While exploring through "Room for debate", I became fascinated when I came across an article that discussed measuring one's happiness with happiness indicators. As science becomes more high-level and technologies develop more friendly with our beliefs and bodies, they are generally used as a foundation to reconstruct or restrain individuals.
This suits the overall pattern of a comprehensive destruction of privacy and ownership of every other feature of ourselves to the degree that the very concept of an individual self is becoming an antedate. The federal government will be observing approximately all credit card transactions to adequately manage people's spending decisions. They're intensifying monitoring of food consumption by centralized powers to manipulate and regulate people's diets. The medical records are going into centralized databases to encourage closer administration of that previously isolated area of people's lives. Also, how cameras and cell phone can monitor people's actions.
Liberation from desire or anxiety should correspond with the happiest moments of people's life. For instance, when all the fundamental needs are being met and when people have time and energy for personal goals and activities when the important work is done. Do you think that it is a good idea to measure one's happiness? Is happiness measurable?
Eriell Ricasata
I don't think that it's a great idea to measure someone's happiness. I feel that it's a bit of a breach in privacy since you're trying to figure out HOW happy someone is, and it's not your emotions (though I understand it's in the name of science).
ReplyDeleteI especially don't agree with measuring happiness if it means that the government will be collecting it and will try and use it against us (the idea of the government restricting our credit card funds and food consumption is ... worrisome at the least). I also don't think emotions can be completely measured. We typically say vague 'measurements' when we talk about our emotions such as, "I'm extremely excited!" or "I'm feeling a bit down." When we talk about our emotions in percentages or fractions, we often exaggerate or estimate how much we're feeling; "I'm 100% happy," or "3/4's of me is in pain".
We can't exactly express how much happiness we have.
Emotions are based on our subjective experiences, so typically people are happiest once they're freed of their anxiety or completed their wish. It's kind of a shame we can't completely measure that happiness if we want to record it specifically.
I don't really think that someones happiness can be measured. I feel that this goal of being able to measure someones happiness is odd and unreasonable because every individual has different types of happiness. Happiness can't be defined but it is felt and understood being that we feel happiness everyday (or at least we should). Usually you can get a sense of how happy someone is by their actions and language.
ReplyDeleteI also think that the government should not be tracking the activity of individuals to attempt measuring the emotions of someone else. The only person who knows what that individual is truly feeling is themselves and like Ashley said, it's an invasion of privacy. I understand what the government is trying to do but I personally don't believe this will be very successful.