Is Happiness Catching

507 Words3 Pages
Is Happiness Catching? In today’s world more and more people need to feel a sense of acceptance. We have lost our sense of self, and are choosing to do thing just to fit in. In the story “Is Happiness Catching” an older couple chooses to live their life based on what the people surrounding them are doing. Many of us do this without even realizing it. We want to feel accepted as a part of something, and with doing that we lose a little bit of ourselves. Eileen made a lot of life changing decisions based on what her friends were doing. Notice when she says “At the time, my cigarette habit didn’t seem like a problem; most all of my friends smoked socially. But in the late 1900’s a few of them began to quit, so I started to feel awkward holding a cigarette and soon quit too.” Eileen started smoking just to fit in socially, and could’ve caught a deadly disease by doing so. It took for her friends the quit, for her to see a problem in smoking. She never once thought about the consequence that comes with smoking. Her main focus was fitting in socially. Most of my friends smoke, yet I have never smoked. Do I feel awkward, no. As kids we are taught to be ourselves, nobody likes a copy cat. Yet we are all guilty of doing something we probably shouldn’t just to fit in. Have you ever wanted to upgrade you house because your friends upgraded theirs. Or have you ever purchased a new car, and noticed someone close to you did the something right after. It’s all the same thing, we need to feel like where not missing out on anything. But, at the end of the day, we are the only person responsible for the outcome of the decisions we make. We need to spend less time focusing on others and more time focusing on ourselves. When reading about the obesity situation in the story, researches seems to think the man was obsess due to lack of friendship, or being lonely. Nowhere in the
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