As an old saying goes, “Joy surfeited turns to sorrow.” This semester, we are dealing with happiness in english class. When I was in China, I did write something about happiness. Nothing is in psychological term. Daniel Gilbert is definitely a great author, and he turns psychological discovery into a prose and into a beautiful article. Many of his idea resonate with me, especially after I take psychological class. It is generally accepted idea that people tend to think that they cannot handle the horrible situation. Once people is in the worse state or have gone through it, they know actually the thing is not as worse as they thought.

I thought honor psychology mid-term is extremely hard when I prepared for the mid-term last week. I do not feel happy at all because I am under great pressure and always question myself in the class and after the class. I never have two hours writing midterm in my life. I feel like that I wrote more than 10 pages in two hour mid-term. I thought two-hour writing would be terrible for me. However, I feel great release after test. Far more than that, I really enjoy the two-hours writing during the test which I didn’t know when i was in and before the test.

Under economic principle, people face trade-off everyday and need to trade to improve the life of whole soceity.My question is:” Can we trade happiness?” or ” Can we make other people happy?” 3 weeks ago in psychology class, Professor Locke played a carton in the class. It is a story about two carton charaters X and Y . Character X feel sad these days. Character Y, as X’s friend, want to do something to make him happy. Therefore, Y invents a device, which could make people smile and laugh when he feel down or happy. X tried on the device, and then start to smile and laugh most of times. After few hours, X feel tired of laughing and smiling. So he request Y to stop the device.Hoewver, Y think that the device is the only way to make X happy. In Y’s perspective, laughing and  smiling is happiness. Few days later, X shows some negative symptoms, such as eyes bleeding, fatigue. He beg Y to stop the device. He was rejected. After few months, the device goes wrong. Then X will go back to his original life without being control to laugh and smile. I could still remember the last scene: X beg Y to fix the device so that he can laugh and smile all the times because he think laughing and smiling have already been a part of his life. It is weird and funny.  

I didn’t dig in too much in psychology area. Instead, I kinda feel like that X will die soon because happiness is controlled by external device, but you inner heart.