The email was from my friend, Eric. It is interesting/unbelievable how life plays out out sometimes. We were randomly placed together in a room freshman year at BC, and I don't think it could have worked out any better. We lived together for a couple more years and have remained close friends and will be life-long friends (unless I screw something up). Eric is a positive thinker, is always looking to help out other people, and is someone I know I can always count on.
Anyway, this email is about happiness. I'm never happy. Just saying.
Here it is:
Jon,
Read this article,I know you'll enjoy it.
Inside the article, the head of this study summarizes four levels of human defense mechanisms. He believes that consistently utilizing level three and four defenses is a key to overall happiness and contentedness as we age. Here they are, summarized:
1) Psychotic adaptations: paranoia, hallucination, megalomania
2) Immature adaptations: acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, fantasy
3) Neurotic adaptations: intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); repression (naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected organ)
4) Mature adaptations: 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)
Also important: further education, stable marriage, not smoking, no alcohol abuse, moderate exercise, healthy weight.
All of his data so far lead to this conclusion: "The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships with other people."
I couldn't agree with the final conclusion more.
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