What is happiness?

 The video describes how literature gives you access to a multitude of emotions when it talks about how literature saves time. Literature can be a good medium for exploring the topic of success as it helps you dive deeper into the meaning of words such as happiness. Last semester I wrote an essay on happiness. The purpose of the essay was to figure out why certain scenarios made us happy and what happiness meant to us. I eventually asked myself perhaps chasing happiness is the wrong way to go about it. Without writing this essay I would not have been able to explore the idea of happiness in such depth. I eventually came to the conclusion that for me chasing pride and chasing the ability to be proud of what I’ve done is what makes me happy.  The reflection of my growth is my happiness. To me strictly chasing happiness promotes conformity as wanting to be happy everyday restricts me from diving into discomfort. Unfortunately the unknown, suffering, and struggle is what promotes growth. Until I completed the assignment I realized the ideology of pride has been instilled throughout my whole life. When the video talks about how literature makes us nicer it is interesting how it correlates being nice directly into being open minded. Literature allows us to see the lives of other people. It allows us to see a gigantic catalog of struggles, barriers, and how people got through them. In order to be open minded you must be exposed to many circumstances and literature does exactly that. Literature lets us learn lessons without having to experience things the hard way or at the very least a way we would not have preferred.