How to Make a Good Life
Revelations from Harvard’s 75-Year Study of Human Happiness
“The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.”
The good life has been the subject of countless treatises for as long as people have contemplated their lot in life and how to make it better. It’s been said that people are rational creatures guided by a hierarchy of needs that, when satisfied, result in a so called “happy life.” One of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russell, wrote in 1925 that, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” Russell had a lot to say about the nature of the good life and how we limit our own happiness. In fact for most of human history, questions like these were thought to be unanswerable by anyone but a philosopher, and perhaps the occasional poet, but that was all about to change. A survey today would find that the majority of people believe that fame and money will bring health and happiness. However data will show that you are mistaken.
Beginning in 1938, a group of visionary researchers at Harvard University decided to enlist the tools of science to answer the age old questions about what it means to live a good life. Thus began the Grant Study which would go on to become the longest-running study of human happiness.
The Study of Adult Development at the Harvard Medical School, as it was officially known, would provide a counterpoint to the disease model of medicine which defines wellness as the absence of disease. This model holds wellness to be the foundation of happiness and the key to a good life. Instead this study set out to identify the conditions associated with enhanced well being by closely following the lives of college students selected from the sophomore classes at Harvard between 1939 and 1944. By the end of 1944 researchers had enrolled 268 subjects into the study that was revolutionary both in scale, ambition, and impact. To say that no study like it has been undertaken before or since would be an understatement. Everything science has to tell us about living a good life is thought to start and end with this study.
Medicine in the 1930’s and 1940’s was far from the evidence based practice we know today. Doctors at the time knew little about genetics and they had no concern for mental health which was at the time a fringe concern for most doctors. It would be 20 years before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, is first published. During the Civil War famed American poet, Walt Whitman was a volunteer nurse and wrote about the underserved human factors in healthcare.
“This tremendous war goes on,” Whitman writes. “Every family has directly or indirectly some representative among this vast army of the wounded and sick.” Overcome with compassion, he set out to alleviate their suffering by lifting their spirits, his own personal hearts and minds campaign intuitively speaks to what we now know about how our minds affect our bodies. He questioned how many have gotten sick after a long, stressful week? We now know it is because chronic stress lowers the immune system making us more susceptible to infection.
Whitman did little more than supply sick men, who were recuperating from their injuries, with writing paper and a stamped envelope each along with some cheerful reading matter. While it may be hard for people today to understand, his seemingly small gestures in the context of the time he was alive, along with his motivations to treat the unseen side of human health, were nothing short of revolutionary. Still it would take 75 years and a World War before doctors would endeavor to systematically study that which Walt Whitman intuitively recognized; that unseen factors had a major role to play in human health and well being and unless we started looking for them we would never be able to answer the question, what makes a good life?
Despite being a revolutionary study, the Grant Study had some glaring limitations, ones that reflect the darker chapters of our nation's history. All the original subjects were privileged white men. No women or persons of color were included so we can’t know the impact of institutional biases that favored privileged white men over just about everyone else. Nevertheless, the findings provide an invaluable insight into some of the hidden facets of the human experience and reveal some unexpected insights into what makes a person happy and satisfied with their life. We learned who lived to 90 and beyond and what factors best predicted self-actualization and success in their chosen careers. We also learned how the interplay between nature and nurture shape who we are and who we are likely to become.
One of the Grant Study directors gave a TED Talk which covered the latest discoveries of four generations of scientists who have worked on this project since it began. With 75 years of data about the building blocks of human happiness and long life, the strongest statement we can make about what it takes to live healthier and happier is to have good strong relationships. The clearest message we obtained from the 75 year study is that good relationships keep us happier and healthier, period. There are three important findings:
- Social connections are good and loneliness kills. Those more isolated were less happy and their health declines.
- It is not the number of friends or whether you are in a committed relation but rather the quality of your relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.
- Good relationships protect both our bodies and our brains.
In other words, other people, not ourselves, are the key to happiness, longevity, and the meaningful life.
