Timothy Stanley

This month's Atlantic Monthly is covered with a compelling summary of a research project based out of Harvard. Since 1937, medical researchers have been asking just under 250 men about almost every detail of their lives. It's one of the few and best in depth studies of human life amidst men who should have been happy and successful. These were the lucky ones who went to Harvard, lived in one of the United State's most prosperous eras, and had the world as their oyster. And yet, few actually achieved happiness and lived the dream. Why? What were the factors which led to early death, or that long happy life? One of the themes which guided many of the questions for the study was how the men interpreted the world. The study wasn't just looking at their biology, nor just the good and bad things that happened to them, but rather, it asked about how they dealt with the nature of reality. The article recounts an anecdote:

One Christmas Eve [a father] puts into one son's stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son's, a pile of manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, "Dad, I just don't know what I'll do with this watch. It's so fragile. It could break." The other boy runs to him and says, "Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!"

When it comes to our happiness, what's real is utterly inextricable from our "adaptations" or "defense mechanisms" which the study deemed so important. The indicators for long term health and happiness came down to healthy adaptations of reality. I'll leave you to the article and Freud journals for more on this, and don't assume that because you know what good adaptations are that you'll necessarily be able to enact them. Rather I'll leave you with a similarly themed recent post on the NY Times which recounts a number of paradoxically happy people who seem to live up to the beatitude, "blessed (happy) are you who weep:"

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed. I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”