The Truth of Happiness
Project overview:
This project began with reading the book Brave New World. We wanted to gain a understanding of a dystopia so we could understand what is required to create a utopian society. This gave the first idea of what is needed for happiness. The book showed us what fake happiness is so we could begin to understand how to create true happiness. After the book we began to research the different aspects of happiness for our annotated bibliography. After we learned about 5 assigned sources we each decided what aspect of happiness we would look into individually. I chose to look into peoples intrinsic and extrinsic values. This lead to the next part of our project. Finding something that increases your happiness. To do this we each designed experiments around changing something in our lives that will increase overall happiness. This lead into our final piece of the project, we had to find the truth of happiness. We created videos in groups that explained what we found the truth of happiness was based on our experiments and individual research.
This project began with reading the book Brave New World. We wanted to gain a understanding of a dystopia so we could understand what is required to create a utopian society. This gave the first idea of what is needed for happiness. The book showed us what fake happiness is so we could begin to understand how to create true happiness. After the book we began to research the different aspects of happiness for our annotated bibliography. After we learned about 5 assigned sources we each decided what aspect of happiness we would look into individually. I chose to look into peoples intrinsic and extrinsic values. This lead to the next part of our project. Finding something that increases your happiness. To do this we each designed experiments around changing something in our lives that will increase overall happiness. This lead into our final piece of the project, we had to find the truth of happiness. We created videos in groups that explained what we found the truth of happiness was based on our experiments and individual research.
Reflection
1. What have you discovered your truth of happiness is?
Throughout this project I have come to the conclusion that my truth of happiness is to have meaning. I came to this conclusion when we started working on the videos. I realized that if you chase happiness you will more than likely come up short. You need to search for meaning and once you find that happiness will come to you. When you have meaning you are appreciated by other people. From my happiness experiment I found out that you need to be appreciated by people to be truly happy it is a physiological need.
2. What was the greatest challenge you faced in this project and how did you work through it?
The hardest challenge for me was writing up our observations for our Happiness Experiment. I found taking the time to observe what I was feeling was extremely hard because of how caught up in the moment I was. Sometimes after I was done cooking I had little to no memory of what i was feeling in that moment of time. To overcome this I had to rack my brain each time I started to cook and take notes throughout the time I was cooking and eating.
3. How have you grown as a group worker in this project?
Group work has always been something that I have struggled with. I never fully trust my groupmates which ends up giving me lots of stress throughout the project. I always fear that my groupmates don’t care about the project which is almost always wrong. This leads me to constantly watch over and see the entire project soon causing me to unnecessarily complete some of the other peoples work. Throughout this project I have grown my trust while working in groups. Throughout the project I am sure that I took a step back and let other people do what they want. Now I know that I can trust people to do the work and don’t have to step in for them which has been a big step for me.
4. If you could refine any part of your project, what would you refine and how would you do it?
If I could refine any part of my project it would be reading Brave New World. I would refine this because while reading this book I was not very interested and on most chapters once I got the correct amount of annotations I would stop reading. This caused me to miss a lot of what happened throughout the book. If I could refine this I would read the book thoroughly and make sure not to miss anything. What I did caused me to miss a big portion of the book that could have lead to a better more well informed idea of the truth of happiness.
1. What have you discovered your truth of happiness is?
Throughout this project I have come to the conclusion that my truth of happiness is to have meaning. I came to this conclusion when we started working on the videos. I realized that if you chase happiness you will more than likely come up short. You need to search for meaning and once you find that happiness will come to you. When you have meaning you are appreciated by other people. From my happiness experiment I found out that you need to be appreciated by people to be truly happy it is a physiological need.
2. What was the greatest challenge you faced in this project and how did you work through it?
The hardest challenge for me was writing up our observations for our Happiness Experiment. I found taking the time to observe what I was feeling was extremely hard because of how caught up in the moment I was. Sometimes after I was done cooking I had little to no memory of what i was feeling in that moment of time. To overcome this I had to rack my brain each time I started to cook and take notes throughout the time I was cooking and eating.
3. How have you grown as a group worker in this project?
Group work has always been something that I have struggled with. I never fully trust my groupmates which ends up giving me lots of stress throughout the project. I always fear that my groupmates don’t care about the project which is almost always wrong. This leads me to constantly watch over and see the entire project soon causing me to unnecessarily complete some of the other peoples work. Throughout this project I have grown my trust while working in groups. Throughout the project I am sure that I took a step back and let other people do what they want. Now I know that I can trust people to do the work and don’t have to step in for them which has been a big step for me.
4. If you could refine any part of your project, what would you refine and how would you do it?
If I could refine any part of my project it would be reading Brave New World. I would refine this because while reading this book I was not very interested and on most chapters once I got the correct amount of annotations I would stop reading. This caused me to miss a lot of what happened throughout the book. If I could refine this I would read the book thoroughly and make sure not to miss anything. What I did caused me to miss a big portion of the book that could have lead to a better more well informed idea of the truth of happiness.