The Futile Pursuit of Happiness (Essay Sample)

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Summary “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness”
Jon Gertner’s “The futile pursuit of happiness” was published in September, 2003 in the New York Times magazine. This essay clearly discusses the major difference between an individual’s perception on how he or she believes he will be happy on the occasion of a particular outcome or a decision and the actual state of happiness in the individual after an outcome or a decision. The essay rests on the experiments carried out by two professors: George Loewenstein and Daniel Gilbert. These experiments clearly show that human beings are not always happy as we may think with some decisions and outcomes (444). This is because of the forecasting and the issues of miswanting that might cause negative excitement and disappointment in the journey towards attaining happiness in our lives.
The author clearly uses a number of examples in this essay in order to help him drive his point home to the understanding of the reader. He uses the style of repetition in order to help emphasize and illustrate his points in a clear and concise way to the reader. He claims that it is indeed wrong for one to believe that nice things and issues in life will eventually make a person happy. This he claims is very deceiving to the general public and can be seen as a way of sabotaging the rooms that available for an individual to improve in his life in the future. The language that he uses seems to be very blunt and at the same time scornful as it looks very naïve in the beginning of the essay. He is very pessimistic as he begins by telling the reader that an individual can never be happy. He goes ahead to discuss this through the essay by using two major discussion points that are the miswanting and the act of forecasting in a person’s future life (446).
The essay concentrates on the issues bordering the fact of taking the live out of the alive. It is based on the study by Daniel Gilbert on the behavioral prediction and the extent of disappointment and pleasure that individuals may receive from experiences in case they do not meet their target or goal in life. As much as he believes that there is nothing that can make a person happy or sad as he may think he will, it is still clear that emotions are part of the experiences by the human nature (445). Through this sharing of the experiments by Daniel Gilbert, people would then become indifferent to the lives and thus miss out on the passion that would come alongside the fact of being alive.
By simply telling a person that the estimation to the extent of happiness in their lives is wrong will definite...