What makes happiness?

"Happiness" was the theme of an editorial in today's newspaper by David Brooks, though it was published two days ago in the New York Times. Go here to read it. It's about a longitudinal study of 268 young men going to Harvard University in the early 1940s.

"The results from the study, known as the Grant Study, have surfaced periodically in the years since. But they’ve never been so brilliantly captured as they are in an essay called 'What Makes Us Happy?' by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the forthcoming issue of The Atlantic. (The essay is available online today.)"



Brooks' editorial whet my appetite for the much longer article, that is very interesting. A few quotes from that piece:

"The story gets to the heart of Vaillant’s angle on the Grant Study. His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of 'adaptations,' or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called 'defense mechanisms') are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality." (2)

"Whereas clinicians focus on treating a problem at any given time, Vaillant is more like a biographer, looking to make sense of a whole life—or, to take an even broader view, like an anthropologist or naturalist looking to capture an era. The good news, he argues, is that diseases—and people, too—have a 'natural history.' After all, many of the 'psychotic' adaptations are common in toddlers, and the 'immature' adaptations are essential in later childhood, and they often fade with maturity. As adolescents, the Grant Study men were twice as likely to use immature defenses as mature ones, but in middle life they were four times as likely to use mature defenses—and the progress continued into old age. When they were between 50 and 75, Vaillant found, altruism and humor grew more prevalent, while all the immature defenses grew more rare." (2)

As I am in my late 50's, I am glad to hear that--hope in growing older!

"Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. 'It is social aptitude,' he writes, 'not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.' Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, 'What have you learned from the Grant Study men?' Vaillant’s response: 'That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.'" (3)

Another point that I find unmentioned but seemingly relevant, at least to me, is the spiritual component of their lives. In my 40s, I became newly aware of the Divine, which is told in my Faith Story, especially in the earlier posts. I am much happier believing and having faith in God.

This goes along with our lectio divina scripture today from John 15:9-11 :

15:9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.

15:10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.

15:11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

Here, Jesus tells us that our joy is incomplete until his joy joins ours. Our joy has to be made complete by his joy, which encompasses love. Along with this, is the image from last week's lectio meditation in the post below this that helps me to remember that our wholeness is in God, which exists always no matter how we feel or look.

It is a never-ending circle, which I do not know how to make on the computer, so imagine the sequence as:

happiness = God = joy = love = life = relationship

I am glad this is the reality I know.