For years, people have been trying to decipher the true meaning of happiness. Some say having a wife, kids, a dog, and a house with a white picket fence in the front is happiness. Others say having a job where you make bank is happiness. Bertrand Russell says the happy life is to an extent the same as the good life. In Bertrand Russell’s essay titled “The Happy Life”, he tells us what he thinks the happy life is from his point of view as a Hedonist. He says, “I have written in this book as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who regards happiness as the good, but the acts recommended from the point of view of the Hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist”. That quote in a way explains the first sentence in the essay which is, “The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.” Russell wrote a book called The Conquest of Happiness which is where the essay “The Happy Life” comes from. Russell wrote these to inform the reader of his opinion, which he considers to be right or factual, on the happy life.
As previously stated, Bertrand Russell is a Hedonist. A Hedonist thinks the happy life is the same as the good life and pursuing happiness is the main conquest of life. The essay is written not only from the point of view of a Hedonist, but also the point of view as a pacifist. The fact that this essay is written from the point of view of those two groups makes this article potentially biased toward one side. This essay doesn’t quite persuade the reader to one side; it just explains Russell’s opinion. This goes back to the second and third sentence of this paper. One side could say happiness is one idea and Russell could say happiness is another. Neither are 100 percent correct. You can only assume what happiness is as its definition is different for everybody. Russell gave the example of a kid drowning. If you jump in and save the drowning kid without thinking about what you’re about to do, you’re a good person. But if you jump into the water after thinking that it is morally right to jump in and save the kid, you are a morally worse man (or woman, don’t be sexist). Russell also uses styles that George Orwell goes against in Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. Russell uses pretentious diction, something Orwell is against. In the second paragraph, Russell says, “There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the attitude towards life that I have been recommending and that which is recommended by the traditional moralists.” Russell could’ve made it easier for the reader if he had just said something along the lines of “There is a slight difference between my point of view towards life and the point of view of a moralist.” See how much easier that is?
This essay applies in many ways. One could say that this essay teaches you the way to live a happy life or the way not to write. Both ways work. You could take away from this essay that the happy life is living a good life. Feel free to define the good/happy life in your own way. Or you could take away a prime example of a way not to write. Russell uses pretentious diction which is words used only to impress the intended audience. Pretentious diction is not necessary and if used, can make the writer seem stuck up. If easy and well known words are used, not only will it be easier to write, but it well be easier for the audience to read. And that’s the way everyone likes it.
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