Casperino 1 Casey Casperino Professor Lago English 1100 18 September 2013 Have you ever met a person who

was so happy that you are one hundred percent sure they can have no sad bones is their body? These extremely happy people may also get on the nerves of those people who have equal parts of each emotion; those being happiness, anger, and sadness. Of course, being happy in life is something that most, if not all people, wish to achieve throughout their lifetimes. Some of those people can handle this happiness in a positive way, while some people may go mad. For these people, sadness is needed to balance out all of the good. In Jennifer Seniors essay, Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness she emphasizes why people need not only happiness but sadness in life as well. Jennifer Senior talks about a happiness indicating test known as the Authentic Happiness Inventory. She states how by taking this test, she scored below average based on facts about herself. These facts were her age, gender, education level, and occupation which was then put against other people in her zip code area. By doing this, she found out that even though her score, which was a 2.88 out of a possible 5, was below the average for her age or occupation, she was at the half percent mark for her zip code which means even though she may be considered to be on the sadder side of life, so were half of the people she lived with in her area (Senior 422). To understand exactly what Jennifer Senior meant by this, I took the Authentic Happiness Inventory Test. Before beginning the test, you are asked questions such as, your age, gender and education level when you register, which is used to later give you a comparison to similar people

Casperino 2 to yourself. The actual test contains 24 questions with multiple answer options to choose from. Once you complete the test, you are given a number score and told how you compare to others. My score on the Authentic Happiness Inventory was a 3.04, putting almost 50% happier than those in all the same categories as me. This puts me in a neutral territory, not really happy or sad (Authentic Happiness Test Inventory). Further along in Senior essay, she talks about a man, Philip Brickman. Brickman was famous for a lottery study he conducted. An interest of his was happiness and how to achieve it. It seems that Brickman was so interested in happiness that he did not accept the sadness. Brinkman climbed the tallest building in Ann Arbor, in May of 1982, and jumped (Senior 428).