Can Money Buy You Happiness Essay

What Happiness Is In the essay “What Happiness Is,” Eduardo Porter states that happiness is a slippery concept. He believes that happiness doesn’t have a specific definition, it means different things to each person. In the essay happiness is broken down into 3 parts: satisfaction, positive feelings, and the absence of negative feelings. Porter says that most people think that money and economic stability will bring them happiness and because of that they will push themselves to do better at their jobs. He also states that people choose to do things that make them instantaneously happy, even though that choice could harm them in the long run.

This discovery explains that “nothing in your own life plans or aspirations and accomplishments will alter a built in, hardwired capacity for contentment,” (Kingwell). Genetics determines a person’s ability to obtain certain levels of happiness despite their search for happiness. Although genetics are a limiting factor towards one’s contentment, even the geneticists do not have a definition of happiness. In the conclusion, Kingwell asserts that philosophical thinkers have some truth in their thinking that questioning the definition will lead to unhappiness and he also believes that the geneticists are only looking at the facts instead of introspectively “raising the deeper question of what they, or we, mean by happiness,” (Kingwell). This type of thinking, the kind that limits the human understanding of happiness, is the hurdle /limiting factor/ that puts a damper on finding the true definition.

. . and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment. Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word ‘selfishness’ is: concern with one’s own interests” With this view Ayn Rand gave an entirely new meaning to the concept of egoism. So, striving for your rational self-interest is to strive for your own happiness and this can only be done if everybody strives for their own interest and their own happiness.

The sky is limited to what you can build, and what can happen to you and your family" expressed Sanford I. Weill. With low levels of belief in the value of hard work and high levels of stress among poor respondents in the U.S. as a starting point, it compares optimism about the future across poor respondents of difference races. The poor minorities were much more optimistic about the future than other people. There are high costs to being poor in America, where winners win big losers fall hard. Indeed, the dream, with its focus on individual initiative in a meritocracy, has resulted in far less public support than there is in other countries for safety nets, vocational training, and community support for those with disadvantage or bad

Some people believe that money buys happiness.However others think believe that working hard and being successful will bring them happiness. Money cannot buy you happiness, money can buy things such as clothes, cars, electronics, etc. The way you use your money can create the life you desire. The pursuit of happiness gives you more pleasure than attaining them, for instance lottery winners do not know the value of working and achieving the money to be happy. Also the Declaration of Independence states that we have the right to have the pursuit of happiness, and in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness based on the novel The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner it shows how Gardner went on a journey to find his happiness.

Americans never seem to be fulfilled, and they end up spending their lives trying to fill an endless desire. Although, in the end of Paul Piff’s T.E.D. Talk, he explains his last case study. In this study, people are shown a video about childhood poverty. In Piff’s discoveries, rich people were just as willing to help out an underprivileged person just as much as ordinary people were.

According to the excerpt provided, from "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert, in the first paragraph, it says: "...they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter". The main point of this excerpt is conveying, is that being wealthy, does not mean you are happy, or does not mean you will be. If anything, it just gives you a sense of happiness and relief to become wealthy after being poor. Yet, if your wealthy from the start, that does little to no change in making you or keeping you happy. In the excerpt, economist explain that wealth has"declining marginal utility," which is a fancy way of saying

How to please them and do what satisfies them. What consumers want, and what marketers think they want, may be very apparent. For a marketer, it is one of the most important, if not the most important thing to know the wants and needs, and what makes a consumer happy. What really matters to consumers? According to, “The 3 Psychological Triggers that Matter to Happy Customers”, the first trigger is personal touch, making something more personal to the consumer.

It is often thought that the American dream has to do wealth. People often think that the key to happiness and value in one’s life has to do with how much money and possessions they acquire through out there life. But it is showed through the two films and Television show that this is not the case. They all conclude that family and the small things in life is truly whats important. The

In this section I would like to compare two different approaches of the before mentioned concepts of ethics and desire. The first theme that I started my paper with is ethics. Both Levinas and Aristotle in their philosophies strove for the higher good, which for one of them was represented by happiness and for another by the notion of G-d. In their perception this higher good is the eternal truth and understanding of the world. For Levinas, however, the ‘good’ is infinite in a sense that it is not concerned in what is common among all things, but what is entirely unique about each person or thing.