A Critique Of Sharon Begley s Happiness - 1925 Words

A Critique of Sharon Begley’s â€Å"Happiness: Enough Already† Perhaps it is safe to say that most everyone in the deranged world that we live in today aims for happiness. Some would even say we are simply slaves to our primal passions, shackled in our endless pursuit of fulfillments and shaping our existence around them. Gravitating towards the things in life that bring us pleasure, and recoiling away from those that could cause us pain. A lot of individuals think of happiness as an overall end goal, while others consider happiness the starting point of being great. Nevertheless, happiness is drawn from different things based off the individual. My mom always use to tell me that her moments of happiness came by surprise, and that I should†¦show more content†¦I agree with most everything that Begley addresses, however I also agree with other writers who suggest that happiness is a feeling of existence and should come more from self love. Trained in the profession of psychology, Sharon Begley had multiple pieces published in The Wall Street Journal, and conducted several survey critiques of happiness. Begley introduces the article by talking about a book labeled â€Å"The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder.† Essentially, the novel depicts how today’s society relies too much on a pill for solving ones disputes. It is normal to feel dismal after an event such as a break up, and instead of letting an individual cope with the feelings the assumption is that a person is depressed and needs to seek medical attention. Begley proceeds to touch on the fact that â€Å"...only by experiencing sadness can we experience the fullness of the human condition† (557). It is necessary to feel all different emotions rather than masking them all with one. Begley is not stating that happiness is a bad thing, rather she interprets that it is healthier to be in a state wher e you can have improvement in your life. Sadness is too much associated with a negative connotation and one of the most damaging accusations is that all sadness is a disease (Begley 557). Begley goes on to clarify that each individual will achieve different levels of happiness at different moments, and she claims