Everyone’s Talking about the Happiness Study. Here’s What the Conversation Misses.
It’s an impressive study, the longest scientific study of happiness, conducted across decades (it started in 1938). Referred to as the Grant Study or the Harvard Study of Adult Development, this famous research program has gotten several rounds of press, most recently because of another book relating some of the key findings to a general audience (a few others have already appeared).
The press coverage seems to miss something incredibly vital and far-reaching in this study. Even the books have failed to make it clear. In a way, we could suggest the lead researchers of the study missed this finding—didn’t notice it, didn’t fully grok it, or didn’t understand how crucial it is.
This unstated finding is the most important finding about happiness and a meaningful and fulfilling life that we have. Before we get to it, we should take a few moments to reflect on some of the interesting findings the books have rightfully sought to share.
The latest book comes from Robert Waldinger (current director of the study) and Marc Schultz (the associate director). They call their book, The Good Life—the idea being that a study on happiness should inform us on what makes for “the good life,” a phrase indigenous to philosophy because it’s the kind of life long promised by the wisdom traditions of the world.
In relation to this, the authors thankfully acknowledge something essential: that “science is not the only area of human knowledge that has something to say about the good life. In fact, science is the newcomer.” Who’s been at it longer? The authors admit that, “The ancients beat us to it.” Philosophers, saints, sages, yogis, priestesses, and others already laid out everything we really need to know about cultivating the good life. As the authors point out, “Their wisdom is our inheritance, and we should take advantage of it.”
We don’t tend to do that. The authors offer us nothing essential that the wisdom traditions don’t teach in far more practical terms. The fact that we effectively shun this supreme inheritance creates serious problems for all of us. As the authors put it, with their own emphasis: “people are terrible at knowing what is good for them.” This also means we’re terrible about know what’s bad for us. All told, we kind of suck at realizing the good life. So we end up . . . well, take a look at the state of the world.
A deeper problem lurks here: Our cultural context offers no reliable support for coming to know what’s good for us. This should come across as rather shocking, all the more so when we consider the fact that this issue dates back to the earliest history of philosophy.
Socrates tried to wake his culture up to the fact that, when people seem to have become terrible at knowing what’s good for them, it means the culture has a major disorder, a kind of illness that will eventually bring the culture to collapse. The path of healing requires, among other things, a revitalization of education—an education rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty.
His fellow citizens killed him for pointing this out. It’s quite a nuisance to hear something like that, and our current “leaders” (in business, politics, and culture) want nothing to do with such a suggestion—even though the Harvard study supports what Socrates said. The only difference is that, if we don’t listen to Socrates now, it could have tragic consequences at a global scale. We can already see many of them.
Waldinger and Schulz acknowledge that things haven’t changed since the time of Socrates. We have done very little in terms of rooting our culture in wisdom, love, and beauty, and thus the culture does little to empower people to fully realize for themselves what is truly good for them, and make it a reality. As the authors put it,
“the good life may be a central concern for most people, but it is not the central concern of most modern societies. Life today is a haze of competing social, political, and cultural priorities, some of which have very little to do with improving people’s lives. The modern world prioritizes many things ahead of the lived experience of human beings.”
We should all have to pick our jaws up off the floor. We have nothing but our experience. And the dominant culture effectively represses this spiritual fact, seeking only to give us “experiences,” but not a vitalizing experience of life. This contrast between “experiences” and experience mirrors the tension between “value” and values. The economy has to do with “value” and “experiences,” while life itself has to do with values and experience.
Waldinger and Schultz then mention a second obstacle to the good life, one we already touched on:
“our brains, the most sophisticated and mysterious system in the known universe, often mislead us in our quest for lasting pleasure and satisfaction. We may be capable of extraordinary feats of intellect and creativity, we may have mapped the human genome and walked on the moon, but when it comes to making decisions about our lives, we humans are often bad at knowing what is good for us. Common sense in this area of life is not so sensible. It’s very difficult to figure out what really matters.”
The wisdom traditions arose as a response to both of these issues. In some cases, “philosophy” emerges as a counter-cultural current in the context of a culture that has lost its way. For cultures more rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, philosophy is just “how we do things”.
Okay . . . so, after doing 85 years of work, what did the researchers figure out about “what really matters”? Was it difficult to figure out?
From one perspective, it doesn’t seem too tricky. Waldinger and Schultz tell us, “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.”
Waldinger’s predecessor, George Vaillant, put it a little more skillfully a decade ago: “the seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points . . . to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’”[1]
That’s a fairly radical and revolutionary suggestion. Imagine the changes we would need to make in order to honor this Good News, this Gospel of Love. Before we imagine those changes, let’s consider a few revelations from this Gospel of Love—ahead of the data from the report which, as we shall see, make these revelations clear:
1) Talent and hard work are not sufficient for achieving conventional success.
