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Fulfilling Life Theories

Delivered August 8, 2019. Contributor: Alexandra Y.

Goals

The goal is to find both western and eastern philosophies on life happiness for personal use.

Early Findings

  • Three of the most popular theories on life happiness in the west are Hedonism, the Desire Satisfaction Theory, and the Objective List Theory. Other theories of life happiness include the Marx Theory and the Epicurus Theory.
  • Hedonism claims that the only drivers of life are pleasure, or happiness, and pain, or unhappiness. All emotions fall under these two headings. For example, joy, love, and gratification fall under pleasure, and depression, sadness, and anger fall under pain. This theory encourages people to "aim for the greatest balance of pleasure over pain".
  • The Objective List theory claims that each person has a list of things that are essential to their overall life happiness, such as friendships or a career, and having those things is what makes them feel fulfilled.
  • The Epicurus theory states that people can be fulfilled by ultimately aiming to find pleasure, not virtue or knowledge. This theory focuses more on indulging personal pleasure.
  • Western theories on happiness tend to focus on the individual pursuit of happiness, whereas Eastern theories focus more on happiness gained from community activities and service.
  • The Confucian theory comes from Eastern practices. This theory states that individual happiness is achieved through "due contributions to the material and cultural development of the society". The theory also says that people must be constantly attempting to better their life by frequently evaluating things they have not yet done or learned and focusing on accomplishing those things.
  • In addition to this public search, we scanned our proprietary research database of over 1 million sources and were unable to find any specific research reports that address your goals.

Proposed next steps:

You need to be the project owner to select a next step.
There are many eastern and western theories on happiness and life fulfillment. In order to provide a deeper dive on these theories, we suggest the following: 1) A report on 3-5 of the most popular theories of life happiness (popular being the most believe in/used). For each one, we will provide a brief overview of what the theory focuses on and what practices the theory suggests people follow. We will also include any notable downsides to each theory as noted by experts.