Short essay

Precisely that explains how to write a short essay. Here we explain the characteristics of the short essay, the stages of drafting, as well as the main differences with other text types.

A theme about the pursuit of happiness

1 Short essay or theme on happiness: initial reflection

 Is there such an overused word as happiness? Elusive and at the same time banal, so obvious but we don't know exactly what it is and, therefore, not even where to find it: take a nice piece of paper for the draft and start writing down, word for word, everything you associate with the idea of ​​happiness. : images, situations, special moments, emotions, people, memories, dreams. Everything. At the end of this brainstorming, you will have before you a variegated picture of yourself and your idea of ​​happiness Take a good look at it and start thinking about how you can order is elusive it. Now we will look for some critical points to think about and write my essay.    

2 The theme on happiness: reading of the documents provided by the teacher and research on the internet

I think no one to the question "Do you want to be sad or happy?", he would reply "Sad". Yet when we are asked the question "Are you happy ?", We always hesitate to answer and often rely on a diplomat "yes, come on, enough". We know little about what it means to be sad and even less about what it means to be happy. Happiness is a mystery and today, our society seems to want to force you to be happy at all costs proposing the sterile patterns of achievement mostly based on possession. Things are already seen if you think about it. The gods of ancient Greece were beautiful, immortal, and eternally young; they spent their lives flirting, laughing, and amusing themselves in banquets (even waging war from time to time). Everyone today would sign up for a life like this because we imagine it to be perfect. The models of happiness present in advertising, precisely because marketing plays with our dissatisfaction, always propose beautifully, established, always young men and women. The reality, however, is much more complex: but these desires push us to work to achieve those goals. Often, once obtained, we feel empty and dissatisfied. And let's go back to the starting point.  

Where can we find happiness? Everyone has to find his answers. For a moment, however, let's try to better observe the reality that surrounds us. Looking around, in fact, we can more easily grasp the unhappiness of the people: in the subway the gazes down, the heads in the hands, the tiredness. People are forced into poorly paid jobs, with impossible schedules. Or think of the people in line at the supermarket: they are in a hurry to leave one of the most alienating places you can experience. It is impossible not to ask the meaning of all this. Adult life only exacerbates this unease: David Foster Wallace in a beautiful speech given in 2005 to the young graduates of Kenyon College(Ohio), said precisely that it is up to us to understand the problem of the world in which we live. Choosing what to think about and how to orient ourselves: and happiness is about this "because banal clichés can be a matter of life or death" (Foster Wallace). To have a pure smile in front of the mystery of life, to try to be happy if not, at least not desperate, to understand how to move in this tireless search, we must learn to think. Another important thought is that of Zygmunt Bauman, who uses the image of the horizon to make us understand how happiness is almost elusive and write essay for me.   

“Our life is a work of art - whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. To live it as the art of life demands, we must - like every artist, whatever his art may be - set ourselves difficult challenges (at least when we ask ourselves them) to be tackled at close range; we must choose goals that are (at least when we choose them) well beyond our reach, and standards of excellence that are irritating to their stubborn way of being (at least as far as we have seen so far) well beyond what we have known how to do or that we would have the ability to do. We must try the impossible. And we can only hope - without being able to rely on reliable and much less certain forecasts - to succeed sooner or later, with a long and excruciating effort, to equal those standards and to achieve those objectives, thus proving that we are up to the challenge. Uncertainty is the natural habitat of human life, although the hope of escaping it is the engine of human activities. Escaping uncertainty is a fundamental ingredient, or at least the unspoken assumption, of any composite image of happiness. This is why an "authentic, adequate and total" happiness seems to remain constantly at a certain distance from us: like a horizon that, like all horizons, recedes every time we try to get closer to it. "

Happiness is the antithesis of individualism

It means that bypassing from one challenge to another man is always on the way towards a goal, but it is not a goal to be achieved in total silence: he asks in an almost distressing way to be shared with someone and, above all, it must constitute a value: it must lead us to the masterpiece. In that masterpiece, there are not only us but all the people who have been there and maybe are still by our side. Happiness becomes a shared journey since, come to think, is very difficult to be happy in the most total. To be happy it is necessary to betray our individualism to give ourselves to others. 

«The betrayal of individualism is all here: in making people believe that to be happy it is enough to increase the utilities. While we know that one can be a perfect utility maximizer even in solitude, to be happy takes at least two. The reduction of the category of happiness to that of utility is at the origin of the belief that the miser is, after all, a rational subject. Yet a large number of social interactions acquire meaning solely thanks to the absence of instrumentality. The sense of a kind or generous action towards a friend, a child, a colleague lies precisely in its being free. If we came to know that that action stems from a utilitarian and manipulative logic, it would acquire a different meaning, with which the ways of responding on the part of the recipients of the action would change. The Chicago man - as Daniel McFadden recently called the most up-to-date version of homo œconomicus - is a loner, a loner and therefore an unhappy one, the more he cares about others since this concern is nothing but an idiosyncrasy of his preferences. [...] Now we finally understand why miser cannot be happy: because he is first of all stingy with himself; because he denies himself that bond value that the implementation of the principle of reciprocity could ensure him. "

Happiness is a choice

Happiness is a choice, a way to go: it is not the opposite of sadness, as the awareness of the fragility that dwells in everyone and the ability to love this frailty as the most valuable asset in everyone. One of the films that deal with the problem of happiness isElusive and at the center of the film Into the wild, which tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a boy who just after graduation embarked on a solo journey in the wastelands of Alaska where he accidentally died. He too was looking for happiness, to the point that he left us some very interesting reflections in his diaries.  

