Happiness | Teen Ink

Happiness

April 3, 2015
By Rodriguezt BRONZE, Amherst, New York
Rodriguezt BRONZE, Amherst, New York
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Where does happiness come from? I believe that tue happiness comes from your internal environment. Some people believe that their external environment around them should be happy in order for them to be happy for example they change their surroundings in order to feel a type of false happiness and satisfaction which it creates a short term happiness meaning they feel a type of happiness for a short period of time but feel sad inside when around their new surroundings or when that surrounding is gone when time continues. True happiness comes from within yourself (internal environment)

      There are two levels of happiness, external and internal, internal being happy within yourself and external being happy in the environment. "True happiness is the result of a decision to be happy, regardless of what's going on in your life." This means that you are happy no matter what goes on in your life either a good experience or a bad experience. In order to be happy internally you need to have peace with yourself and look on the bright side of things. In order to be happy externally you need to have your environment around you be happy or something that you want. People choose to have a happy external environment due to peoples wants and needs like money and relationships instead of a internal environment were you see the bright side to all things. Both of these ideas can be related to short term happiness and long term happiness, these can both be related to both internal and external. Short term happiness being associated with pleasure and Long term being associated with pride and fulfillment. For example from the article "Happiness" they state a example of ice cream being a short term happiness  due to your brain can make connections that ice cream is good. In the book Ethan Frome , the protagonists short term happiness and long term happiness represent people short term being Mattie and long term being Zena.

       Most of peoples relation to happiness and unhappiness is due to the relationships that they were in or still in either family, friends, or a significant other. In terms of being in a relationship with a significant other, people fear rejection of their other one so they will do anything to make them happy and create a short term happiness so that there love can last. In the end this just creates more problems and could lead to a break up or moving on to a different person. People also fear of being alone so they will do things in order to stay with someone because they are dependent on them to make them happy instead of dependent on themselves to make them happy. This is a good example in the book Ethan Frome due to Ethan's relationships with Zena and how their relationship is going down the drain due to the unhappiness of them both. Another cause for unhappiness in relationship either family, friends, or significant other can lead to the belief in others opinions and judgments. If someone is trying to keep a relationship going and keeping it together, they should depend on themselves instead they listen to people's judgments and opinions and try to make things the way they want it making it unhappy for the relationship and cause a hatred of love.

       There is a way to measure how happy someone is due to the activity of the brain. The brain is separated into hemispheres, left and right, left dealing with positive emotions and right dealing with the negative ones, this can be put I to a theory that happy people have more activity in the left side of their brain and unhappy people have more activity on the right side of the brain. In the book Ethan Frome we can say that he typically has his right side of his brain express more and look at the bad things in life and when he is with either Zena or Mattie he expresses his left side but in a way that not enough is expressed due to his naturalness having sadness judge his life making him unhappy.
  
     Many peoples happiness can be pulled form anything in their enviroment but true happiness comes from within yourself or your internal enviroment. If you are not happy internally and only pull things from your external enviroment to make you happy, most of the time relationships can be destroyed and wrong a belief in love can be formed. Also looking for things that can resemble long term happiness instead of short term will improve happiness and your relationships with others.



Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.