Conquest of Happiness

Humanities2.4
Xiao Yao
Critique 3
2016/1/12
Are we become unhappier as we grow up?
Our happiness come from a lot of places, our self- accomplishment, our family, our social
relationships and our connections to the world. Thus, our unhappiness are caused due to
many reasons. In chapter 13, there’s a sentence describe the origin of unhappiness in
family: “This is, of course, a very grave limitation, for the causes of family unhappiness in
our day are of the most diverse sorts, psychological, economic, social educational, and
political.” Not only in family, economic, social educational, and political factors can interpret
our unhappiness in many ways and psychological factors are more like the mental
changes of these four.
Count them backwards, first I’ll talked about political factor. Most of the people in our
generation are the single child in the family and always feel lonely. Lack of companionship
since young can hardly make us happy whether we grow up or not. I’ve lately researched
the “Two-child Policy” which just established in China. Our team made a survey asked
about the differences between parents’ generation and our generation. From the result,
interestingly, the answers are more like answer to the question “What are the reasons that
today’s children are less happier than children in last generation?” According to the result,
“The word loneliness is mentioned directly 21 times”, “lack of the feeling of brother and
sister mentioned 31 times”, “no playmates mentioned 32 times”. From the result “At least
46 parents think their childhood are happier, have more freedom, and have more time in
playing”, nowadays children “have no time for real fun”. We can conclude that children in
our generation are lonely, lack of friends to play with, more limitations, thus less happier
due to these reasons. As the policy limit the birth in every family, we as the single child in
family are generally lack of fun and are easily become unhappy or even depress. Since
people are...