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Francisco Campos

Professor Beadle

English 115

10 May 2019

Similarities of Happiness and Suffering:

Everyone feels different emotions, but these emotions are something that everyone has

experienced. But have you ever thought about how these emotions impact the outcome of your

day to day actions? In the three articles that were read in class, all the authors talk about these

impacts, whether it be from happiness or from suffering. All three authors are very similar in the

topic which they are writing about, but they are also different. Each author is different from each

other because of the way in which they get their message across to the readers. Each author talks

about happiness in some shape or form throughout each of their essays. All of the essays that we

read in class use at least one of the rhetorical strategies, the most common one being pathos.

Each author uses these rhetorical strategies with a different purpose in mind. Some use it to hook

the reader, others use it to keep the reader engaged, they also use it so that the audience can

relate to the text at hand, and the authors also use it to show their credibility. David Brooks,

Graham Hill, and Sonja Lyubomirsky all focus on the internal space. The authors each use ethos,

pathos, or logos to suggest the transformation of one's own space through charts and by

providing experiences of others. Each author has success when using the rhetorical strategies in

their essays, especially when they are suggesting how to transform one’s internal space.

In “What Suffering Does” by David Brooks, the one constant that is used throughout the

passage is the rhetorical strategy of pathos. He talks about suffering and what it does to the

human internally. Brooks’ use of pathos suggest changing your internal space by not always

thinking of happiness as the solution to everything, but realizing that there are more ways of
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feeling good about yourself that don’t have to do with the feeling of pure happiness. Brooks says

that “suffering involved in their tasks becomes a fearful gift” (286), showing that most of the

people that are mentioned in his essay have found some kind of meaning or reward through the

feeling of suffering and through feeling as if they have lost everything. David Brooks also

suggested that one should not be afraid of suffering for it will make you see things in a different

perspective than you did before things went downhill. Brooks mentions that “recovering from

suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed, they come

out different” (286), and the examples that he goes on to give are ones in which people have

suffered and not only have they changed completely, but they have also done things that helps

themselves and helps the people around them. Change your internal space, whether it be your

mindset, your perspective, your heart, etc. change it and turn negativity into positivity, not only

for yourself, but for others as well.

In “Living With Less. A Lot Less by”, Graham Hill uses the rhetorical strategies of pathos

and ethos all throughout his essay. Hill uses ethos and pathos to suggest that one change their

internal space by not making the same mistake he made, which was falling in love with objects

and demanding that he have more, when finally he had it all and wasn’t happy anymore. He was

not happy anymore because there was nothing else to own, he then learned that your happiness

shouldn’t be dependent on materialistic things. One of the ways in which Graham Hill used ethos

is the fact that he gives us a background on who he is and he uses the name of the company that

he worked for so that the readers can see that he is serious about the topic at hand. Another way

in which ethos is used is because of the fact that this is a personal experience that he has decided

to share with the readers, making him credible because nobody can tell him whether he is right or

wrong because nobody else lived what he did or felt the way he did throughout those moments in
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which he hit a high point in his life and then he hit a low point. Pathos is used in this essay

through him describing his emotions and how he felt when he first had everything and how he

felt after some time he passed and he was no longer able to acquire anything that had much

significance to him. Graham Hill said “My success and the things I bought changed from novel

to norm” (309), demonstrating that he had lost feelings when he could no longer buy anything

new. He makes sure to let people know that they should stop caring about materials by ending

his essay by saying “my space is small. My life is big” ( Hill 312). This is showing him talking

about the development of the space around him and how it has made him into the person that he

is today. He once felt that in order for his internal space to feel complete, he needed his external

space to be big. As time went by, he realized that this was not the case. He had to change

everything around him because his internal space started to feel incomplete once he realized that

there was nothing else that he could obtain because he obtained everything he ever wanted. As

soon as he changed his external space by making it small, his internal space, his life, felt big. His

message is that you do not need to live up the the expectations of everyone else to make your

internal space feel good, but do what you please and everything else will follow.

In “How Happy Are You and Why?” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Lyubomirsky talks about the

feeling of happiness and the reason as to why certain people feel happy and why other people do

not feel happy at all. In order to get her message across she uses all three rhetorical strategies, all

three being ethos, pathos, and logos. Sonja Lyubomirsky uses both ethos and logos by showing

readers data in her essay, not only making her credible, but easy to agree with. Her numbers

provide evidence so that the reader can be well informed about all the studies that have been

conducted on her topic. She uses a graph to show the readers the happiness score of different

generations and she uses a pie chart to demonstrate what affects happiness and how much it
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affects it. She also mentions three of the myths that there are about the reasons why a person can

be happy. Sonja Lyubomirsky also uses pathos when she mentions all the stories of the people

she has interviewed. This draws emotion because in some of the stories, some people went

through some harsh things as they were growing up and as a child they were not happy, but now

as adults they have found happiness. For example, the story of Randy, he has experienced two

people close to him die from suicide, one being his father, then his mother made him move with

her to a different city and his step father belittled him. He felt as if there was no escape, but he

left by marrying at an early age, but that ended in divorce. All that did made him into a stronger

person because “today Randy is one of those happy people who make everyone around them

smile and laugh” (Lyubomirsky 181). In other stories the people had a very good upbringing,

did not go through much that made them suffer, but now as adults they don’t find much

happiness in doing things for example, Shannon.Lyubomirsky says “despite the lack of tragedy

or trauma in her life, Shannon seems to turn everything into a crisis. The use of this gives the

readers the ability to relate to one or more of the stories that are mentioned in the essay. The use

of all these rhetorical devices present a suggestion to transforming internal space by making one

look within themselves and find why they are happy or why they aren’t happy and change it. Just

like in the stories that Lyubomirsky included in her essay, some were happy young, but ended up

unhappy as they got older, although some do try to change this. Those that were traumatized

young, but grew up and learned how to be happy did something to change their internal spaces.

This goes to show you that just because your internal space may not feel like it is worth anything

at the moment, that does not mean that you cannot do anything to change it, there is always a

solution to any problem, and that solution begins with you.

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Overall, the three authors, David Brooks, Graham Hill, and Sonja Lyubomirsky found ways

to implement some, of not all, of the rhetorical devices into their articles and they made it in a

way in which it could make one change their internal space. The stories all had the same topic,

but it was presented in different ways, that topic being happiness. Some of the essays presented

stories from other people that allowed the reader to relate to some of them, whereas one of the

essays did not have a story straight from another person's mouth, instead it was just an example

of a mother losing her child, which not many can relate to. Most of the stories involved some

kind of data or study that was conducted on the topic at hand, which made the authors seem more

credible because they were giving the readers evidence that supported their arguments. All of

these strategies used by each author, David Brooks, Graham Hill, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, were

successful in their own right because they were all convincing due to the fact that they had most

of the rhetorical strategies implemented within their essays, making the reader take a minute and

think about what is being discussed and look within themselves to see if they need a change of

internal space.
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Works Cited

Brooks, David. “What Suffering Does”. Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt and

Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St Martin’s, 2016, pp 284-287

Hill, Graham. “Living With Less. A Lot Less” Pursuing Happiness edited by Matthew Parfitt

and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St Martin’s, 2016, pp 308-313

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. “How Happy Are You And Why?”. The How of Happiness Pursuing

Happiness edited by Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski, Bedford St Martin’s, 2016, pp 179-

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