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Alex Vasquez

Professor Jon Beadle

English 115

9 May 2019

How Changing our Space can make us Happy

Happiness is an emotion that everyone wants to experience at one point in their lives. The

culture we live in now believes that if we continuously pursue our goals, it will make us happy

when we achieve them. Many of us do pursue our goals, but very few people have ever actually

achieved happiness from reaching it, leaving us sad and lost on what to do next. This is when we

realize that we are hurting ourselves because our pursuits do not find us genuine happiness. Only

a few people realize this and want the rest of the world to know as well. They publicize their

ideas about space and happiness through their articles "What Suffering Does" by David Brooks,

"Living with Less. A Lot Less" by Graham Hill, and "How Happy Are You and Why?" by Sonja

Lyubomirsky. Each article shows us different methods one can take to find happiness, by helping

us realize that we will never have control over our outer space, but we can gain power from our

own internal space.

To begin with the article “What Suffering Does” written by David Brooks, a well-

established writer that has worked since the 90s talking about our culture and the effects our

culture has had on people. Brooks writes about how our culture has created this idea that if you

work now, you can become happy in the future. He goes in depth about how current people who

are working aren’t doing it because of future happiness; instead, they are doing it to move away

from a painful past. Brooks tells us that we suffer from an uncontrollable force that we can do
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nothing about, but even though we cannot control what’s outside, we can control what’s inside to

make ourselves happy. He uses President Franklin Roosevelt sickness to demonstrate how we

can become happy from enduring adversity, when he was diagnosed with polio, “Franklin

Roosevelt came back deeper and more empathetic after being struck with polio” (Brooks 284).

President Roosevelt was a rugged man before he had Polio. Once acquiring polio, he was pushed

outside his comfort zone into an unknown and painful world. He became gentler because

Roosevelt understood the pain others felt because of polio. This experience made him help those

who are less fortunate by bringing happiness to others and himself. Each of us suffers from

uncontrollable circumstances, but if we learn from the pain, we can find happiness.

Similarly, in the article “Living with Less. A Lot Less” Graham Hill believes that people

are unhappy because they continue to fill their lives with material objects in order to fill a void in

their space. Hill uses himself as an example of someone who was trying to fill in a vacuum by

telling us a moment in his life where he decided to become happy by buying things “It started in

1998 … I bought a four-story … house … a pair of $300 sunglasses, a ton of gadgets … and an

audiophile-worthy five-disc CD player” (Hill 309). Hill had the money to buy anything he

pleased, so he can make himself happy, but his purchases did not make him happy, instead

everything he bought started to bring him pain “My success and the things it bought quickly

changed from novel to numb … It didn’t take long before I … felt more anxious than before”

(Hill 309). All of his stuff started to bring him down to the point where he was not able to enjoy

anything, instead he fretted over things that held no importance “My life was unnecessarily

complicated. There were lawns to mow, gutters to clean, floors to vacuum, roommates…car to

insure…” (Hill 309). To become happy, one must relieve themselves of pointless materials so

that they can refocus on what makes them smile. This is accomplishable by shifting their mind
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from outer space to a more internal one. Once Hill had realized this, he got rid of trivial things

and revitalized his desires. If one tires to remove the things that do not matter, then perhaps we

will become happy as well.

In the last article “How Happy Are You and Why?”, Sonja Lyubomirsky takes a different

approach to why people are not happy. She believes that people are unhappy not because of an

external space, but because of an internal one that we cannot change. This is explained through

an evolutionary growth she calls the happiness set point. The happiness set point is a

fundamental level that is determined at birth by both hereditary and personality traits we learn

throughout our lives. She pushes this idea through two examples of people, Angela and Shannon.

Angela, thirty-four-year-old women from California, has had one of the saddest stories

Lyubomirsky heard “her mother was emotionally and physically abusive … she was overweight

… and stigmatized at school” (Lyubomirsky 180) although she should be depressed, she is

happier than you would think. She enjoys watching movies with her daughter, reading stories

with her and volunteers to help others. Regardless of all the pain, Angela can stay happy because

her happiness setpoint is set high that she can overcome her hurdles. The other person

Lyubomirsky writes about is a person whose happiness set point is placed low, Shannon.

Shannon is a twenty-seven-year-old woman who suffered little travesties in life. When compared

to Angela, “Shannon had an uneventful childhood, a stable and modest home, and several close

friends” (Lyubomirsky 181) yet she feels what Angela should have felt; anger. She would turn

menial tasks into travesties not because she wanted to, but because her mind thought pessimistic.

Shannon’s low happiness set point explains why people experience different emotions when

faced with similar circumstances. But even though people do not experience the same levels of

joy does not mean that is all they will feel. Lyubomirsky believes that we can change the amount
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of pleasure through our actions. By exploring new areas, learning something different, and

achieving your goals one can bring their happiness up. Continuing just to live is satisfactory if

your satisfaction set point is high but having goals and objectives can make you happy from just

trying.

From the three articles, we have seen that happiness can be achieved through a multitude

of methods. One may choose Hill’s method of clearing your space so you can remember what

makes you happy or experiencing new events that Lyubomirsky recommends so you can feel

different emotions. Also just going on a walk with a dog through a neighborhood and having an

adventure with him may help. Everyone has different circumstances that affect how they enjoy

happiness and just doing something different can change your perception, making one realize

that there are more ways to experience joy in life. Experiencing new things can change one for

the better, more so than the superficial ideas the media thrusts to people. People can find

happiness by trying new things.

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Works Cited

Brooks, David. “What Suffering Does” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt and

Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 284-287.

Hill, Graham. “Living with Less. A Lot Less.” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt

and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 308-313.

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. “How Happy Are You and Why?” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew

Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 179-197.