Jake discusses the 3 definitions of happiness that have been discussed this semester, as well as warming you up and getting you ready to take an in-depth look into happiness.

Previously, we asked you to think about whether or not you would want to live forever. Now, we want you to focus on your current life, and think about the following questions: Are you happy? Do you think your life is meaningful? Does the meaningfulness and the happiness go hand in hand? A lot of philosophers have explored this concept. Like Joseph explained in an earlier post, Bentham and Mill think happiness is the most important thing. Mill believes that not all pleasures are equal, and happiness the highest pleasure. On the other hand, May believes there needs to be a combination of active engagement and narrative values. Narrative values include things like spirituality, sincerity, creativity, courage, generosity and personal integrity. He thinks happiness is great, but not enough, and your heart needs to be dedicated to your project. Wolf also believes in active engagement, but puts more emphasis on successful and valuable projects.

To help you think about whether or not your life needs to be happy, meaningful or both, here is a list of movie characters who are also exploring this concept. You may relate your life to Iron Man or Sister Maria, or simply take comfort in that fact that people are trying to answer this complicated question everyday.

Iron Man
Throughout the Avengers movies and Iron Man franchise, Tony Stark, who’s alter ego is the superhero Iron Man, should be happy because he is saving the world, helping people and is a billionaire. However, he is very dark and sarcastic, and does not seem happy to the viewer. Despite having the qualities that someone like Wolf thinks is important to have a meaningful life, he is not happy. Do you think Iron Man’s life should equal happiness?

The Sound of Music
Sister Maria struggles throughout this movie to commit to her relationship with God or to her relationship with Mr. Von Trapp. She wants so badly to be a good nun, but after she takes time off and falls in love, it is clear she is not going to return to the convent. It would be interesting to see what a philosopher like May thinks of this because he believes in both active engagement, which means your heart needs to engaged in your life, and narrative values like spiritually. Maria did not have it in her heart to be a nun, but May thinks spirituality is very important. Which life do you think is more meaningful? Does Maria’s happiness with Mr. Von Trapp and his kids mean more than her relationship with God?

Eat, Pray, Love
After a divorce, Elizabeth quits her job as a successful travel writer to find herself and see the world a slower pace. She visits three different countries and lives in each one for four months. She spends time eating in Italy, finding her spiritually in India and looking for balance in Brazil. Elizabeth has a failed marriage and is not doing any work or projects other than working on herself, so many philosophers would not consider her life meaningful. However, Elizabeth finds happiness throughout her entire journey. Do you think happiness is or can be the meaning of life?

It’s A Wonderful Life
An angel visits George Bailey after he wishes he had never been born because he is poor, stuck in his small town and his house fill of kids is falling apart. George thinks his life is meaningless, but the angel, Clarence, shows him how life would be different without him. After George relives saving his brother, taking over the business for his father so his father can retire, his worried family and the affects of his loans, he realizes he has a lot to live for. George is then happy and proud of himself. Wolf would not call George’s life successful because his business is currently failing, but his past and his family make George happy. Do you think happiness is enough to outweigh the bad in your life? Or George’s?

We can talk to you all day about different views philosophers have on happiness and meaning, but is this really relatable?  Sure, we have the common denominator that we are all living lives here on Earth, but these philosophers we’re talking to you about have spent countless hours thinking about and analyzing this topic of happiness.  We’re not trying to disprove the value of the work these individuals have produced, as they give us a great baseline to form our own thoughts and feelings on, but learning the ideas others like us (who have not spent so much time thinking about this material) have about happiness and meaning could be very interesting.

It is this thought process that led us to distribute a survey asking random people questions about happiness and meaning with some regard to religion.  Now you’re probably wondering why religion suddenly popped up.  We included questions on religion, because we thought there might be a positive correlation between religion and happiness, and we wanted to see if we were correct with this assumption.

The survey was given through SurveyMonkey.com.  It was composed of 10 questions (8 multiple choice and 2 ranking questions).  We had 100 respondents.

The first question we asked was about age.  We wanted to get an idea of who we were talking to about this topic.  As you can see from the chart below, the majority of the respondents (37%) were aged 18-24, with the next highest portion (22%) being between 36 and 45.

We then asked everyone what their gender was, and these results were surprising.  A whopping 78% of the people who took the survey were female!  We’re not really sure why this happened, but it’s good to keep in mind that most of these responses are from women.  We’d be interested to see how the results would look if most of the responses were from men.

Like we mentioned before, we wanted to look at religion in relation to these questions, so we asked a baseline question of whether the individuals we were surveying were religious or not.  The majority (61%) were religious.  Only 17% of people said they weren’t religious, leaving 22% somewhere in between.  It would be interesting to note the individual religions of each respondent in relation to their answers to questions, but we wanted to keep the survey relatively simple.

We wanted to delve a little deeper than just asking whether people were religious or not, so we asked a follow-up question: “Would you say your religious affiliations (or lack thereof) are a large part of your personal identity?”  61% of people responded “yes” to this question, which is interesting considering the fact that 61% of people also answered “yes” when asked if they were religious.  This similarity led us to look at the individual responses people gave, and the majority of the people who answered “yes” to the first question also answered “yes” to the second, which leads us to assume that those (in this study) who consider themselves religious believe this to largely identify them as individuals.

