Choosing Love and Happiness to Human Beings

Choosing Love and Happiness
Love and happiness are two important in our everyday living. On the one hand, happiness is defined as a positive emotion experienced with regard to our day-to-day pleasurable activities. On the other hand, love is the intense feeling of affection, but yet Frederickson in her article “Love 2.0” considers love as the “the ache to sense that something vital is missing from your life: a deep thirst for more” (Frederick 118). Hope, inspiration, pleasure, comfort, and gratitude are some of the positive emotions that not only make us flourish but also happy. Daniel Gilbert in his essay dubbed, “Immune to Reality,” argues that man is always after happiness. With happiness as a good one goal, one is conditioned to build up a “psychological immune system” in the event of negativity. In our pursuit for happiness, we are always forced to generate positive and credible views of our actions than inactions, painful experiences than sad experiences (Gilbert, 155). In contrast, Barbara Fredrickson, through her piece “Selections from Love” argues that cultivating moments of “positivity resonance” and love, is essential to experiencing “happiness” in an authentic way. Fredrickson believes that love and other position emotions among them being resilience makes life easier and satisfying (Fredrickson, 120). Just like gilbert believes in positive thought in the face of adversity, Frederickson believes in love and positive resonance as a way to navigate through unhappiness. However, Jia Tolentino thinks that an ideal woman, pursuing happiness, is always self-optimizing and has mastered the art of self-resilience, courage, and self believe. Such ideal woman acts upon the belief that perfecting themselves and streamlining their relationship to the world is a matter of both work and pleasure of 'lifestyle (Tolentino 65). Good life is one that is happy and full of love, but attainment of both love and happiness demands hard work, positivity and greater self-awareness, in order to learn how to unlock the resources that increase the happy life moments.
Happiness is the art of finding and recreating joy re-inventing positive moments in day-to-day experiences with self and others. The pathway to happiness is realized through practicing ways of moving away from default setting or self-centered perspectives and towards a “learning to think” phase where one pays close attention to and how to construct meaning from experiences (both good and bad). While psychological immune system is ideal in the short run, “it causes an individual to misinterpret circumstances under which he or she starts blaming others” (gilbert 137). Happiness is never realized when instead of bearing responsibility of our actions and inaction and learning from them we pass blame to others. realization of greater happiness starts with mastery of the art of self-awareness and empathy. Self-awareness increases our abilities to understand our thoughts thus making it possible to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings. In order to increase our happy moments, one must get rid of the self-centered outlook on life and embrace self-awareness, resilience, and positivity. Experiencing realities of life with open mindedness opens room for greater possibilities. Life is already challenging and the only way to find happiness is to master the art of positivity and resilience with the hope that things get better especially in tough times. It is why, Jia Tolentino states that “an ideal woman is like an Instagram, always reproducing the lessons of the marketplace. The process requires maximal obedience on the part of the woman in question, and-ideally-her genuine enthusiasm, too” (Tolentino, 63). Life is full of unhappy moments and for women faced with a history of social inequalities and many other challenges, the need to embrace positive energy, resilience, remain self-aware and evolve through difficult moments matters in the pursuit of happiness. With life becoming busier with technological advancements, the best way to enhance personal satisfaction is to spread societal awareness” the idea that through unselfish motives, people acknowledge that however different we might be, we have common struggles.
When life experiences are not worthwhile, we always have the power to recreate them for better happy moments. That is why people opt for change, progress, growth, and love as day-to-day conscious choices with the hope of increasing their happy moments. That is why “when the experience we are having is not the experience we want to be having, our first reaction is to go out and have a different one, which explains why people return unsatisfactory rental cars, check out of bad hotels, and stop hanging around with people who pick their noses in public” (Gilbert 150). People need other people in their lives but when the relationship with them is self-destructive letting go is the most beneficial option. Bad experience in a hotel, people lying or cheating, car that breaks down every time, among others steal our joy and follow you around with an undeniable clamor that whatever you are experiencing is not exactly how things should be. Ideally, to build positive experiences and become better versions of themselves “an ideal woman is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image.” (Tolentino 64). The ideal woman who was initially overworked, is now empowered and has become whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streaming her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure (Tolentino 65). It is this appreciation of self, independent thinking, and confidence that women now believe that they are the architects of their pleasurable types of power. Training our mi...