2) Talent and hard work are not even necessary for achieving conventional success.
3) Conventional success (money, fame, power, comfort, pleasure, possessions) isn’t real success; we can be conventionally successful, but still not fully realized in our most profound potentials (the ones that bring us true peace, happiness, and well-being), and we can be conventionally unsuccessful, but still fully realized in our most profound potentials.
4) Balanced effort and cultivated talent/skill play a decisive role in real success—a life of wisdom, love, and beauty, a life of profound mystery, meaning, and purpose.
Now we can maybe imagine some of the changes we would need to make in order to honor this Gospel of Love. It upends our understanding of the good life. In doing so, it puts our understanding of the good life in accord with the teachings of the wisdom traditions, including the teachings of Plato and Socrates, who taught that the path to wisdom and the good life is love, and the path of love is wisdom.
This is the meaning of the very word “philosophy”—literally, LoveWisdom. And, we in fact need the wisdom traditions because they teach us that love is a skill, and teach us how to cultivate it, whatever our age.
They also teach us that wisdom, love, and beauty come totally interwoven (a limit in one is a limit in all). And they offer an astonishing array of practices for helping us realize the good life—realize true peace, love, happiness, meaning, and fulfillment, true wisdom and well-being.
So, we’re back at philosophy, still waiting for science to play catch-up—because the scientists have nothing new to teach us about how to live our lives as an act of love, how to bring love to fruition in our lives, moment to moment, season to season. The wisdom traditions can help us love better and live better, far more effectively than anything we have in dominant culture science.
This state of affairs came about in no small part because of a movement within what we refer to as science to abandon philosophy—and thus to make the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love something largely absent from our central practice of knowledge. Science shunned our supreme inheritance. And we can only fully recover it if we inquire into the really big issue, the crucial finding our science and our society needs to catch up with most urgently—the one no one emphasizes when talking about this big study on happiness.
To take steps toward this crucial finding of the wisdom traditions (and now the sciences too), it may help to look at a few of the more intriguing findings from the study on happiness that Vaillant detailed in one of his books, The Triumphs of Experience. It’s fascinating stuff. They found that IQ (beyond about 110), body type, and even class had little impact on maximum earnings or happiness. But, they found a few things that might seem downright surprising.
We should keep in mind that the original study focused on men, but later got expanded. Here are some of the findings:
. . . the men who had good sibling relationships (one factor of a warm childhood; see Table 2.2 and Appendix C) when young were making an average of $51,000 (in 2009 dollars) more a year than the men who had poor relationships with their siblings, or no siblings at all. The men from cohesive homes made $66,000 per year more than men from unstable ones. Men with warm mothers took home $87,000 more than those men whose mothers were uncaring. The fifty-eight men with the best scores for warm relationships were three times more likely to be in Who’s Who, and their maximum income—between the ages of fifty-five and sixty, and in 2009 dollars—was an average of $243,000 a year. In contrast, the thirty-one men with the worst scores for relationships earned an average maximum salary of $102,000 a year. The twelve men with the most mature coping styles reported a whopping $369,000 a year; the sixteen men with the most immature styles a much more modest $159,000. These same variables were equally able to predict warm relationships at the end of life.
. . . . The Study found some facets of adulthood in which a good relationship with one parent or another exerted the more important influence. As the men approached old age, their boyhood relationships with their mothers were associated with their effectiveness at work, but their relationships with their fathers were not. A man’s maximum late-life income was significantly associated with a warm relationship with his mother, as was his continuing to work until seventy. His military rank and his inclusion in Who’s Who were also marginally significantly associated with a warm relationship with his mother.
A warm childhood relationship with his mother was significantly associated with a man’s IQ in college, and, more important, with his mental competence at eighty. A poor relationship with his mother was very significantly, and very surprisingly, associated with dementia. For example, of the 115 men without a warm maternal relationship who survived until eighty, 39 (33 percent) were suffering from dementia by age ninety. Of the surviving men with a warm maternal relationship, only 5 (13 percent) have become demented—a significant difference. In the Grant Study, dementia has not been significantly associated with vascular risk factors. One senior colleague of mine insists that this finding must be wrong, on the grounds that no one has noted it before. He forgets that seventy-year prospective studies are as rare as hen’s teeth. Only time—or replication—will resolve the matter.
None of these issues were even suggestively associated with the quality of the man’s relationship with his father. However, warm relationships with fathers (but not with mothers) seemed to enhance the men’s capacity to play. Men with warm paternal relationships enjoyed their vacations significantly more than the others, employed humor more as a coping mechanism, and achieved a very significantly better adjustment to, and contentment with, life after retirement. Counterintuitively, it was not the men with poor mothering but the ones with poor fathering who were significantly more likely to have poor marriages over their lifetimes. All five of the men who reported that marriage without sex would suit them had poor paternal relationships, but these men were evenly distributed as to the adequacy or inadequacy of their mothering.