Finding happiness in adventure

Some so many unhappy people nevertheless do not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned by security, conformity, traditionalism, all things that seem to ensure peace of mind, but in reality, for the adventurous soul of a man, there is nothing more devastating than a certain future. The very core of a person's living spirit is a passion for adventure. The joy of living comes from meeting new experiences, and therefore there is no greater joy than having a constantly changing horizon, of being every day under a new and different sun ... We just have to find the courage to turn against it. the usual lifestyle and throw ourselves into an unconventional existence ...

The risk of living your life as a slave

How many times does it happen that we behave in some ways just to indulge what people want from us: we feel suffocated, but we resist apnea without batting an eye: simply because we have to do this and there is no other reason in the world. Certainly, some commitments are undertaken, jobs that must be done to live. However, living one's life as a slave without savoring one's freedom, without even the courage to dream of freedom, was what Christopher wanted to avoid. His solution, drastic, was to perpetually travel. He spent his life reading and traveling, living for the day, savoring every moment, similar to the Adler described by Eichendorff, a German Romanticist writer. This is the poem that the author has placed in the exergue of his book and write my essay for me. 

Eichendorff's poetry

To whom God wants to show a just benevolence,

Those he sends into the vast world,

To those he wants to make known his wonders

In the mountains and the woods and the water and the fields.

The lazy ones, who lie down at home, Are

not refreshed by the red dawn,

They only know the care of children,

The pains the fatigue and the trouble for bread.

The brooks come down from the mountains,

The larks whisk away high for fun

How much would I not sing with them

A piercing throat and a purer heart?

Dear God, I just let him rule;

The brook, the larks, the forest, and the fields

And the earth and the sky wants to keep,

He also arranged my things in the best way.

Not different from what Christopher McCandless himself says : 

McCandless's words

“But you are wrong if you think that the joys of life come above all from relationships between people. God has put happiness everywhere and everywhere, in everything we can experience. We just need to change the way we look at things ». 

Giacomo Leopardi and happiness

However, as his testament, Chriss writes: " Happiness is real only when shared." So we can understand that no matter how hard we try to find it within us, it is found in the relationship between us and others: so it is both inside and outside of us.

Even Leopardi has sought throughout his life to be happy and today crowds of students say "Damn Professor, how depressed Leopardi", and Facebook appeared even page " Giacomo Leopardi Mainagioia ". In a letter to his desperate love Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, he wrote: "... and I laugh at the happiness of the masses because my little brain does not conceive a happy mass., Composed of individuals not happy . " (Letter of December 5, 1831). Leopardi sometimes looked at the fragile illusions of humanity with sarcasm, sometimes with compassion, always intent on chasing the elusive horizon of happiness. Yet some of the most beautiful reflections on happiness come from him, a well-known pessimist. Leopardi said that «The imagination [...] is the first source of human happiness . The more this reigns in man, the happier man will be ».      

See the world with new eyes and sadness as a value to be defended

We talked before about the distant horizon that man tries to reach but fails, but in the meantime, he shares the journey with others, in friendship, and here is already the root of happiness. Imagination is then the tool we have to be able to reach the unattainable, through which we can change the reality around us, with which we can create and feel alive. With the imagination we can not so much change the reality in front of us, but have new eyes to look at it: have a poetic, new gaze, not spoiled by any habit. Think if we did this also with people ... if we saw new ones every day. After reflecting on this, let us return to the problem of pain and suffering. For poets also sadness is a value to defend because it brings us closer to a new and authentic feeling; it brings us closer if not to ephemeral happiness, to greater awareness, it leads to greater happiness as our destiny is better revealed. In a very profound passage, Rainer Maria Rilke, a great poet, speaks of sadness to one of his pupils.  

«I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel like paralysis because we no longer hear our dazed feelings live. Because we are alone with the intruder in us; because for an instant everything familiar and familiar is taken away from us; because we are in the midst of a transition, where it is not possible to stop. This is why the sadness passes: the new in us, the new one, has entered our heart, has penetrated its innermost chamber, and is not even there - it is already in the blood. And we don't know what it was. It would be easy to lead us to believe that nothing has happened; yet we have transformed ourselves, as a house is transformed into which a guest has entered. We do not know who has arrived, nor perhaps we will ever know, but many signs seem to indicate that the future enters us in this way, to transform into us well before his advent. This is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when we are sad: because the apparently empty and still instant in which our future enters us is so close to the life of that other noisy and casual moment in which it, as from outside, it occurs. The more quiet, patient, and open we are when we are sad, the deeper and safer the new enters us, the better we acquire it, the more our destiny will be, and we will feel about it, the day that "it will happen" from us to meet others), similar and close to each other in the intimate ». it is so close to the life of that other noisy and casual moment in which it, as from outside, occurs. The more quiet, patient, and open we are when we are sad, the deeper and safer the new enters us, the better we acquire it, the more our destiny will be, and we will feel about it, the day that "it will happen" from us to meet others), similar and close to each other in the intimate ». it is so close to the life of that other noisy and casual moment in which it, as from outside, occurs. The more quiet, patient, and open we are when we are sad, the deeper and safer the new enters us, the better we acquire it, the more our destiny will be, and we will feel about it, the day that "it will happen" from us to meet others), similar and close to each other in the intimate » value of essay.

Finally, we can speak of a great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most desperate men I have ever had the opportunity to face. But he too, like each of us, wanted to get to the truth and consecrates despair : 

"Overcome, I beg you, superior men, the little virtues, the little sensibilities, the tiny regards, the swarming of ants, the miserable well-being, the ' happiness of the greatest number ' -! And rather to resign yourselves, despair. And, in truth, I love you, superior men, because today you do not know how to live!

We started by understanding what reality is, what true wealth is. Eventually, in this superior detachment, we found a certain agreement in different thinkers. Now the ideas seem to me many and perhaps too many. It's up to you now.