To be honest, this is truly a great topic to me which I am not sure if I could handle, since even for myself, I am not quite sure about what happiness exactly stand or represents for. Besides the uncertainty of me to the word “happiness”, people define the concept of happiness in different ways owing to their very own experience in life. For example, It may probably differ from one stage of life to another, it may be effected by our system of values, it may be taught in our traditional cultural, and so on. But there must be one most important and basic understanding toward the word “happiness” which therefore built out the concept we define it by.
During the
history class this morning, the professor began the class by asking “How many
of you heard of the Harvard Open Course of Positive Psychology?” and later on
he talked about the some ideas professor TalBen-Shahar talked in his course.A person
with happiness must have a specific goal which brings along joyousness and
importance before pursuing it. A truly happy person will live in the way they
feel most meaningful and enjoy every moment of it. Nowadays,
since we lived in such utilitarianism society, we can try to measure happiness
as a profit-seeking business, if that will be easier for most of the people to
understand. By the definition professor TalBen-Shahar suggested what a truly
happy person should be like, and if happiness is the only standard to measure
life, then that would be the ultimate goal for each of us to pursue. It works
in the same way when people measure the success of business, the only standard
is money, that is whatever is not related with finance will not be considered. However,
when dealing with finance problems, profits and loss are the two issues we
could not ignore. So, if compare measuring happiness to measuring the success
of business, how come there in no gain and loss in happiness?
To
say it more specifically, when looking at our life, we can take the negative emotions
as the loss and while the positive emotions as the gain. So when our positive
emotions are more than negative emotions, we eventually feel more profit in
happiness. When the world country profits more in happiness than in business,
will there be much less crimes or social issue among us? Of course, in
different stage of life, we would encounter struggles and frustrations, for
example losing the ones we loved or go through failures, but time eventually
heals all of the sorrows. Moreover, we cannot immerse in the same sadness for
too long, cause once you did it, then you are not living your life, you are
just simple wasting it unwisely. There is never a thing we cannot overcome; the
only thing we could not fight through is mostly ourselves. So, why making life
even harder for yourself when there is much more meaningful thing waiting for you
to accomplish?
