Jeune Street

In the mid-1930s, 268 men at Harvard were selected for a longitudinal study that was intended to narrate models of successful living. Now, more than 70 years later the men (those who remain alive) are still being followed, and the long arc of their years reveal fascinating insights into our human struggle to live well.

Despite the original intentions of the study, the subjects have not revealed a formula for happiness and success; instead, they provide insights into how men who were given extraordinary endowments and capabilities turned them into such different lives filled with promise, tragedy, and transformation.

These men were part of the famous Grant Study, which is narrated in a fascinating article from this month’s Atlantic magazine. The author, Joshua Wolf Shenk, takes us into the fine-grained details of the lives of these man, while also bringing out the broad strokes of conclusions drawn by the study’s lead researcher, George Vaillant.

At the centre of the article is the question posed by the article’s title “What Makes Us Happy?” but the answers given by these lives are ambiguous. Vaillant sums them up in the concept of ‘mature adaptation’, when we learn to respond to adversity with humour, altruism, and faith. Happiness, Vaillant concludes, is the outcome of conveying emotions such as awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust. They make us more vulnerable and deepen our relationships with others.

Vaillant’s conclusions call to mind a favourite quotation of mine from the writings of Baha’u'llah,  in which he urges us on to lives of faith:

For every one of you his paramount duty is to choose for himself that on which no other may infringe and none may usurp from him. Such a thing–and to this the Almighty is My witness–is the love of God, could ye but perceive it.

Build ye for yourselves such houses as the rain and floods can never destroy, which shall protect you from the changes and chances of this life.

The quotation describes an idea of faith that features throughout Baha’u'llah’s writings. First, it is a conscious choice to love God. To choose faith.  Second, faith requires construction, building, and effort. And finally, a central purpose of faith is to embrace life in a turbulent world. This type of faith is not simply obedience or wilful ignorance, but measured confidence in the face of adversity. Where we trust that the difficulties of our lives are occasions to struggle with the truth and cultivate “radiant acquiescence”.

At the end of the article, Shenk offers a meditation on how to grow into a happy life. He returns to the theme of ‘adaptation’:

Only with patience and tenderness might a person surrender his barbed armor for a softer shield. Perhaps in this, I thought, lies the key to the good life-not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.

In a way, that’s what faith is all about: engaged humility and earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises. It gives us the tools to live well.