The roots of happiness Synopsis. One of the most interesting reads in Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum by Behrens and Rosen was “Happy Like God” by Simon Critchely. His main point was his opinion on the flow of happiness that everyone experiences during daily life. For Critchely, teaching philosophy is a means to live and use his knowledge, it gives a very historical meaning to life. A very well-known philosopher, Aristotle, along with many other philosophers believed that the purpose of the philosophical life was to achieve happiness. Our idea of ​​life is dictated and marked by cell phone alarms, computer problems and traffic games. The meaning of life can be misled by the way our society places emphasis on this self-sufficient, fast-past world we live in. The key word reverie can describe happiness very well. The experience of reverie is like being awake, but asleep, thinking, but not in an orderly way, it is simply letting thoughts happen, as they will. Simply the feeling of existence can be the root of happiness. Happiness is not measurable or quantitative by any means of polling, questioning, or science. A passage from Walt Whitman's “Leaves of Grass” writes “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour.” This is a very simplistic view that happiness is only in the present, unplanned but discovered. To be in a reverie, in a portion of time that exists only in the present, is like being a god. We think of the gods as a happy entity who does not care about time, problems of the soul, and who experiences calm in everything. Being happy and being a god can be thought of interchangeably. But time passes, the daydreams end and the feeling of existing...... middle of paper ...... which fills our soul entirely as long as this state lasts we can say we are happy...". (Critichley 449) This quote from Critichley's article was surprisingly in tune with how I feel when I'm happy. Being able to simplify it down to a single paragraph and be consistent with how I think when I'm happy makes this one of my favorite quotes. Schoch's article was more in-depth about economics and the methods companies use to dilute the true meaning of happiness. This wasn't that interesting to me since Critichley went deeper into his own view of what it feels like to be in a state of happiness. His approach to using the term “happy as God” and explaining why it could be used interchangeably was also very interesting to me. This is why I found “Happy Like God” by Simon Critichley more intriguing than “A Critique of Positive Psychology” by Richard Schoch.