From awhile ago

"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/

There were 8 of them. Their uniforms were from different military branches but all shared a common spirit in tailoring: clean lines, two colors, cut to accentuate hard angular bodies. The men's faces matched their uniforms. In fact, every detail of their persons matched all others. Their faces were firm, their mouths were set lines, their spines were erect, their legs moved precisely and their eyes focused on nothing but the air in front of them. They were one body as every movement made was mirrored by all others at precisely the same time and in precisely the same way. They were each other, they were no one at all. They were only men in that moment; they were timeless and nameless, they were servants of their country holding up a man who had been the same.

While watching American servicemen hold up Senator Ted Kenendy's coffin at his funeral this past weekend, I suddenly understood the mindset of those who decide to join the military. I'm one of those people who takes my individuality seriously. Growing up I remember countless times when I would feel viscerally violated when I thought my freedom to self-determine was being infringed upon. If I wanted to do something unconventional (like run around shirtless like the boys though I was elementary school-, not toddler-aged) then I did and passionately defended my position to anyone who thought I should act differently. I've always been the kind of person who takes pride in doing what I want to do, regardless of societal pressures or immediate consequences. Because of my personality, I had always been dumbfounded by any man or woman who would willingly give up any semblance of personal freedom to join an organization that made them physically uncomfortable and psychologically servile.

That's how I felt until I saw these 8 men hold up a senator last week. While watching their rigid stature and focused gazes as they held up a flag-covered coffin, I sensed what had confounded me about the military until that point. These men had given up themselves, their earthly semblances of individuality (which more often than not seem arbitrary) for a more tangible sense of shared humanity. These men gave themselves up to be a part of something that, to them, is bigger than individual will. From their clothes to their hair, from their posture to their language, these men were each other, each others' fathers, and each others' grandfathers. As I watched them, I saw how they might find comfort in learning to become mirrors of the men around them. I saw how the military could be a manifestation of the idea of equality. I had always got that many people find honor, truth and a sense of purpose in serving; I got that they felt that being in the military is to serve a greater good and, judging by the number of bumper stickers, that they must get an almost spiritual comfort from military service. But seeing the men who carried Senator Kennedy's coffin, I understood a deeper reason for donning a uniform: serving brings a daily comfort of being freed from being an individual. I sensed that military men must get personal comfort in giving up the pressure of personality, the all too difficult act of fashioning a self that separates one from the selves of others.