True Happiness in The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut and Hans Weingar

True Happiness in The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut and Hans Weingartner's The Eduakators A large parcel of the population has as their ultimate goal in life achieving well-being. Unfortunately many try to achieve it through the wrong means. For instance, in The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut, Malachi Constant thinks he is truly happy, but what he really does is fulfill his hedonism, satisfy his shallow needs, without truly searching for a higher form of well-being. Not only does a life focused on hedonic satisfaction not achieve true happiness, it also leads, along with the urge to accumulate, egocentrism, and greed, to an unethical life. The Sirens of Titans depicts this kind of life, which is also represented throughout The Edukators, directed by Hans Weingartner. Both Malachi Constant and Hardenberg believe that money is the solution to all of their problems while ignoring the problems their own lifestyle is causing to other people and society as a whole. Happiness, our own and other people’s, is achieved by focusing our lives in the right things. Even though hedonic satisfaction is necessary for living a happy life, focusing only on hedonic pleasure will have the opposite effect. If you focus on money and the things it can buy as the source for your well-being, you are excluding a series of factors that are necessary to achieve a true state of well-being. The following passage from the article â€Å"On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being† clearly details that: Drawing from the eudaimonic view and from SDT, Kasser & Ryan (1993, 1996) related money and materialism to well-being. They predicted that people who place a strong value on wealth... ...se’s life. The only way humanity can achieve true well-being is if abdicates its urge to accumulate and refocus its mostly hedonic ways to a more eudaimonic way of life. Works Cited The Edukators. Dir. Hans Weingartner. IFC Films, 2004. Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1979. Nenno, Nancy P. â€Å"Postcards from the Edge.† Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective. Eds. Halle, Randall and McCarthy, Margaret. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. 61-84. Reed, Peter J. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Dictionary of Literary Biography. ed. 1978. Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. "On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudamonic Well-Being." Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 141-166. Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell Publishing, 1998.