joshua shenk asks what makes us happy in the june 09 atlantic.

it’s a great article with fascinating subjects; the grant study (the longest longitudinal study of adult life undertaken), the studied (268 harvard graduates from the classes of 1939-1944) and the study-er george vaillant.

basically, the key to happiness is meaningful relationships. and it pays to be especially nice to your siblings.

the article is full of insights into the human psyche with some amazingly revelatory bits like our potentially self-destroying self defenses:

Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

as interesting and insightful as the learnings are the personal insights by the grant study men and valliant’s corresponding commentary. these are often intelligent, strikingly honest, unpredictable and always totally engrossing.

Case No. 141:

I think the most important element that has emerged in my own psychic picture is a fuller realization of my own hostilities. In early years I used to pride myself on not having any. This was probably because they were too deeply buried and I unwilling and afraid to face them.

another of the study’s findings is that, generally, people get happier as they age. although there are of course some major fucked-up anomalies to this pattern with plenty of people going off the rails late in life. it’s an essential read.

article author joshua shenk is interviewed on wnyc’s leonard lopate show:

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