In both her TED Talk and her essay “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy,” Emily Esfahini Smith argues that people should pursue a life of meaning instead of chasing individual happiness. Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness” explores the value of loss and sorrow when it comes to kindness. Now that you have read and watched all of these pieces, imagine you have been asked to present a paper at the American Happiness Research Conference and write an essay in which you argue that people should not pursue individual happiness (In your thesis, you should give a reason for your position and/or suggest what we should be pursuing instead).
Support your position with evidence from two of the following sources:
- “Emily Esfahini Smith: There’s More to Life than Being Happy”Links to an external site. (TED Talk)
- “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of numerous poetry and essay collections and children’s fiction. Her writing bridges cultures, reflecting Nye’s personal identity as Palestinian-American. During her adolescence, she lived for a time in Jerusalem, and her writing draws on her experiences in the Middle East as well as her other travels. She earned her degree from Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas. Nye’s works include The Tiny Journalist (2019), Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), Transfer (2011), Honeybee (2008), You and Yours (2005; winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award), 79 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982). She won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award for her young adult novel Habibi (1997). Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow as well as receiving numerous awards including: American Academy of Poets’ Lavan Award, the Charity Randall Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, and the Robert Creeley Prize. She served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for five years, and is the first Arab-American to be named the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate, an honor she will hold until 2021. Kindness Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, 5 what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride 10 thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho 15 lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. 20 Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 205
206 Do We Deserve to Be Happy? You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows 25 and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head 30 from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
Requirements:
- Intro with a thesis statement, body paragraphs, and a conclusion
- Properly cited quotes from two of the sources above
- Properly formatted Works Cited page (I will format the sources for you)
- MLA Format
- Please highlight in yellow any changes you make to your paper.
Please revise this Essay:
The paper’s title is “There is More to Life Than Being Happy” by Emily Esfahani Smith, an American journalist, poet, essayist, and public speaker. The essay is about the topic of happiness and how people think that it is the only thing that matters. She describes that being happy is essential for personal growth, but other things are more valuable than happiness, such as contributing to the world around us. In her TED talk, she explains how we need to use our time wisely to be a part of the world around us. In “Emily Esfahani Smith: There is More to Life than Being Happy,” she explains how we should not pursue getting everything we want all the time because it can make us unhappy or even cause burnout. This paper argues that people should not pursue individual happiness. Base argument on the fact that happiness is a fleeting experience; even when we feel happy sometimes, it does not mean we will always feel satisfied. However, once we realize the actual value of life and appreciate the beautiful moments we experience, we will find that life has much more to offer us than just physical pleasure. A person’s purpose in life revolves around what they believe. Thus, Emily argues that people should become more purposeful and pursue a life of meaning rather than chasing individual happiness. However, she also explores how this might be done by showing current scientific research that supports the idea and provides some examples beyond herself. So, reading her talks and essays gave me a window into what I desire from life: a sense of self-worth, community, and meaningful work from my job. She compares satisfaction to a flower from which we can pick the one most appealing to our needs at the moment, but there is no longer such thing as happiness once you have picked it down and put it in your pocket. Therefore, I believe people should not strive for “happiness” but pursue a life with meaning or purpose. We must now be prepared to deal with both the good times and bad times; if we only focus on finding happiness today, then whenever we find ourselves unhappy in the future because something unfortunate has happened to us, we cannot go back and change things since our career, money, Etc. has been achieved during those years). In my opinion, it is not all about the happiness we find in individual pursuits and achievements. Instead, pursuing a life of meaning can help us achieve satisfaction through the qualities that make human beings extraordinary. I believe that pursuing meaningful activities can enrich our lives and provide a sense of gratification. In her TED Talk, Emily Esfahani Smith talks about how meaning could come from more than just career choices and other goals, such as buying a new house or a fancy car. Instead, it could come from issues like recycling, volunteering at a local college or community center, and donating to charity. With this being said, she argues that pursuing activities like these can help people live better lives because they will experience feelings of friendship, self-worth, and satisfaction in their relationships with others-important aspects of happiness.” The focus of individual happiness is the pursuit of pleasure and comfort. However, this pursuit often leads to one life being miserable and another being happy; moreover, a better objective would be finding meaning in life. This can be literal or figurative (to live a moment not knowing what comes next) or just spending more time doing something that brings you joy. Another aspect of finding meaning in life is impacting others through your actions and characteristics. With the world becoming more competitive and cutthroat to achieve, people need to understand that there is more to life than being happy. Being happy can be fleeting and make us feel satisfied, but it can prevent us from finding fulfillment in our lives. One way to solve this problem would be to embrace sadness as a critical element in life—a person can reach self-actualization only through experiencing loss, sorrow, and despair before experiencing happiness. It is also essential for people to learn how to deal with their emotions; this way, they can keep themselves happy and focused on achieving goals—fundamental in today’s health-conscious environment, where people always want more results than they already have.
Works Cited:
Smith, Emily Esfahani. “There’s More to Life than Being Happy.†TED, 2017, www.ted.com/talks/emily_esfahani_smith_there_s_more_to_life_than_being_happy?lang uage=en
Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Kindness.†Pursuing Happiness: A Bedford Spotlight Reader, edited by Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, 2nd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020, pp. 205-206.