Happiness Interviews on Happiness Happiness is a complex topic, with often divergent meanings for different people. This paper explores how two people of vastly different backgrounds view and define happiness. One of the interviewees is a female colleague who works as a nurse for a medical surgical unit; the other is my mother, a 72-year-old mother of three who has been married for 45 years. Although the interviews were slightly different for

Happiness Hypothesis I approached Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis with the same sort of hubris that I tend to exhibit when someone asks me if I like a work of art. I am quite confident that I can point to art that I like, while being less consistently able to tell why I like or don't like a work of art. Similarly, I have been quite confident of my ability

Happiness is perhaps the most illusive, but most sought after mental state in life. Like all human experiences, happiness is also a very subjective state; different things make different people happy. This is why it is so difficult to say what happiness is, and why there has been so much disagreement among philosophers, who have nonetheless not been deterred from attempting to describe this elusive emotion. Both Plato and Aristotle

Happiness -- its true value and the right means of achieving it -- has been pondered by many people including Plato and Socrates, Stoics, church fathers and Aristotelians. Philosophers have had different arguments including that happiness is a matter of: faith, passion, reason, pleasure and/or contentment, mind and/or body. Some of them have also argued that happiness is a way of being or feeling. Who is happy? Who are the people who

According to utilitarian ethical theory, a lie would be very moral indeed if it increased someone's happiness without creating detriment to anyone -- telling a child that their unintelligible crayon markings is a great picture of a house, for instance, boosts their self-esteem and helps them to feel loved, and no one in the art world suffers for this white lie. Utilitarianism also provides a solution to conflicting duties that

In fact, both Weiner and Cutler have described the same thing, in a sense, yet through very different lenses. For some, money becomes less and less important if there is enough, but for others who truly know happiness, this is something that truly has no bearing on how one leads his or her life. How Society and Media Impact One's Happiness This last section will describe how media impact happiness. For