Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
Q: What makes people happy at different ages?
A: It shifts from novelty toward stability, broadly speaking, though it's never quite that clean. Younger people tend to derive a lot of happiness from new experiences and social expansion — meeting people, trying things, building an identity — because so much is still undetermined and exploring feels productive. Later on, happiness seems to depend more on depth than breadth: a few close relationships, a sense that your time is being spent on something that matters, financial security rather than financial excitement. I'd guess the common thread across ages isn't the specific source but the feeling of genuine engagement with something, which just happens to look different at twenty and at sixty.
Q: Is happiness the responsibility of the individual or society?
A: Both, but in different proportions depending on the obstacle. Society is responsible for removing the conditions that make happiness structurally difficult — poverty, insecurity, isolation, unsafe environments — because no amount of individual mindset work fixes a genuinely precarious material situation. Beyond that baseline, though, I do think individuals bear real responsibility for the daily choices that shape wellbeing — who you spend time with, what you prioritise, how you interpret setbacks. Treating happiness as purely societal lets individuals off the hook a bit too easily, but treating it as purely individual, especially for people facing real hardship, is close to unfair.
Q: Has life become more stressful?
A: I think it's become differently stressful rather than simply worse. Physical danger and material insecurity have decreased significantly compared with a century ago, but they've been replaced by a kind of constant low-grade cognitive load — notifications, comparison through social media, the expectation of being reachable at all times — that earlier generations didn't have to contend with. The stress is less acute and more chronic now, which might actually be harder to notice and therefore harder to address, because there's rarely a single dramatic cause you can point to and remove.
Q: Is constantly pursuing happiness counterproductive?
A: I think it can be, yes, which sounds paradoxical but isn't really. When happiness becomes the explicit goal of every decision, people start monitoring their own emotional state constantly, and that monitoring itself gets in the way — you notice you're not quite happy enough and that noticing produces exactly the dissatisfaction you were trying to avoid. What seems to work better, from what I've seen, is pursuing something else entirely — competence, connection, purpose — and letting happiness arrive as a by-product rather than chasing it directly. So the pursuit isn't wrong exactly, it's just usually more effective sideways than head-on.
Q: Does material wealth make people happier?
A: Up to a point, and then the relationship weakens considerably. Moving out of poverty into a stable, comfortable situation makes a large measurable difference to wellbeing, because it removes a huge source of chronic stress. Beyond that threshold, though, additional wealth seems to buy diminishing returns, partly because people recalibrate their expectations upward almost as fast as their circumstances improve, so yesterday's luxury becomes today's baseline and the felt improvement fades. I'd say wealth is closer to a necessary condition for happiness up to a certain level than a reliable driver of it beyond that level.