This is pretty awesome: via David Brooks:
In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted.
And yet the categories of journalism and the stereotypes of normal conversation are paltry when it comes to predicting a life course. Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. One man couldn’t admit to himself that he was gay until he was in his late 70s.
And this is the amazing article he links to: Joshua Wolf Shenk’s piece about the Grant Study for the June Atlantic, titled “What Makes Us Happy?“:
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. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries. They sit in a wall of locked cabinets in an office suite behind Fenway Park in Boston, in a plain room with beige carpeting and fluorescent lights that is littered with the detritus of many decades of social-scientific inquiry: a pile of enormous spreadsheet data books; a 1970s-era typewriter; a Macintosh PowerBook, circa 1993. All that’s missing are the IBM punch cards used to analyze the data in the early days.
One of the most interesting aspects of the piece is how it incorporates the biography of the man in charge of the study for the past 42 years, George Vaillant. He joined the project in 1967, when he was 33, and as the article points out, “he would spend the rest of his career—and expects to spend the rest of his life—following these men.”
After a life spent looking into the nature of personal fulfillment, the most succinct conclusion Vaillant (who became “a kind of godfather” to positive psychology) has come up with is, “Happiness is love” — which is something the happiest people already know intuitively.
