Bigger Picture Sources

Scholarly Sources

Piff, Paul K., and Jake P. Moskowitz. “Wealth, Poverty, and Happiness: Social Class Is Differentially Associated with Positive Emotions.” Emotion, vol. 18, no. 6, Sept. 2018, pp. 902–905. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/emo0000387.supp (Supplemental).

•  This piece tries to correlate if there is a positive trend between higher class people and higher levels of happiness. 
• The findings are slightly mixed, but will definitely help me to counter the previous scholarly article’s conclusion on some aspects, while adding to others. Their conclusion, and final perspective is that the happiness that wealthier people experience is different from the happiness that lower social classes experience. While the former value amusement and pride as strong factors towards their happiness, the latter value love and compassion. While both parties can find an equal amount of happiness, lower social class people’s happiness tends to sway to the empathetic side.

THE DIARY OF A SELFISH MAN.

Lemon, Ida J.The Leisure hour, Jan. 1877-Oct. 1903; London (Mar 1889): 168-169.

• This diary, while short, describes a man who is self aware, yet continues to be selfish.
• He argues that selfishness is necessary for success, which works in an incredibly weird fashion with my other articles. My other pieces describe the negative aspects of welath related selfishness, whithout acknowledging that empathy may not lead to success. That is the perspective that this piece brings to my story. Maldon acknowledges his own selfishness, yet also acknowledges his own success and his own happiness.

Non-Scholarly Sources

Why do we get so weird about money?

• Just like the title says, this is an article asking why our relationship with money and talking about money are generally very awkward. 
• There truly are a plethora of minute questions with expansively different answers for each one. You can almost make a graphic flowchart with every possible answer to find out your relationship to money (which isn’t a bad idea for my article). I am a big fan of the ‘mindsets’ aspect of this article. Its execution in this article is far from perfect, as a large part of its conclusion is believing that “it will all work out”. Nonetheless the point that what defines you is your mindset more than any numerical standard is a pleasant thought that I may try to delve into in my last paragraphs.

• This New York Times piece operates as a guide to empathy, more so than a feature article. 
• It is very humanistic, but that is also a perspective of life and psychology that I am not too familiar with. The article mentions that invitation to new experiences, learning about others’ shoes and shared learning are the keys to empathy. Personally, I will normally associate a cathartic moment to a philosophical revelation or psychological epiphany; this guide associates growth with steady work. It is an interesting and foreign concept because it makes what I normally see as an internal psychologist, the pseudo search for internal, introspective knowledge, into a set of external steps that one can take. Maybe I need to start giving more credit to the outside world as a source of happiness as opposed to trying to internalize and rationalize how I feel.

Cultural Sources

• Matthew Mcconaughey’s post Oscar winning speech wherein he describes his hero, but more so his philosophy on how to stay humble with your successes. 
• Mcconauhghey proves not only to be a fantastic actor, but a great writer, pseudo-philosopher and great person as well. I think that if I learned one thing in the entirety of this class it is that. I think that I would like to use his speech in the final paragraphs of my paper. He gives incredibly valuable quotes about the constant pursuit of opportunities, successes and self betterment. In an almost reverse twisted Belfort-esque style, Mcconaughey turns the “more is never enough” philosophy into something beautiful. His thoughts on staying humble, regardless of his financial and popular successes is truly inspiring. I would like to end my story with the conclusion of constant self improvement, using the same philosophy that a money hungry person would, with monetary gain or not, is how to stay empathetic.

Experiential Research

A good boss of mine, Anthony Davis (Director of Communications)

• Anthony is a great boss, great worker and great person. He was my direct supervisor for two different contractual employers: a summer camp and an elementary school. 
• Anthony oversees communications at both of his jobs. I work as a videographer. It is on this basis that he was my boss. One day in summer camp, I felt burnt out and uninspired. I felt like I was on an infinite conveyer belt, constantly doing the same thing every day. He told me a piece of advice that I still use today: “make everything you do better than the previous thing you did” (or something along those lines). While it creates an almost unreal standard, it will continuously keep you humble, by always having the bar set exactly where you left it. It will also keep you ambitious, as it makes the only person necessary to impress yourself.

Librarian Visit:

A lovely librarian by the name of Stav Vitoratos helped give me the tools to narrow down my research. With Dawson’s increasingly digital library, once you know how to sign into ebscohost or jstor, there isn’t much for the librarian to do. Nonetheless, Stav still showed me the ropes, taught me how to use Google Scholar (which I had never used before) and introduced me to a neat trick or two. Most noteworthy was the ability to put your keyword followed by an asterisks, which helps you to not limit your search based on the tense of pluralization of your word. All in all, my expectations for the librarian visit weren’t exceptional, but the results definitely out performed them.