IELTS Writing Part 2: Essay 9

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Present a written argument to an educated reader with no specialist knowledge of the following topic: "A lot of people think that personal happiness is mostly related to economic success. Others believe that there are some other factors behind personal happiness. Discuss both the views and give your opinion."

Model Answer:

Having secured the ease of survival, most of us in the civilized world are driven by the pursuit for happiness, to work and to live with a sense of progress toward the ethereal status of being happy. Clearly happiness has not yet been reached by people at a mass scale, hence the ceaseless toiling of the modern man, who often pictures money as an over simplified but convenient manifestation of happiness. But I agree with those who believe that there’s more than economic success in the recipe for happiness. But of course money is power, power to do the things we want to do and avail the things we need to have. Quite naturally, thence, happiness is seldom pictured in the realm of destitution. The capitalist earth requires us to have the monetary means to qualify ourselves as being potentially happy. We therefore must be economically successful first, at a relatively practical level, to make our dreams of happiness viable. As cruel as it may sound, it is practical in our present sense of practicality. But there’s more to it. The paradox of happiness is that it is not material. So happiness cannot be bought, at least not in its entirety. The proof is visible in the tragedies of the rich and the famous. This leads many, like me, to believe that money begets only an edge, as opposed to how we would be being penniless, and does not make us happy. Our absurd humanness requires us to be in a delicate balance of material and emotional well-being in order to feel happy. Therefore to reach a conclusion, if I must, to this globally inconclusive argument, I am compelled to indulge in the human romanticism and image happiness, if it were, as infinitely more than just money and power. After all, if economic success alone mothered happiness then how would the destitute mother be happy at the sight and touch of her child?