A/G Your job has a greater effect to your overall happiness than your social life does.

Helen Keller once commented, “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking in the light.” Having friends to guide us through ups and downs in life plays a paramount role of our life. Without friends, we may have no shoulders to lean onto when at our lows and no companions to share good news when at our highs. Therefore, it is of my belief that social life actually has a greater effect on overall happiness than jobs do.

To begin with, having a rich social life allows us to unwind slightly without stressing over pressure from work. That is, social life is a great avenue for modern people to release their pent-up pressure and therefore a great source of happiness. To exemplify this, I used to work as a computer engineer and I had been leading a hectic life, leaving home at six in the morning and coming home at ten in the late evening. Although I gained a great sense of accomplishment from the lucrative work that I did, I was never happy since my work schedule did not permit to have a social life. Every day when I came back home, I just slumped my body into bed, without thinking about my friends or my social life. To me, my work was merely a tool for making money. Besides, the pressure from the clients and from the supervisors had been crushing me physically and mentally. I ended up suffering from depression. Therefore, I decided to quit my job as a computer engineer and instead worked as a waiter at a local Chinese restaurant, where I met people from different backgrounds and cultures, and I even made some really good friends. We would hang out together sometimes, watching movies or attending some museum exhibitions or even traveling to Japan from time to time. Although the pay as a waiter is significantly lower than that as a computer engineer, I, however, gain much richer social life and make much more acquaintances. I find myself beaming and smiling more.

Furthermore, having a rich social life can also make me happier since I can learn a host of things from people that I meet. One typical thing about working is that once a person starts to work, all they would do is to repetitively tackle the same work for the next forty or gift years without learning anything new. Things that they do would become pretty trite and automatic. However, if a person spices up his social life, then he would have the opportunity to meet a great diversity of people, whom he could learn from. Take myself. When working as a computer engineer, all I did was to go to the office, turn on the computer, hide myself in my own cubicle, begin working my software programs, and then clock out and leave the office. Since I had been acquainted the process of writing software, the procedure of encoding and decoding became pretty tedious and even unbearable since I was just basically sitting on the chair, with my fingers moving across buttons on the keyboard, not even thinking or reflecting. I certainly could not feel happy because I was not learning anything novel and exciting. However, after I began my career as a waiter, I found that I had to constantly learned new skills or sharpen them. For instance, small talks are pretty important in establishing a congenial relationship with customers. Therefore, I had to learn how to strike a conversation or come up some exciting topics to engage with customers. What’s more, I had to remember all the details of dishes at the restaurant so that I can give a detailed introduction to customers when they want to know where how the Orange Kitchen is made or where the chicken in the Broccoli chicken comes from. Though the needs to learn all these different things are pretty challenging at work, learning them at the same is pretty exciting and makes me happy.

Irrefutably, some dissidents may disavow my argument by claiming that job has a greater effect on our overall happiness level since with satisfying jobs, we can be rewarded remuneratively, which allows us to purchase things that we crave in life, thus making us happy. However, have these people forgotten that since we have to showcase the professional side when at work, we need to constantly suppress ourselves and thereby cannot be truly happy? After all, when we are adding more varieties to our social lives, we are at the same time adding more flavors to our happiness.