The Happiness Of Pursuit Analysis

Words: 1028
Pages: 5

820004
Modern society limits one’s ability to achieve happiness because of technology.
Modern society limits the ability to find happiness because social media creates unnatural stress and competition among people while ironically lessening one’s ability to have meaningful relationships. Jeffrey Kluger wrote an article called “The Happiness of Pursuit” which discusses how the stresses and pressures of modern society can cause one to lose happiness. Social media commonly causes a person to feel worse after seeing the friendships and possessions that other people have. Time Magazine created a poll to test how people felt after using social media, and “60% of respondents said they [did] not feel better about themselves” (Kluger). As Kluger proved,
…show more content…
Jeffrey Kluger’s article, “The Happiness of Pursuit,” is about how people who innovate and solve problems have a greater chance of being happy, but when they stop innovating the rates of depressions rise. In the modern environment, innovation is coming to a halt and people have stopped searching for problems and solutions. However, there are still problems to be solved, and now “[we’ve] got all the toys, [and] now we need to relocate the joy, to tap into the propensities that allow us to take pleasure in striving--in, if you will, the pursuit” (Kluger). As Kluger proves, by redirecting one’s effort back to innovation people can achieve happiness. People are losing the joy found from searching and finding solutions to problems. As Kluger explained, finding new problems and solving them will allow the human mind to find happiness through the pleasure of pursuit. Members of modern society are so used to having these technologies in their daily lives that they can forget that there are still other problems to be solved. The overuse of these technologies causes us to lose focus on the bigger picture of human life. One may stop seeking innovation and, therefore, limit their ability to find happiness. In an article entitled “Spontaneous Happiness: Our Nature-Deficit Disorder,” Andrew Weil explains how the modern environment affects one’s brain and physical health. The modern environment with all its technologies and pollutants can causes a variety of negative impacts on the human body. The city environment changes one’s body significantly compared to people in the human past who lived in less sophisticated societies. These changes in physical can indicate the health of one’s brain. One way that society has negatively affected the mental and physical health of it members is that “‘primitive’ people do not develop the