He loves his son, and everything Chris does is for him.Īlmost at the beginning of the movie, his wife leaves him and his son, so he needs to deal with working and caring for his son. Raising a child on your own is very difficult.Īlmost at the beginning of the The Pursuit of Happyness movie, his wife leaves him and his son, so he needs to deal with working and caring for his son. Several themes we can discuss from The Pursuit of Happyness are: 1.
At the end, we see that he got the one paid position and his life changed dramatically from that moment. His talents and skills, along with his charisma and personality, earned the trust of several people who signed contracts with the brokerage firm. His life was the one that you think you could never handle. He has to pick up his son at the day care center and he also has to be on time to get a room in one of the local homeless shelters. And there should be more and better education focused on values, empathy, emotional health, and citizenship.He struggles to get contracts for the firm while trying to make an honest living for his son. To combat the escalation of consumer desire, advertising to children should be banned. Poverty, unemployment, and mental ill-health should be targeted for extra help. We should monitor how much happiness there is in our society, and use the economic levers of tax, pay, and mobility to adjust the work-life balance properly, discourage over-competition, and strengthen families and communities. Given this, says Layard, if one takes seriously the idea that communal effort can make a difference to levels of happiness in society, the desiderata are clear. On the positive side is the adaptability of human beings, and the fact that inner life has as much to do with happiness as outer circumstances. People are social beings, who need trust in their relationships, who suffer stress in the face of change and the unfamiliar, and whose concern for the status quo makes them more anxious about losses than gains. For him the sources of happiness are clear from the abundantly available results of research.
There is a polemical cast to Layard's book: he wishes to persuade his readers that public policy should be judged by how successful it is in increasing happiness, and therefore that what society needs is a consensus about the common good, and a shared endeavour to bring it about. The interesting difference between their respective conclusions is one of interpretation. Nettle and he do not disagree about the facts as research reveals them they both take subjective avowals of happiness to represent an objective dimension of human experience. He offers an intuitive definition of happiness as “feeling good”, and brings to bear much of the same research as Nettle to argue that it provides us with definite answers about what makes people happy, and what, therefore, can be done to increase the amount of happiness in society. Richard Layard's Happiness: Lessons From a New Science is premised on a frank acceptance of the utilitarian idea that happiness is not only attainable, but that the aim of private and public policy should be to maximise it. The journey is what matters, though without a destination to navigate towards there cannot be one. Daniel Nettle's excellent survey of the subject-a lucid, intelligent, and thoughtful essay-turns on the idea that happiness serves us best as a goal rather than an achievement, to encourage us to strive. These two books come to interestingly different conclusions about happiness. Why is it that this suggestion makes us recoil rather than rejoice? For happiness is only a pill away.
IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS LICENSE
Would that license the actions of a person whose happiness came from murdering others? Moreover: if the true goal of life is happiness, it could easily be achieved for all by lacing the water supply with a drug that induces happiness. This can easily be seen by asking whether any means to happiness is justified by its attainment. Moreover, reflection has always persuaded some-not least among them the philosophers-that there are higher values in life than happiness. If anything it has fallen, or at best remained the same. Every reliable indicator shows that although people in the west have grown wealthier in the past half-century, the degree to which they claim to be happy has not kept pace. Yet most people say that happiness is their goal in life, and many of these, in turn, believe that they would achieve it if they were rich, or anyway richer.
One of the main sources of unhappiness in the world, as more than one sage has pointed out, is the search for happiness.