<p>This was my 1st SAT essay, timed or not, so I was a bit inexperienced and didn't quite develop my ideas as fully as I wanted to. This discusses the topic of "Are people capable of finding happiness?", your generic, standard SAT question. I timed myself for 25 minutes, although I did so some preparation and research for "happiness" beforehand, as well as reading the "12 Essay in 10 Days" thread. I wrote it on looseleaf so I'm not sure if I wrote enough, but it did fill up the entire looseleaf page. I had about 4 minutes left when I finished my essay, to check over everything and add stuff.</p>
<p>What do I need to improve? How longer should it be? Give me a grade.</p>
<p>People are not capable of finding happiness, because nothing lasts forever and happiness is relative. Temporary happiness is a completely different story from habitual happiness, because every dog has to give up its toy eventually. Finding happiness is essentially a chase, and by default, human nature is programmed to chase.</p>
<p>In the literary work, "Fahrenheit 451", Bradbury depicts an utopian society where, as he describes, "we have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy." Finding happiness appears to be elusive, and although people in the book think they are happy, the book admits that they are not. The very same can be said in our world; we have everything, from the grass that grows on the ground, to the houses that we inhabit, yet the majority of us are not, by standard definition, happy. The wealth of us have money, clothes, and food, but yet a number of us would admit that we aren't happy, and we all want more clothes, food, and money to even begin feeling happy.</p>
<p>Happiness is not only elusive, but it is rather relative. A village infested with disease in an obscure corner of Africa would be happy to live a full month without a dozen deaths. A worker in the United States would be happy if they had paid vacation time. Therefore, what is relative is always a threshold beneath something else. Even if a person were to find happiness as per se, they would want more, and yearn for more. It's in the beat of the human heart to subconsciously chase and chase. The Declaration of Independence talks about a "pursuit of happiness", thereby forever associating the word "happiness" with the idea of "pursuit".</p>
<p>Happiness, like all else, is a temporary emotion, and what is considered temporary cannot be fully attained. It is also relative, therefore making the find for happiness a torturous, endless cycle. This is why casino players gamble and roll even when they have already profited. Reconciling with this fact, actually, would be a part of the process in attaining a state of <em>underline</em>temporary<em>underline</em> happiness, albeit a pre-meditated and difficult one. From what a broad question like this can be perceived, happiness would be a state of euphoria. While there are those who die "happy", and are living "happily", they are not experiencing this said state of euphoria, but rather satisfaction, an emotion deviant from the feeling of happiness.</p>