive, to be exited as quickly as possible” (Brooks, 284). The term failure

scares people and the best way to deal with it is either by learning from it or by making it seem

unimportant, but simply just exhale it from your body so that your happiness is destroyed. The

use of Steve Jobs here is a use of credibility because he is a very well-known person and it

allows the reader to understand that life isn’t always what one expects; everything in life happens

for a reason. Sometimes one goes through difficult moments in order to find the precious

valuable ones. Brooks also mentions: “physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s

perspective, an attuned awareness of what other outsiders are enduring” (286). The use of one’s

sense of emotion is being used because going through pain allows people to understand

experiences others are going through. That signalizes that there are others just like them and that

they can do something to help each other with sadness and turn that into joy. Suffering is

something that not everyone knows how to deal with because they aren’t taught how to deal with

it.

Materialistic things don’t always make one happy; they make one realize that they can’t

buy happiness, and, in the end, it only makes us see how lonely we truly are. The article, “Living

with Less. A lot Less” by Graham Hill talks about how having nothing at the beginning and

building up to having it all but no one to share it with is the unhappiest thing in life. There was

an indication from the author in the story that he had bought himself a four-story house,

expensive glasses, gadgets, and a five-disc CD player, all in celebration of him and his associate

selling their Internet company for far more money than expected (Hill, 308). Having everything
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he once wished made him extremely happy because everything seemed so surreal to him. This is

a form of emotion involving ethics because the author is telling his own relatable story where

many can relate and being completely honest in how the money was being used and taken

advantage of. Many will understand the authors perspectives and notice how something similar

has happened to them. Through time the author came into a realization that it was all

overwhelming and he didn’t really know what to do because he mentions that he would question

himself in what he had become now and how he was dealing with unnecessary things that he

didn’t want (Hill, 309). This is also a form of pathos because the intended audience might

understand the pain he is going through and how unhappy he was. His audience could probably

think of a moment where they had a lot of things that they didn’t need or want, yet they still

ended up getting them. A 15-year period went by for the author to realize that he can get rid of

everything he once had and live a happier life with much less (Hill, 309). To truly be happy, you

need to live life and through time understand that money and materialistic things aren’t

everything life has to give.

Happiness comes from different factors and not one thing in specific defines it. As the article,

“How Happy Are You and Why?” explains, conducting research on people and have them

briefly explain their entire life from birth and comparing them to people who had a harsh

childhood and are always positive and happy, to the people who had a similar childhood and

letting that affect their happiness now as adults (Lyubomirsky, 179). This use of logic of how

one tends to run their life defines someone’s happiness and how they decide to live life. Their

early life experiences would shape their future. Not only early life experiences will affect future

life, but it also comes from your own blood, your own family. Happiness can come from

genetics; fraternal twins will have a different happiness from one another whereas identical twins
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will have the same happiness no matter if they are separated at birth or not (Lyubomirsky, 188-

189). The way one deals with happiness must have something to do with ancestors, because, as

mentioned sometimes it is already a part of you, and you can’t really change that. Ancestors life

style will depend how happy you are able to be in your life or how you are able to manage

happiness. All one can do is bare with it and remain as positive as you can be.

Between the three articles, there are differences as well as similarities. Some of the

similarities between them are that they all incorporate happiness and the way one deals with it.

For example, in the articles “What Suffering Does” by David Brooks, “Living with Less. A lot

Less” by Graham Hill and “How Happy Are You and Why” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, you can

infer that something happened in the characters life where it put them in a situation where they

were unhappy and doing a turn on them so that they can finally be how they always wanted to

be, happy. “Living with Less. A Lot Less” and “How Happy Are You and Why?”, both mention

a story on how their life experiences brought them to be the happy person they are today. The

form of expressing happiness can be expressed in many different forms.

Some of the differences between these articles is that “How Happy Are You and Why” is an

article that expresses many different scenarios on happiness and has real life situations since it is

a research-based paper. The article “Living with Less. A Lot Less”, is a personal story that the

author explains on what he went through and how they dealt with having nothing and being sad

to where he had everything and was still unhappy until one day he was able to realize that having

it all wasn’t making him happy. That was when he made a change in his life that made him

happy. “What Suffering Does” is an article that tells a story on how one deals with suffering and

how some people aren’t able to be the happy person they once were. Every article depicts
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happiness in their own perspective and express it differently without changing the meaning of the

original topic.

The way that people deal with their happiness is different from everyone. Some take different

measures to ensure that their happiness shows and rubs off on others, while others don’t see a

point in being happy and just drain in their bad energy. As mentioned above, there isn’t anything

that defines ones’ happiness, all you must do is work for it and make the best of it. The only

person that can know what makes one happy is yourself and no one will do it for you. The truth

is that happiness isn’t set by one thing, but by multiple events in one’s life.
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Works Cited

Brooks, David. “What Suffering Does.” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt and

Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 284-287

Hill, Graham. “Living with Less. A Lot Less.” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt

and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 308-313

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. “How Happy Are You and Why?” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew

Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 179-197