ACTIVITY: We’re all about evidence this week, so it’s time to do some research! You will be interviewing someone who is different from you in some significant way (different race, age, gender, socioeconomic class, life experience–however you choose to define ‘different’!) on the topic of happiness. You can construct your interview however you see fit, and conduct it in the way that works for you (in person, over text message, facetime, whatever). Your interview’s TOPIC must be about happiness, and you must, at some point, ask them to respond to one of the theories that has come up in our readings.
For example, I might choose to interview my father. In the course of my interview, I want to ask him if he is happy, how he defines happiness, maybe if that definition has changed as he’s gotten older. To bring our readings into it, I might explain a little about santosha, and ask how he feels about that, or I might refer to someone mentioned in Storr’s essay–Little, who decides that happiness is really having a bunch of ‘personal projects’. Since he’s my dad, he’s a different gender, and also a different generation, so he fits the task definition of a different demographic.
You will conduct your interview and summarize your findings in a useful way and submit it in an MLA format. A successful entry will be a minimum of a page long, identify the subject you chose to interview, accurately summarizing their answers, and reflecting on how those answers agree or disagree with your own and take into account the differences in demographic. For example, I might imagine how my dad’s answers were shaped by serving in Vietnam, and mine were shaped by the later Cold War. A successful answer will be about 1-2 pages long.