More Happiness An Individual Searches example essay topic

It has been historically shown that happiness is inversely related to the amount of freedom an individual possesses. Many people believe the more freedom they can obtain, the happier and more fulfilling their lives will be. It is inevitable, however, as more freedom is achieved, the unhappier that person may become, ultimately destroying that individual, mentally, emotionally, and even physically. The search for ultimate happiness has been going on for centuries. People search and search until they find they have wasted their lives away searching for something they could never really quite get their hands on. In the end, they end up miserable, possibly alone, and trying to remember any small amount of happiness they may have passed up along the way.

Young Goodman Brown went on this search, not knowing what he would find, but feeling once he did he would be much happier. When tempted by the Devil himself, he loses his Faith, not only in everyone around him, seeing that they have succumbed to evil, but also in his wife, Faith. He spent his life surrounded by people he thought to be good and pure, but when he goes on his journey to uncover the truth, he comes out worse off than when he only suspected they had been tempted. When he does find what he is looking for, he becomes so incredibly miserable he no longer can stand to look at anyone, especially his wife. He lost his Faith in all that surrounded him and spent the rest of his life completely unhappy.

The search for happiness has proven to bring extreme emotional stress into a person's life. In some cases, emotional ties, such as family, must be broken in order to achieve the happiness that is so eagerly sought. In "Marriage is a Private Affair", Nnaemeka knows that his happiness will bring his father's unhappiness. For his father to be totally happy, he would have to give up his freedom to choose whom he wants to marry. It was soon realized that his choice of freedom brought about his unhappiness as well as his wife's and then his children's, not knowing their grandfather. Emotionally they all carried a burden: Nnaemeka that he had disappointed his father; Nene, for not being able to live up to Okeke's standards; and Okeke, finally feeling remorse for missing out on the most important thing to his son, his happiness.

To achieve happiness, it is necessary to challenge any emotions that may contribute to that happiness. Where ultimate happiness is achieved, complete freedom has been lost. In " 'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman", society is completely controlled by one person, the timekeeper. The timekeeper has taken all freedom from everyone, so far as to install a cardio plate which could take away their lives.

This complete lack of freedom is supposed to keep everyone in harmony; one person cannot be late so as to make the next person unhappy. However, this lack of freedom does not make everyone feel content with their lives, and ultimately there is always someone searching for more, or something better. Someone like the Harlequin, who throws a glitch into the mix every once in a while to show those with no freedom what they are missing. The Harlequin wants to show the people that it is all right to be late every once in a while, and that being late is not going to make them unhappy. He throws the whole master schedule off by seven minutes by dumping jelly beans on the express strip. When he jammed the sidewalks, everyone "howled and laughed".

He showed them that they could take time to be happy, even if it is at the expense of someone else's unhappiness, The Ticktockman's. Even though the Ticktockman does not physically shut the Harlequin off, he does mentally in the end by forcing him to conform to society. Sadly it is too late, because he does realize that being a few minutes late is not going to harm anyone. Being three minutes late actually made him smile to himself, even if it did throw the schedule off. The quest for ultimate happiness, joined with ultimate freedom will never cease. No matter how much happiness a person has, almost everyone is looking for something better.

More money, more love, more of anything to make them happier than they already are. Someone else always seems to have something another wants to make them happy. The more happiness an individual searches for, the more unhappy that person becomes when they cannot achieve the amount of happiness they want. In the end, like someone who is consistently late being "turned off", that is what happens to those who are ultimately unhappy.

They become reclusive, disassociate themselves, and shut themselves off, even as far as to attempt or achieve suicide.