谢振礼 托福范文: 工作生活
TOEFL Independent Writing
ielts360toefl@hotmail.com
Topic:
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Your job has more effect on your happiness than your social life does. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Essay:
Happiness stems from all aspects of life, including hard work and social life; but, for that matter, happiness levels vary from person to person. Hard work brings happiness, so does social life, and these two aspects are not mutually exclusive. While neither hard work nor social life can always bring us happiness, there is no happiness without either.
Happiness is hard work; and the harder we work, the happier we may feel. Since most of us spend a great deal of our lives working, it is inevitable that work plays a key role in shaping our levels of happiness. Even if you do think that we work in order to be happy, you could not deny that there is no happiness without a job because unemployment is miserable. That is to say, work is an essential aspect of happiness whereas unemployment causes a major fall in happiness. In view of this, it is no surprise that employed people are happier than unemployed people, although the quality of work may cause variations in happiness, depending on the type of job a person has. For example, we are a lot happier with a job that we love doing than with a job we love to hate. Nevertheless, a job is a job, and it is a way to pay for a living and it does not fully define happiness. Because happiness is when we love our job and because work brings varying degrees of happiness, it is important to work on what makes us happy. If we are spending time doing things we do not like, then our overall happiness is likely to be pretty low.
Our social life can increase our happiness, too. Typically, people are happier when they maintain their social life through the work week. It is worth repeating that how happy we are varies, depending not only on what kind of job we have--if we have one—but also on our social life. To begin with, we human beings are social creatures, and people with more social connections are generally happier in life, probably because we thrive in supportive relationships and we need other human beings to reaffirm our existence. Usually, the richer the social life we enjoy, the happier we are likely to be. It is also probable that the happiest people are the most social. According to a recent report, people with few social ties are two to three times more inclined to suffer from depression than people with strong social bonds of interacting with friends, partners, co-workers, and family members. In a wide sense, social life is about the feelings of being happy as it gives us a feeling of belonging, a feeling of self-worth and a feeling of security. Accordingly, social life does have a considerable influence on our happiness.
In conclusion, hard work and social life can contribute to our happiness, and both are indispensable to people in general. These two aspects of happiness are complimentary, though. We tend to think that happiness begins at work and that happiness from social life is endless.
