The Ricochet discussions here, here, and here reminded me of an article I read last year in The Atlantic and which I found incredibly moving. It’s the kind of article that I continue to send, apropos nothing, to friends and family and I am not exaggerating when I say that this piece—the most viewed online article in The Atlantic’s history—is a literary masterpiece. But you judge for yourself.
It asks, simply, what makes us happy?
At Harvard, in 1937, psychiatrists decided to answer this question by tracking nearly 270 well-adjusted, confident Harvard sophomores (all men) from their college days through the following decades. The Grant Study, as it is called, "is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history." The study tracks the likes of a former member of the presidential cabinet, a best-selling novelist, a US president--John F. Kennedy Jr--and longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee,
From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse—and now well into retirement—the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews.
These men were destined for success. But what happened to them ten years out of school, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy? The often tragic lives of these once happy men reveal the deep truths of human nature, human suffering, and human happiness. Their stories are Shakespearean.
The psychiatrist running the study, Dr. George Vaillant, "described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs." Answering the journalist's questions about whether people change, what makes us happy, how we lead the good life, Vaillant wryly responded, "Why don’t you tell me when you have time to come up to Boston and read one of these Russian novels?"
Here's the story of one man:
Case No. 141
What happened to you?
You grew up in a kind of fairy tale, in a big-city brownstone with 11 rooms and three baths. Your father practiced medicine and made a mint. When you were a college sophomore, you described him as thoughtful, funny, and patient. “Once in awhile his children get his goat,” you wrote, “but he never gets sore without a cause.” Your mother painted and served on prominent boards. You called her “artistic” and civic-minded.
As a child, you played all the sports, were good to your two sisters, and loved church. You and some other boys from Sunday school—it met at your house—used to study the families in your neighborhood, choosing one every year to present with Christmas baskets. When the garbageman’s wife found out you had polio, she cried. But you recovered fully, that was your way. “I could discover no problems of importance,” the study’s social worker concluded after seeing your family. “The atmosphere of the home is one of happiness and harmony.”
At Harvard, you continued to shine. “Perhaps more than any other boy who has been in the Grant Study,” the staff noted about you, “the following participant exemplifies the qualities of a superior personality: stability, intelligence, good judgment, health, high purpose, and ideals.” Basically, they were in a swoon. They described you as especially likely to achieve “both external and internal satisfactions.” And you seemed well on your way. After a stint in the Air Force—“the whole thing was like a game,” you said—you studied for work in a helping profession. “Our lives are like the talents in the parable of the three stewards,” you wrote. “It is something that has been given to us for the time being and we have the opportunity and privilege of doing our best with this precious gift.”
And then what happened? You married, and took a posting overseas. You started smoking and drinking. In 1951—you were 31—you wrote, “I think the most important element that has emerged in my own psychic picture is a fuller realization of my own hostilities. In early years I used to pride myself on not having any. This was probably because they were too deeply buried and I unwilling and afraid to face them.” By your mid-30s, you had basically dropped out of sight. You stopped returning questionnaires. “Please, please … let us hear from you,” Dr. Vaillant wrote you in 1967. You wrote to say you’d come see him in Cambridge, and that you’d return the last survey, but the next thing the study heard of you, you had died of a sudden disease.
Dr. Vaillant tracked down your therapist. You seemed unable to grow up, the therapist said. You had an affair with a girl he considered psychotic. You looked steadily more disheveled. You had come to see your father as overpowering and distant, your mother as overbearing. She made you feel like a black sheep in your illustrious family. Your parents had split up, it turns out.
In your last days, you “could not settle down,” a friend told Dr. Vaillant. You “just sort of wandered,” sometimes offering ad hoc therapy groups, often sitting in peace protests. You broke out spontaneously into Greek and Latin poetry. You lived on a houseboat. You smoked dope. But you still had a beautiful sense of humor. “One of the most perplexing and charming people I have ever met in my life,” your friend said. Your obituary made you sound like a hell of a man—a war hero, a peace activist, a baseball fan.
So what's the lesson to be learned? What ultimately makes us happy? To Vaillant, love and intimacy are the key to human happiness.
...the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he [Vaillant] 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.”