Happiness Blog

For both (or either) Adam Curtis and Sigmund Freud, is it possible to be happy?  Why?


I definitely feel that it is possible to be happy! After all, Adam Curtis had portrayed Edward Bernays as a man who could make the masses happy and feel good about themselves after they had purchased products and performed actions that were symbols of freedom, such as women smoking cigarettes in public. But the real question is what is happiness? What makes us experience that feeling of happiness? 


In Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and It's Discontents", Freud argues that happiness was the result of the avoidance of pain and the pleasure experienced by that individual after they have that feeling of accomplishment. Freud believed that these actions and their corresponding feelings were part of the human psyche and were literally natural instincts, insinuating that humans were "hardwired" to seek and experience happiness not just once, but multiple times in their lifetime, even going so far as to make it their goal in life. I agree wholeheartedly with Freud regarding this explanation of happiness and the reasons for what makes us want to pursue happiness. So according to Freud's definition of happiness, it is possible to achieve happiness.


In fact, after watching Adam Curtis, portrayal of Edward Bernays' work and his efforts to make humans constantly experience happiness through materialism, leads me to believe that it has become even more easier to pursue happiness and experience it more often. 


Humans now live in societies where happiness has manifested in the form of material goods such as clothing, cars, electronic gadgets and jewellery. When people buy clothes that are part of the latest trends, they feel really happy and good about themselves because they can now feel "stylish" and "cool". These people are again following their basic instincts of trying to attain happiness by buying these material goods and as a result, modern societies have made it easier to be happy by widening the sources of where happiness can be attained from.