Blog Post 12

This course was pretty challenging, but really push me as a writer and for that I am grateful. The difficulties I had in this course were turning things in on time and keeping up with the class. I usually don't have trouble in this area, but I think I found my way at the end. This class challenged me to think outside the box and find new ways to write and see things from different perspectives. In the future I plan on taking a lighter class load and planning things out better. I found each topic interesting, and each topic gave me an opportunity to learn more than just grammar. Through this course I learned about American history, technology, and how to achieve a happier life. I enjoyed the technology unite the most because while writing my paper and discovering different points to add to my essay I learned a lot about history and media. Aspects we learned in this class and by writing our papers really come into use in our daily lives and I really appreciate that. The blog is pretty cool because it gives us a chance to voice our oppinutes and read oppinointes of those around us. Overall the class was great. The first semester was easier to keep up with than the second and I would stress that to people planning on taking the second portion of this class, but in a whole the class really does challenge students so that is a definite positive.

Blog Post #11

Denmark seems to be the happiest place on earth, according to the article "The Secret To Danish Happiness" by Huffington Post writer, Jessica Alexander, Danmark exceeds in happiness because of the "Danish way of hygge...derived from the Germanic word hyggja, which means to think or feel satisfied".  The article describes hyggie as having no direct translation, but summed up to mean "drama-free togetherness", and "homey". I believe that having satisfaction in yourself and your life is happiness. When taking a look at some of the wealthiest people in the world, we see that some of them acquire material things like cars and homes,yet describe themselves as unhappy and even depressed. That should be a clear indication that money does not equal happiness. Measuring happiness is a lot deeper than what's in our pocket book.  As much as I would like to accredit positive self outlook to being the only driving factor for the Danish happiness, the UK Dailymail published an interesting article which states "According to research from the University of Warwick, genetics could be the key to explaining a nation’s levels of happiness". After looking at survey data from 131 countries, researchers at Warwick found that "Compared with people from other countries, Danes were less likely to possess a short version of the gene linked to low levels of life satisfaction". This of course got me thinking that if there are genes linked to depression, then why can't there be genes linked to happiness. Even though this research seems to be still pretty new I think genes could potentially be a big factor in why Danes rank so high in happiness. Happiness might be what you make it, but maybe moving to Denmark would make it a little bit higher.