In an attempt to gather an idea of what people were talking about when they referred to activities that make them happy, we asked a question with four options that respondents were to rank in order of what made them the happiest (1) to what made them the least happy (4).  Most people ranked “spending time with family” as what made them the happiest.  This was followed by “leisure activities” which was then followed by “religious activities”.  “School or work” was ranked the lowest by most respondents.  These results did not do much in supporting our hypothesis that religion and happiness are positively correlated, but it did give us insight to the fact that most people care about relationships over accomplishments (family and friends matter more than work).

We also wanted an idea of what people valued as meaningful in their lives, so we asked another question like the previous one.  Respondents were again asked to rank from 1-4 what was most meaningful to them to what was least meaningful to them.  Most respondents ranked “quality time with loved ones” as the most meaningful, which makes sense considering “spending time with family and friends” was ranked highest previously.  Next came “doing things you love to do” which corresponds with “leisure activities”.  “Accomplishing goals” was ranked third, and “praise from others” was ranked fourth.  It seems that most people can find both meaning and happiness in similar activities.

After we asked the two ranking questions, we assumed respondents would then have some sort of basis on which to decide which was more important to them between meaning and happiness.  Two-thirds of respondents chose “happiness” as more important to them, while the remaining third of respondents chose “meaning” as more important.

We wanted to focus again on the religion aspect of our study in the following question, so we asked whether or not respondents thought religion could provide someone with happiness.  The majority (63%) answered “definitely yes” to this question.  The rest of the answers ranged from “probably yes” (19%) to “might or might not” (18%).  The most surprising detail that came from the responses to this question was that even though there were options that said “probably no” and “definitely no”, none of the 100 respondents chose either of these.  This leads us to believe that even those who are not religious have little doubt that religion can provide people with happiness.

The following question was built off whether or not individuals thought religion could provide happiness.  We simply asked who was happier based on people respondents had met: religious people or nonreligious people?  The large majority (79.8%) said that religious people were happier, which makes sense considering the majority of people thought religion could provide happiness.  

The final question we asked was about the personal happiness of our respondents.  The majority of people (64%) said they were happy.  26% said they were somewhat happy.  The remaining 10% fell somewhere between “not really happy or unhappy” and “unhappy”.

From this study, it’s pretty clear that happiness and religion are positively linked.  When asked who was happier between religious and nonreligious people, religious was most often chosen.  Those who identified themselves as religious also chose happiness as more important than meaning and later decided that religion could provide happiness.  In other words, religious people (in this study) value happiness and believe that it can come from religion.

Even though our results display this correlation, they beg another more specific question: can religion alone provide happiness?  From the results of this study, the answer seems to be no.  Respondents most highly valued spending quality time with friends and family for both meaning and happiness.  If individuals did not have this but still had religion, would they remain happy?  The answer is probably no, but this is a question for another time.

So, how would you answer these questions?  What brings you happiness?  It might be compelling to try to consider whether you side with the majority or whether you choose differently.

Avoiding all things based around “professional” opinions, it seems as though we need to look at things from a personal perspective to really get a feel on what “happiness” is. Happiness, for the purposes that we’re looking at it in, is a very subjective thing. Something that makes one person happy, may not necessarily make someone else happy, so it is hard to even put a definition on what we’re talking about here. This being said, there seems to be an understanding, even without a strict definition, of what happiness is to people.

This personal touch can be seen nicely when looking at the poll that is shown below. When asking about happiness in this way, we were trying to see if there was any obvious correlation between whether or not a person is happy and if their lives are religiously based or not. While the answers here are obviously not a great way at looking at lives having meaning, it is a good bridge between happiness and meaning through religion. 61% of the respondents claim that their religion plays a large part in defining who they are as a person and 16% say it might, so using the information from the question above that, EVERY person who claimed that they were religious says that it at least might make them who they are. It is hard to make a connection with religion and meaning without going into detail what we have discussed in the earlier parts of class and even in other groups’ projects, but what might be the most shocking is what people actually find to be meaningful in their lives.

When asked what makes people the happiest, the largest response numbers came from those saying that spending time with family and friends. On the same lines as that, ‘quality time with loved ones” was ranked as the most meaningful by the respondents. The fact that the thing that makes people the happiest and the thing that has the most meaning to people were basically the same thing is a hard thing to ignore. It is understood that the pool of answers here was limited to only 100 responses and makes it hard to draw conclusions, it seems that there is a connection between the two.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that came from our survey is the 7^th question: What is more important for you to have in your life? Even though humans have been looking for the meaning of life since the beginning of our existence, more people in our survey answered that they would prefer happiness over meaning. This response was shocking in numbers, but not necessarily in the realistic sense. When it comes down to it, human lives are so short that it makes sense for people to desire happiness over meaning because it makes them feel better. If it happens to be religion that provides the reassurance that our lives are meaningful, then it seems as if happiness comes along with this.