Does money affect happiness?
My question
I believe fits all of the criteria. For
personal meaning it relates to me because I have to deal with money everyday
and also my happiness is personal. I
also have seen the two extremes in people who I am very close to and will be
able to relate those to the question.
For the question of does my question fit into society, I think that it
affects everyone. Everyone has to deal
with money and happiness. The question
has multiple answers and people can have multiple opinions on it. There are multiple further questions that can
stem off of these. Some examples are what
does money mean to you, does money rule the world, what is happiness to you,
does money affect sadness, and how can money affect your happiness. I do not believe that my topic is too broad
or too specific. The question does not
contain my value judgment. So because of
all these things I think that my question is a good question to use.
Potential Artifacts
1.
The
Pursuit of Happiness
2.
The
news
3.
http://www.forbes.com/2004/09/21/cx_mh_0921happiness.html
article on Forbes.
4.
One
Tree Hill the TV series
5.
Credit
Cards
6.
Banks
7.
The
Kardasians
8. Family
Feud
9.
Money
10.
College
Student loans
For a potential artifact I thought that a good one to use
would be a popular movie that is shown in school and nearly every person has
seen, The Pursuit of Happiness. I will
use the movie The Pursuit of Happiness as my artifact to relate to my
life. In the movie he is depressed because
he is broke and his family is splitting up because he has lead them to be
broke. In the movie he tries to sell a
health machine to make money but he cannot seem to sell it. He had bought a bunch of machines expecting
to make a lot of money however he actually went broke out of it. In the movie he is trying to pursue happiness
by selling these machines. Eventually he
realizes that it is not all about the money and gets close to his son. Then he decides it is time to stop being
depressed and grow up. Then he tries to
pursue happiness by getting a job. In
the end of the movie he gets a job as an accountant and they are happy and
brought closer together. I am going to
use this artifact to relate to my life in many ways. My dad has got many different jobs to pursue
happiness and most recently got his dream job even though getting a pay degrade. We never dealt with depression or anything
like that but my dad pursued happiness not related to money, like in the movie
when he realizes it isn’t about the money it is about family. I think that is very important, not to worry
about money making you happy but worry about the things that will last making
you happy, like family. I think that I
will be able to relate this two well together in my paper by taking about my
dad’s pursuit of happiness and Will Smiths pursuit of happiness throughout the
movie. When using this artifact I am
also going to talk about how it kind of contradicts itself in terms of talking
about how money isn’t the most important thing but yet they have made millions
off of this TV show. Through these ways
I think I will be able to give an answer to does money affect happiness.
1. Generally speaking, I think your question can work well. I especially like the sub questions you ask off it--choosing one of those to focus on for each project might be a really cool idea. The only thing you'll want to be cautious of is falling into the trap of a cliche answer to you question--something like, money can't buy happiness. You'll want to be looking at this question in a new and complicated way--one that doesn't have siple answers.
ReplyDelete2. I worry that your artifact might be a little too cliche or "obvious" since the message of the movie seems to exactly the point you want to make in your essay. Instead, you want to think about something that complicates the expected answer tot he question. I thought your ideas about credit cards or the Kardashians might be really interesting. These seem like things that you could use to think about what roll credit plays in our lives or if the Kardashians support or confound the idea that money can't buy happiness. In other words, I think connecting something totally unrelated to your dad (rather than a story about another dad) could lead you to a really interesting piece of writing.