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Happiness: Is it real?
What is happiness? Is happiness attainable and if it is can it be created or does it come
natural? In “Immune to Reality” Daniel Gilbert, he discusses how the mind works when facing
an arduous
situation and why we react to the situation in a specific way. In both Leslie Bell’s “Selections
from Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom” and Susan
Faludi’s “ The Naked Citadel” the women and the cadets, respectively, actively seek to find their
personal identities and aim to justify their ill-advised decisions. All the people mentioned in
Faludi and Bell’s essay come from different background but all strive to achieve or manufacture
happiness. In order to explore the concept of actively seeking to be happy, we must ask ourselves
what constitutes happiness. Is happiness safety, health or is it pleasure, contentment and
fortunate? According to Merriam-Webster, happiness is “feeling pleasure and enjoyment because
of your life or situation”. It is impossible for people to manufacture happiness because happiness
is a result of one’s actions and not an object that can be created. Making happiness leads one to a
short term happiness.
The cadets by the definition given by Merriam-Webster experience happiness. The
definition is problematic because the cadets are not doing what’s good for themselves which
usually leads in long term happiness but do what they must to survive. “ The Citadel assures that
any desire on part of a cadet to speak out about the mounting violence will usually be squelched
by the threat of ostracism and shame” (Faludi 81). The heinous acts portrayed, committed by the
upperclassmen insinuates a sense of pleasure almost like happiness. The cadets derive a sense of
pleasure from such activities because they think they are helping the knobs. Since everyone at
the Citadel undergo hazing, the upperclassmen see hazing as helping the freshman become men.
Their thought process is explained by Gilbert who writes, “Indeed, research shows that when
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people are given electrical shocks, they actually feel less pain when they believe they are
suffering for something of great value” ( Gilbert 136). They see hazing as beneficial because
they are suffering for something honorable and sacred, being able to say that they attended the
Citadel. Their suffering is justified by the resuls and not only do the knobs see it like that but so
do the upperclassmen. The cadets who are upperclassmen derive happiness by inflicting the pain
because when they were freshmen they had to endure the same type of hazing. They justify their
actions by thinking that they are actually helping the knobs to become better men. The short
satisfaction that the cadets get from torturing the freshman is a short term happiness. After the
cadets leave their supremely controlled environment of an all male military academy they can no
longer beat anyone they want. This short lived happiness can result in a major conflict. If the
cadets continue to actively search for this happiness, they may find themselves in a prison or
