living, thinking and writing
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| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
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Tuesday, January 28, 2003 Path to happiness Last night, I asked my COM101 students to design models of happy life for man and woman separately. They present quite similar models, but with pretty creative graphs. Here are the elements of happy life proposed by all the models: For woman to lead happy life, they need to own: wealth, health, high education and family For man, happy life means: friends, sports, sex and family It was completely opposite to my expectation, and I could not help but comment: look who should be the elite of the society! Has the social role of male and female changed already? We assumed that men¡¯s self-achievement reside on successful career and responsibility for family, but actually the pursuit of pure material fun is the main path to happiness; maybe my students are still too young to think about serious stuff. But talking about the happy factors for women, I could not see any feminine characteristics from what the students presented (I'm glad there only one group thought beautiful physical features can bring women happy). How could we explain this? To look at it in a pathetic way, maybe the things that make you happy are those that you can never get enough. Socrates once said: to know yourself is the only path to happiness (something like that). There should be unique formula of happiness for every individual. I would rather believe my students are talking just a general model of happiness and not really believe in what they created. posted by lmeimei @11:38 AM| permanent link| | |
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