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 7th 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.