Happiness On Display Despite All, Explained.....

2021

The (net) happiness (or welfare) of an individual is the excess of her positive affective feelings over negative ones. This subjective definition of happiness is more consistent with common usage and analytically more useful. Over the past century or so, both psychology and economics has gone through the anti-subjectivism revolution (behaviorism in psychology and ordinalism in economics) but has come back to largely accept subjectivism (cognitive psychology and recent interest of economists on happiness issues).

Education and Society, 2023

Happiness is the supreme goal of life that everyone desires to acquire because it has positive impact on the quality of life and well-being of the people. Happy person experiences mental or inner peace, more positive emotions like pleasure, joy, love, enjoyment, and less negative emotions like sorrow, anxiety, fear, and pain. The purpose of the present study is to explore the general concept of happiness and its importance. It also discusses different perspectives of happiness and presents the correlation between happiness and other important life domains. An attempt is also made to address one of the most important questions related to happiness i.e., "should happiness be researched".

Math Paper Press, 2010

An anti self-help book for both the morose and the euphoric. Through a deft process of poking and prodding, this treatise deconstructs the perceptions/illusions attached to the notion of happiness and its relation to choice, responsibility, and myriad control mechanisms, revealing the concept of happiness to be a floating signifier without grund. --- Michael Kearney, editor and steering group for Multiculturalism, Conflict & Belonging, Inter-Disciplinary.net On Happiness is a versatile critique of happiness. Kenny Png’s play—‘The Boxes’—dismantles the notion of happiness into the uneasy mantra, “I am happy because I should be happy!” Some ten years later, Jeremy Fernando responds to the play with an undercutting theoretical essay. One of the text’s strengths lies in the fact that the essays and poems are fraught with friendships. In this respect, it is a happy book. --- Setsuko Adachi, Kogakuin University, Tokyo. This book attempts to approach the notion of happiness—and specifically, the question of whether it is possible to be happy—through the apparently paradoxical statement, “I am happy because I should be happy!” This is a treatment of the possibility of happiness without a reliance on the usual subjective notions of freedom, and choice. Hence, this is an attempt to think the impossible—perhaps even defend the undefendable—and posit that happiness is a state of otherness; one that seizes you, and perhaps even ceases you. What is called into question is the logic that ‘you can choose to be happy’—the hinge on which the entire ‘self-help’ genre revolves. Not only is this an anthropocentric gesture—as if the self is the centre of her/his world—but more than that, it is also a totalitarian gesture: if there is a methodology to control one’s life, this also suggests that it is applicable regardless of situation; and more than it, it is replicable, repeatable. And by extension, all people are ultimately flattened into mere variations of the same. Hence, what is at stake here is the singularity of the person, of each person.

2016

What is happiness? The word conjures sunshine, pleasure, expansiveness and possibility-and we could all claim some knowledge and experience of happiness. Nonetheless, happiness, perhaps more than any other experience, is as much defined and delineated in the negative. Happiness is not suffering, not anguish, not absence or lack, not loneliness, not depression, not melancholy. Happiness, it would seem, is an ideal state to be sought, to be cultivated, defended and even boasted about. That we do not in fact have grasp of a pure state, such as happiness, in isolation from its contraries is illuminating something important in how ourselves and our realities are structured. We are able to recognise it not only because it is already a part of our experiential repertoire but also because we are already familiar with its converse. This insight has direct implications for our experiences in general and for the experience of happiness in particular.

Ars Aeterna, 2020

The main objective of the following text is to focus on and exemplify the basic axioms of theories of happiness that come from historical and philosophical tradition and are still, at least in some cases, relevant nowadays. As philosophers claim, the longing for happiness is a naturally human desire that has taken various forms in their thinking: happiness was connected with beatitude (Aristotle), with self-preservation (Spinoza), social helpfulness (Hume), living in the present moment without expostulations or false illusions (Comte-Sponville), and others. The desire for happiness means the main aim of a human life drives particular life goals and the values of individuals. Concepts of happiness have accrued in diachronic and synchronic cross-sections. The Aristotelian/Spinozan conception or Kantian, modern and postmodern traditions formed in a diachronic cross-section. Those that accrued in a synchronic cross-section segregated themselves on the basis of an individual’s spiritual ...

Within the constellation of the positive emotional responses related to the sense of accomplishment and/or fulfillment-a constellation that also includes feelings like pleasure and enjoyment as well as positive emotions like gladness, cheerfulness, hilariousness, serenity, etc.-joy and happiness stand out as two related, and yet different, experiences. Considering recent work, the discrepancy between the large amount of research on happiness and the comparatively little one on joy is remarkable (cf. Demmerling and Landweer 2007, 111-125; Potkay 2007, 1-29). Interdisciplinary research on happiness have flourished in the last decades, and research fields called "happiness studies" or "the science of happiness" have developed (Ahmed 2010, 2-20; Haybron 2011). Several attempts have been made to establish more or less standardized criteria for the evaluation of individual and social happiness. This interest for happiness and happiness standards not only concerns scientific research but also social discourses: we read articles about the happiest country in Europe, about how to keep a happy relationship, about being happy with what you are, etc. There seems to be nothing similar concerning joy.

Handbook of Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research, 2011

Happiness is the main goal; most individuals reach out for a happy life and many policy makers aim at greater happiness for a greater number. This pursuit of happiness calls for understanding of conditions for happiness and for that reason the subject has received much attention in the history of western thought. The study of happiness has long been a playground for philosophical speculation. Due to the lack of empirical measures of happiness, it was not possible to check propositions about the matter. Hence, ...

2012

Philosophical Topics, 2013

This paper challenges the idea that happiness—taken to be a subjective mental state marked by positive affect—is something that depends upon and arises from the satisfaction of interests. While this understanding of happiness seems to follow from reflection on the paradox of happiness, empirical research concerning the production of happiness tells us a different story, and suggests that whether or not we are happy is largely independent of whether or not we satisfy our interests. Following analysis of this research, I argue that whether or not we are happy depends instead mostly on how are minds are doing.