Sometimes, in the middle of the supermarket, I stop and look around at column after column of frozen food — any food I can imagine, right there for purchase. Think about that, anything I want to eat, I can. Instantly. Just hop in the heated/cooled automatic transportation machine. Sometimes, I can feel the pressure from the thousands of generations that preceded me — tens of thousands of years of suffering and hardship of our ancestors, attempting to find and grow enough food to live. And it makes me think, I’ve gotta do everything I can with this life. I have to act in such a way that honors the fact that I’ve never known hunger, that my life is unbelievably luxurious compared to 99.9% of those who came before me. I must push my potential, seize this moment, make the most of myself. And yet sometimes, I feel an unhappiness, a profound ennui. And it makes me sad, to feel that unworthy and unappreciative of this gift of ease. So, whenever I run across research about happiness, my interest is invariable piqued. In the parts of the world where the hunger problem has been solved, it has been replaced by a happiness problem — but, of course, the answer to unhappiness is much more complex than the answer to hunger.

In the June issue of The Atlantic magazine, there’s an article called What Makes Us Happy? I loaded it up a few days ago and I’ve been making my way through it… and I thought I ended up at the article from a link at kottke.org. But then I went to check at Kottke’s website, only to find that he had written up the article just a few hours before now. Oh well — if there’s someone whose tracks that I’d like to (accidentally) follow online, it’s probably Jason Kottke. Therefore, I am neither the first nor the last to recommend this article.

The premise: imagine a longitudinal study that follows a group of men over more than 70 years. Some become congressmen, one becomes president, others become doctors or content patriarchs, some drunks, others commit suicide, and still others fall deep into depression — many combine the aforementioned achievements and problems. Indeed, you needn’t imagine this study at all. There was (is) such a thing, called the Grant Study. Scientifically, the data it has yielded can help one to learn a stunning amount about many aspects of mental health — including how to live a happy, healthy life.

As was articulated recently in a New York Times article called What Are Friends For? A Longer Life — the important part of happiness, and health is… surprising. Statistically, your cholesterol is important for some of your life, and indeed, staying at a healthy weight is important too. Now, parts of the Atlantic article echo the Times: your chances of living a happy, full life into old age are vastly increased by connections to other people, e.g. volunteering, friendship. There are so many quotes I’d like to share from the article — if you intend to read it, I’d recommend stopping now and going to do so. If you haven’t the time, I’ll keep my favorite tidbits to three things:

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).

A bit on those surprising health factors I mentioned, including those adaptations from above:

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.

…

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.”

And finally, a wonderfully poignant anecdote about love:

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Almost a decade ago I wrote (in an AIM profile of all places) that “giving, as well as receiving, love is its definition” — but just as living “happy-well” is a challenge, so too is love. It is a beautiful challenge, no?

The wonderful thing about this article, though, is it doesn’t espouse a narrow path to happiness. There are many ways to it, suitable for many different people. Happiness is, I think, an extremely interesting problem of our time. A spiritual hunger.

More ideas on the topic, but running out of time. Signing off for the time being…

• Happiness
• Psychology
• The Atlantic
• George Vaillant
• Food

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