On NUDGE

Based on my reading on Nudge, I see an overarching theme on happiness. I have attempted to discuss happiness in my first paper, which tries to find the association between happiness and financial success. In my second paper, I shifted directions to look at the association between happiness and social support, which to my surprise, while social support does contribute to happiness, it is persona/mental well-being that was the highest contributor to happiness.

Now, looking at the blogs that I have published on my Medium blogs, I want to further the topic of happiness to what I have written. I find that many of my blogs seem to have an association with happiness. For example, I talked about my experience of a major hangover as I looked for happiness in drinking excessively with my friends during a social outing. I talked about my frustrations on dating apps attempting to find happiness through matching with many potential halves romantically and sexually. I talked about finding happiness in watching horror movies that “mind-fucked” me — which sounds quite sadistic. I shifted to talking about my fear of the ocean.

Based on the utilitarianism principle, people naturally try to live their lives to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. We maximize our pleasure through trying to make as much money as we can, forming social connections with other people (even if this means experiencing a major headache the day after), finding companionship through dating apps (and attempting many modes of dating — from casual sex, relationships, to possibly finding love). We minimize pain by avoiding things that we are afraid of (in my case, avoid the big, endless ocean).

But then again, utilitarianism principle is also problematic because how would we consider serial killers getting pleasure out of killing people? Another interesting aspect that I observed is finding pleasure in the pain of others (watching the horror movie and getting pleasure out of it). It’s ironic that serial killers find pleasure in killing and torturing, just like I get thrills watching people go crazy in movies, fictionally, of course. But now that we have connected all of my assignments and blog posts to happiness — what truly gives you happiness? If killing gives pleasure, then wouldn’t the utilitarian perspective be morally wrong at times? I think that this is something worthy to think about. Perhaps pleasure and pain shouldn’t be considered as a single unit of measurement.

As we all are on our personal journeys to find happiness, what I believe is important to understand is that finding happiness is a lifelong journey. We cannot continuously pursue happiness that disappears, like shooting up a drug and feeling that rush of euphoria only for a few seconds, minutes, or hours. We need to be finding happiness through the satisfaction of our life and overall well-being.

I know, I know. This is easier said than one. But as one of my professors once stated, when you prepare, that already completes 50 percent of the world. So let us start preparing ourselves. Happiness, here we come!