Happiness can be defined in many different ways. Each person has their own idea of what makes them happy and why. As a general idea, happiness is most commonly described as feeling or showing pleasure or content. What makes ones life pleasurable varies from person to person. Is there a difference between long term happiness and momentary happiness? Can different people be happy in different aspects of their lives? The definition of happiness and meaning are extremely different. “when you ask people what makes their lives worth living, they rarely say anything about their mood. They are more likely to cite things that they find meaningful, such as their work or relationships.”(Acacia Parks). A person who genuinely appreciates life is someone who’s life has a lot of meaning. These are the givers, not the takers. The selfish “takers” live lives that are solely based on things they can benefit from. These types of people will never get far in life. A meaningful life trumps a happy life every time.

Meaning can also be defined in many different ways depending on the person. Meaning is defined as something that is not directly expressed. What gives a persons life meaning is not usually out there in the open for everyone to know, that is what makes it special and worth something. “It’s important to understand that for many people, a sense of meaning and happiness in life overlap; many people score jointly high (or jointly low) on the happiness and meaning measures in the study. But for many others, there is a dissonance — they feel that they are low on happiness and high on meaning or that their lives are very high in happiness, but low in meaning.” (Smith 2013). Out of the two it is clear that meaning is worth more to oneself then happiness.

There is currently a show on television that can portray this kind of selfish “happiness with no meaning.” Many may not watch reality television but those that d0 would know The Real Housewives of Atlanta can be used as a prime example. The show follows some of the wealthiest women in Atlanta. The wealthy and “high class” women are followed around by cameras showing things such as the work, family, and leisure their lives consist of. Although these women seem to have everything they could ever ask for when the exterior is pulled away the deeper side is shown. No amount of money, job, object, even marriage is ever enough to keep the women happy. Every time something extravagant happens there is always mention of something more extravagant that could of happened. This TV show in itself can prove that happiness through fortune, fame, and material objects is never really happiness. In the end everyone always wants more and more to try to fill some sort of void their life has. This type of happiness is only skin deep, the deeper kind comes from meaning in ones life, something these women do not possess.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”(Grewal 2014). Without meaning life would just pass by, nothing left but materialistic memories and uneventful.

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