Overview
Formulate a "happiness plan" for your own life and for your society. Understanding that happiness and life fulfillment mean different things to different people, use the insights gained from this course to develop your own personalized plan for being happy, living your best life, finding meaning and fulfillment in life, or whatever words you might use to express "happiness" or "fulfillment." Make sure you draw upon your second essay assignment, discussing what the 5 assigned readings had to say about what constitutes a "good life." In addition to the readings covered in assignment #2, you should also incorporate any other course readings (or videos) that help you think about creating fulfillment in life for yourself. At a minimum, you should draw upon at least 2 additional course readings or videos. I
n addition to developing your own plan for living a good life, also develop a plan for maximizing the happiness, well-being, meaningfulness, and fulfillment of the (national or global) population as a whole. What characteristics of a society would be most beneficial to increase the "Gross National Happiness" of that society? If you want to think about this in relationship to your own "happiness plan," think about the possibility that the world you live in may, at least in some respects, make it difficult for you to live your best life. In thinking about this, you might imagine how something you don't like about the world in which you live might be changed or be different. Draw upon your first essay assignment to address this question, but also consider relevant readings covered by the second assignment. At a minimum, you should draw upon 2 additional course readings or videos (other than the ones included in your first essay assignment) to articulate the characteristics of society that would be most beneficial for increasing the happiness, well-being, meaningfulness, and fulfilment of the population as a whole.
Now, for grading criteria. I am going to keep this pretty simple and straightforward as well.
To get an A on the paper, here is what you need to do:
1. Write a minimum of 3000 words. 2. Reference at least 15 sources from assigned course material (including the 6 required for the first essay assignment, the 5 required for the second essay assignment, and at least four other course readings or videos). I encourage you to consider using any of the readings or videos covered in the class since the essay 2 assignment deadline. These should be cited in the text of your paper (with author last name, year of publication, and page number in the text) and included in your reference list at the end of the paper. You also should have the completed reference lists from assignment 1 and assignment 2 that you may integrate, adding four additional sources from any readings or videos assigned during the course.) You need not add any additional sources outside of the course materials; if you choose to refer to any outside sources, these should be in addition to the 15 sources from assigned readings and videos.
3. Express the ideas or insights from your sources accurately and clearly and in a way that contributes to the development of your personal "happiness plan."
4. Express the ideas or insights from your sources accurately and clearly in a way that contributes to the development of your plan to increase the "Gross National Happiness" of a society. In developing this plan, it is crucial that you demonstrate the ability to think sociologically. Your societal happiness plan should not be the same as your personal happiness plan; you need to identify social structures that shape happiness and well-being; this part of your essay should make up at least 1/3 of your paper.
5. Write well. Use proper grammar, spelling, and citations; write effective paragraphs and maintain strong organization of your ideas throughout the paper.
****If you have competently completed the first and second essay assignments, there is not much additional work to do for this assignment. Most of the core content for this paper is already covered by the first and second essay assignments. I would suggest that you begin your essay by first copying and pasting your 2nd essay assignment (for the first section) and then copying and pasting your 1st essay assignment (for the second section). Since the prompt is a bit different, you will need to edit your text to keep your focus on articulating the key ingredients of personal happiness, well-being, meaningfulness, and life fulfillment (1st section of paper) and the key characteristics of societies most likely to maximize the happiness, well-being, meaningfulness, and life fulfillment of that society's population (2nd section of the paper). You will also need to integrate four additional sources (from course material posted after the deadline for your second essay assignment.)