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Essay on What is Happiness?

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What is happiness? People have agonized over this question for centuries. Let me start this essay by answering a somewhat easier question: what isn’t happiness? Happiness is NOT feeling good all the time. Happiness is a combination of human emotions and states of mind. Exploring this state of being has consumed the philosophical minds of the ages and will continue to do so for ages to come.

In an unofficial poll of students at State University, I found that of the fifty-eight students and one professor, males and females of several ethnic backgrounds and age groups, that I asked the question "What is happiness to you?", all of them had very different physical, intellectual, or emotional motivator for their happiness. Only the …show more content…

But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. (Pojman 917)

Mill seems to think that happiness comes from the desire to be completely pain-free.
He says that happiness comes from selfishly fulfilled desires. The desire to attain only pleasure is ludicrous; for a person to achieve a completely pain-free existence is impossible. To gain complete happiness would leave them with no motivation to achieve anything else. Human nature is such that if a person achieved pure happiness, that person would then become dissatisfied with that happiness, causing them to, once again, be unhappy. A person will always experience something contrary to pleasure, leaving them with some type of pain.

In my opinion, people seem to be happy for many different reasons at different times in their lives. I

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