What Makes Us Happy?………….

……………….is the title of an article in The Atlantic. I haven’t had time to read it all yet but wanted to bring it to your attention since it’s quite fascinating.

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

H/T Arts and Letters Daily.

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Posted by ligneus1 on May 14, 2009 in This and That | 2 comments

2 Comments

  1. Zot
    May 14, 2009

    What makes us happy? I would say the freedom to make our own choices and live for ourselves (and family if we have any) and create our own destiny.

    It is a freedom that is rapidly fading thanks to the cancer of socialism that has been spreading through this country’s moral cultural body since the 1920s. More and more, we are being conditioned to work and live for everyone else, reduced to the status of worker ant who is expendable if sacrifice is what the collective demands.

  2. ligneus1
    May 14, 2009

    Zot, I agree with you but the article in question ranges well beyond the question itself. And sometimes our choices are constrained by circumstances and then the question becomes why are some unhappy and others not in view of those circumstances. To take that to its extreme there is Victor Frankl who survived Auschwitz who wrote, ‘The final human freedom, to choose how we react to the circumstances we find ourselves in’. This in examining why some survived and others didn’t. Comes back to the Serenity Prayer:

    God grant me the serenity
    To accept the things I cannot change;
    Courage to change the things I can;
    And wisdom to know the difference.

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