"What Makes Us Happy?", is an article that was published by The Atlantic in June of 2009. Like the title suggests, the article is about happiness: who has it, how we get it and how we cope with life when we don't have it. I read the article when it was published about a year ago but for many reasons, its findings have seemed increasingly relevant to my life. The piece investigates humans' relationship to happiness by 1) summarizing the findings of a longitudinal study of 268 male Harvard graduates who were followed from their sophomore year in college up until their deaths and 2) exploring the mind and personal life of the study's longtime director, George Vaillant. I highly recommend the article to anyone-- it's one of those pieces that provides essentially insight into how you live your life on a daily basis. I can say with 100% certainty that reading that article has improved my quality of life. In particular, the insight provided in the quoted section below has been especially useful:
"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)."
I mostly function at the "normal" level but I remembering that the goal is the "mature" level helps me on a daily basis.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/7439/
