Domenica DiStasio Unit 2 Zoe Tuck3/2/18Why happiness? A question we all ask throughout our lives. What is it? Where do we get it from? How will it make us feel? Is it something we strive for? All of these questions are important philosophical questions that I believe will go fully unanswered for the rest of time. There is no real way to test or measure happiness, so these questions are just simply that—questions. Throughout Sara Ahmed’s story, “Why Happiness, Why Now”, she tries to look at other people’s point of views on happiness or on “being happy” and then responds to these statements with her own thoughts. She looks at various aspects of happiness and how the definition of happiness may be different for different people, different cultures, and different countries. Ahmed wants us to realize that as much as happiness is a thing, it is also just as much not. Ahmed makes the readers question happiness and its existence as a state, versus a feeling. She does not simply answer these questions but rather she proposes more questions to the previous ones to get you to think deeper into what happiness could mean for you, and for other cultures and societies. For me, the big thing that stood out from Ahmed’s responses and writing is that different places definitely have their own perceptions and definitions of happiness. I think that this is true because someone who is not well off would describe happiness totally different than a person who is extremely wealthy. Drawing from the previous point, people in the United States would not think of happiness in the same way that someone from Brazil would. Our perceptions of happiness our built entirely by our culture and the way that we personally live.Bringing in my own self perceptions of happiness and my views on it, I believe that it is a state rather than a feeling. Happiness is something that comes to you rather than something that you go out looking for. After going through family troubles, heartbreak, failed friendships, and other life events, I have learned that looking for something rather than letting something find you is never the right way to go. Going through a bad breakup recently and coming out of it thinking that I have to go out and try and find happiness somewhere else has finally opened me up about my sense of happiness. Rather than happiness being something you feel, it has turned into something that we just are —a state and a way of being. Ahmed points this out within her responses and I believe it is one of the main points she draws on. Sara Ahmed draws in points of culture, geographic location, and other ideas. The way that other cultures perceive happiness is different because they not only have different things that could make them happy, but they also look at the world and life differently. Ahmed talks about how different research on what happiness means yields different results in different places. She writes, “These reports are often cited in the media when research findings do not correspond to social expectations, that is, when developing countries are shown to be happier than overdeveloped ones” (3). I agree with this because I know that my version of happiness is different than some of my peers who are international students from underdeveloped countries. For me, happiness is being with my friends or being with my family and for them, things like making sure their siblings have food could be something that makes them happy. This is something that I do not even really need to think about, but it is one of the main thing that couldpotentially be on their minds. On page two she says, “it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them” (2). She responds to this by saying that she draws on such critiques of happiness as a way of asking questions about the happiness wish. The “happiness turn” is a popular shift that has come about within the last decade. This shift leads to more and more people trying to be “happy” and seeing happiness as their main goal. Governments around the world are using happiness as a way to measure their growth as nations and where they stand in the world. “A number of governments have been reported to be introducing happiness and well-being as measureable assets and explicit goals, supplementing the Gross Domestic Product with what has become known as the Genuine Progress Indicator” (3). Happiness is different among everyone and it also different in different places of the world, so we cannot expect an assessment of a nations happiness to be an actual indicator of how much they are growing as nations or how successful they are. People in another culture wish for different things. Nations around the world that are seen as good or powerful are the ones that are seen as the happy places. Switzerland is seen as one of the best places in the world to live and a lot of people say that the people there are “some of the happiest people on earth”. A quote from Richard Layard is that he says, “As western societies have gotten richer, their people have become no happier” (6). Ahmed then responds to this by saying that happiness is still being used by people to see something that could be “found” rather than something that just comes to people. She also says that wealth is being used as a “happiness indicator”, basically saying that is looked for where people think they will find it. They do notallow this type of feeling to come from things where it is not expected. Happiness is being put into social ideals and held over people’s heads as a goal of what they should be feeling or something that they should strive to have. Capitalism advances us from “miserable equality” to “happy inequality”, but this is argued because it says that happiness is the only way to measure growth and advancement and Ahmed questions this statement. She says that people presume that happiness is good and therefore nothing can be better than to maximize happiness. If something is good, then we feel good and so then if something is bad, we feel bad. These presumptions are brought on by the thought that again, happiness is the only thing we should be striving for in life. Money makes us happy, but does it really? Is this just a presumption that we have made? These are the kinds of things that Ahmed is going after to try and explain to her readers. She uses thoughts and responses to clue people in and get their heads to try and