Consider the following comments on happiness.
We have built whole industries on the promise of a happiness they are careful never to deliver.
A society that treats happiness as a duty quietly punishes everyone who is merely sad.
The pursuit of happiness may be the surest way to keep it always one purchase away.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
Immanuel Kant
When a culture measures wellbeing by output, it learns to call exhaustion contentment.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that the modern demand to be happy has become a kind of pressure that undermines the very contentment it promises. Open by honouring the decent impulse behind it, that wanting people to flourish rather than merely endure is a humane and recent achievement. Then complicate it: when happiness becomes an expectation, an industry and a status symbol, ordinary sorrow starts to feel like personal failure, and the chase itself breeds restlessness. A strong third move separates happiness as a fleeting mood, which cannot be commanded, from a life of meaning, which often passes through difficulty rather than around it. Caution: resist the cynical conclusion that happiness is therefore a fraud, since the answer to a shallow idea of happiness is a deeper one, not the abandonment of the hope altogether.