Men with good father relationships also manifested less anxiety—a significantly lower standing pulse rate in college, for example, and fewer physical and mental symptoms under stress in young adulthood. Men with poor father relationships were much more likely to call themselves pessimists and to report having trouble letting others get close. And good father relationships very significantly predicted subjective life satisfaction at seventy-five, a variable not even suggestively associated with the maternal relationship. Nonetheless, a mother who could enjoy her son’s initiative and autonomy was a tremendous boon to his future.
Some remarkable stuff . . . Warm relationships, especially with our family of origin, correlates with a potential doubling of our income? A warm maternal relationship correlates with a dramatically reduced risk of dementia? And that warm relationships in childhood predict contentment all the way into old age, including having our own warm relationships in old age?
We can engage with data like this, and conclude the following: If a person has a healthy relationship with their parents, they very well might make more money.
That way of looking at the matter feeds into a pattern of thought that treats relationships as objects to collect, possibly for the sake of getting other things we desire. We default to this pattern of thought all the time, and it’s a crucial factor in the conventional success of countless wealthy people: They had connections, they enjoyed relationships that empowered their capacity to make money.
But we could turn this entire pattern on its head and conclude the following: The purpose of an economy is to foster vitalizing relationships.
Functionally speaking, we take the purpose of education as the improvement of the economic prospects of the student. A person goes to college to help them establish a career. This goes together with such a confused notion of what a university is, that we now think it a bold or honest intellectual stance to assert that “college isn’t for everyone!” We can only spout such nonsense when the meaning of education (including a college education) has descended into sickness. When university education fails to feel satisfying to all citizens—and fails to resonate with them as a common good—that’s a crisis.
Obviously, the authors of these books don’t advocate cultivating relationships so that we can make more money. The point is that the study inquired into such things, and Vaillant thus reports these differences in income. We live in a cultural context in which this style of thought gets applied to education and vocation.
For instance, parents consistently discourage their children from pursuing interests that offer no obvious pathways to wealth. We say with disdain to university students, “What are you going to do with that major, wait tables?” In other words, if the “value” of something in the marketplace doesn’t accord with our values, people expect us to put the marketplace first.
Moreover, because of deep confusions and unskillful practices, the culture becomes filled with ignorance and resentment, and people begin to say things like, “I shouldn’t have to pay for your child to go to school to study French literature or Indigenous Studies. If they want to do that, they need to pay for it.” We thus reject the real finding of this study on happiness and the good life.
Again, the authors don’t make a case for the value of relationships by considering economic factors alone. But, as we must keep reminding ourselves, “value” as a concept got colonized by a certain style consciousness, including what we could call economic thought. Thus the value of relationships almost inevitably gets discussed in relation to income. That’s not even possible in some cultures.
But this still doesn’t fully get us to the problem with the Harvard study. Waldinger and Schulz come closest to the key finding that seems functionally absent, ignored, or misunderstood when they write, “Relationships are not just essential as stepping-stones to other things, and they are not simply a functional route to health and happiness. They are ends in themselves.”
This gets us close, but ultimately fails in many ways. Here’s how we could better put the finding of the Harvard study:
This study didn’t verify the importance of “relationships” as a kind of “thing” we can think of as either a stepping-stone or an end in itself; rather, this study verified that life is fully and completely relational, and that we are not so much human “beings” as dynamic patterns of relationality—flowing patterns of awareness. The whole Cosmos is relationality all the way down—sacred, wondrous, inconceivable, and, quite frankly, magical relationality.
The authors themselves fall into the error of talking about “relationships” as if they are things we can collect. Even to speak of “cultivating relationships” misses the mark.
Consider that the authors write, “Achievement is most meaningful when it is relational” (their emphasis). The wisdom traditions often teach that, when it comes to wisdom, if we miss by a hair’s breadth, we miss by a mile: There is no nonrelational achievement, and no nonrelational meaning.
If we understood the Harvard study as revealing the inescapability of relationality, we could carry the findings much further, using them to inspire us to create a truly healthy society. And what we find in this study seems to have a lot to do with our failure to thoroughly understand relationality. Unfortunately, that ignorance spills over into all of the media coverage, and it continues to obscure the real lessons we need to learn.
We can put some of those lessons in a separate essay. Because these lessons would come as a paradigm shift, we can’t even make sense of all of them. Worse yet, our reason and our emotion can take offense at such lessons. They can arrive in such a way that they first provoke a great deal of defensiveness and reactivity—even scorn and various forms of aggression.
For now, it’s just important to recognize that we need to change the headlines about this study, and begin to reflect more critically about its meaning and implications.
[1] See: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/thanks-mom/309287/
And: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/