Happiness as the Choice to Give by Scarlett

Happiness as the Choice to Give by Scarlett - October 2025 Scholarship Essay

As adults, most people hold the view that there is not a lot to learn from stories written for children. However, I believe that going back to our roots and examining the moral lessons taught to us from a young age has a lot of value. The lessons in these stories are ones that parents deem not only appropriate but vital to pass on to their kids, meaning their content has passed a parent’s golden standards, and has been approved to enter the curriculum of knowledge passed on to the most important people in a parent's life. Due to the careful consideration parents approach the raising of their children with, successful children’s novels almost always contain undeniably universal truths.
Currently, I’m taking a class whose curriculum is composed of and teaches its students favorite books. A favorite book can be hard to identify, and much to my initial surprise, many people nominated children’s novels as their favorites. This is how I found myself reading Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan, a children’s book that follows the story of a girl named Esperanza. Esperanza starts the story as a rich, spoiled little girl, whose social status gives her access to any material possession she desires. In the span of a month, Esperanza’s world is turned upside down when she loses her father in a fatal cartel robbery, and the death of her family’s patriarch causes her family to lose control of all of their material possessions, ranging from the money they had stored in the bank to land their house was built on. In order to survive, Esperanza, her mother, and her grandmother flee their country. The rest of the story follows Esperanza dealing with unimaginable loss, and her journey of overcoming her feelings of grief and displacement through altering her values and perspective on life.
A central argument in Esperanza Rising is that material possessions are fleeting and meaningless, and thus one should not base their own happiness on their material possessions. In a materialistic society, it can be hard to put this obvious truth into practice, both mentally and physically. However, one active way to put the mindset of dissenting from materialism into real-world practice is through volunteering. The action of volunteering contributes to one’s community and is rewarding to the person who undertakes it, but avoids the materialistic pitfall of compensating someone for time and effort spent with money. I started volunteering at the Charles M. Schulz Museum my freshman year of high school, where I found a community of like-minded people by consistently dedicating my free time to preserving and passing on the secrets of the museum, while simultaneously building real world skills in communication, time-management, and organization. I enjoyed this experience to the point that I began to pick up other volunteering positions on top of the museum, such as spending time as a cat-caregiver in Mini Cat Town or managing and engaging my high school’s freshmen as a Puma Peer. And as a college student, I have continued to volunteer my time to programs such as SCouts, where I spend an hour each week teaching science experiments to third graders at underfunded elementary schools. Due to the lack of superficial benefits from volunteering, I have formed a stronger sense of self from these experiences, and I truly believe that everyone should do their best to find time to give time to others free of charge.
While financial success and stability are undeniably important, cleansing oneself of the mindset that accumulation of monetary possessions is the best marker of a successful person or a life well lived is essential for finding happiness and contentment with one’s current place in life. While everyone cannot be in the top one percent, everyone is in control of what they assign value to, and therefore find happiness from.