The Happiness of the Theoried Class

There are a blessed few who are so happy that they never reflect on the nature of happiness. I'm certainly not one of them. I'm a malcontent and think about happiness a lot. Of course, there are a lot of books on how to be happy, but I have no interest in junk psych or pep talks on positive mental attitude. I have no faith that there is some single, simple formula for perpetual bliss, though most happy folk certainly share some common denominators. For example, in one study those participants who watched the least TV were least likely to suffer depression. But cause and effect are very hard to determine.

Hard research on happiness comes to the basic conclusion that it is simple in theory and complex in execution. This much we all knew already. But thanks to my favorite columnist, David Brooks of the Times, this essay on the nature of happiness by Joshua Shenk just came to my attention, and I found it very compelling. (And yes, I just cited Shenk a couple of days ago, though I'd never even heard of him a week ago. Too strange.)

I won't summarize Shenk's essay (Brooks does), but basically happiness comes down to our capacity (both innate and developed) for resilience or adaptation in the face of disappointment or tragedy. Here is a long pull:

[A]daptations (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.

Vaillant [i.e., the article's expert] 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). . . .

Most psychology preoccupies itself with mapping the heavens of health in sharp contrast to the underworld of illness. “Social anxiety disorder” is distinguished from shyness. Depression is defined as errors in cognition. Vaillant’s work, in contrast, creates a refreshing conversation about health and illness as weather patterns in a common space. “Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”

This is all interesting. But what is fascinating is that long-term "longitudinal" studies show that our deployment of defense mechanisms changes over the course of our lives, from more to less healthy and vice-versa, and upbringing, education, income, etc., the usual presumed predictors of happiness, determine relatively little and guarantee nothing. One study concluded that 50% of a person's happiness simply stems from one's dispositional "set-point" for happiness, with another 10% attributable to circumstances and 40% to factors more or less within our control (religiosity, healthy relationships, PMA, etc.).

That 40% is of course the critical bit, and in the end the science says that happiness is mostly about loving and altruistic relationships. “Happiness is love. Full stop,” Valliant says. “The only way to keep it is to give it away.”