As a ‘pursuer of happiness’ myself, I found this writeup on a Harvard Study really interesting. Excerpt is two of the main case studies shown in the article… er, more like long essay.
Case No. 218
How’s this for the good life? You’re rich, and you made the dough yourself. You’re well into your 80s, and have spent hardly a day in the hospital. Your wife had a cancer scare, but she’s recovered and by your side, just as she’s been for more than 60 years. Asked to rate the marriage on a scale of 1 to 9, where 1 is perfectly miserable and 9 is perfectly happy, you circle the highest number. You’ve got two good kids, grandkids too. A survey asks you: “If you had your life to live over again, what problem, if any, would you have sought help for and to whom would you have gone?” “Probably I am fooling myself,” you write, “but I don’t think I would want to change anything.” If only we could take what you’ve done, reduce it to a set of rules, and apply it systematically.
Right?
Case No. 47
You literally fell down drunk and died. Not quite what the study had in mind.
———————————————-
Case No. 218, continued
On first glance, you are the study’s exemplar. In Dr. Vaillant’s
“decathlon” of mental health—10 measures, taken at various points
between ages 18 and 80, including personality stability at ages 21 and
29, and social supports at 70—you have ranked in the top 10 of the
Grant Study men the entire way through, one of only three men to have
done so.What’s your secret? Is it your steely resolve? After a major
accident in college, you returned to campus in a back brace, but you
looked healthy. You had a kind of emotional steel, too. When you were
13, your mother ran off with your father’s best friend. And though your
parents reunited two years later, a pall of disquiet hung over your
three-room apartment when the social worker came for her visit. But you
said your parents’ divorce was “just like in the movies,” and that you
someday “would like to have some marital difficulties” of your own.After the war—during which you worked on a major weapons
system—and graduate school, you married, and your bond with your wife
only deepened over time. Indeed, while your mother remains a haunting
presence in your surveys—eventually diagnosed with manic depression,
she was often hospitalized and received many courses of shock
therapy—the warmth of your relationship with your wife and kids, and
fond memories of your maternal grandfather, seemed to sustain you.Yet your file shows a quiet, but persistent, questioning about a
path not taken. As a sophomore in college, you emphasized how much
money you wanted to make, but also wondered whether you’d be better off
in medicine. After the war, you said you were “too tense & high
strung” and had less interest in money than before. At 33, you said,
“If I had to do it all over again I am positive I would have gone into
medicine—but it’s a little late.” At 44, you sold your business and
talked about teaching high school. You regretted that (according to a
study staff member’s notes) you’d “made no real contribution to
humanity.” At 74, you said again that if you could do it over again,
you would go into medicine. In fact, you said, your father had urged
you to do it, to avoid the Army. “That annoyed me,” you said, and so
you went another way.There is something unreachable in your file. “Probably I am
fooling myself,” you wrote in 1987, at age 63, “but I don’t think I
would want to change anything.” How can we know if you’re fooling
yourself? How can even you know? According to Dr. Vaillant’s model of
adaptations, the very way we deal with reality is by distorting it—and
we do this unconsciously. When we start pulling at this thread, an
awfully big spool of thoughts and questions begins to unravel onto the
floor.You never seemed to pull the thread. When the study asked you to
indicate “some of the fundamental beliefs, concepts, philosophy of life
or articles of faith which help carry you along or tide you over rough
spots,” you wrote: “Hard to answer since I am really not too
introspective. However, I have an overriding sense (or philosophy) that
it’s all a big nothing—or ‘chasing after wind’ as it says in
Ecclesiastes & therefore, at least up to the present, nothing has
caused me too much grief.”Case No. 47, continued
You are the study’s antihero, its jester, its subversive
philosopher. From the first pages of your file, you practically explode
with personality. In the social worker’s office, you laughed
uproariously, slapping your arm against your chair. He “seems to be
thoroughly delighted with the family idiosyncrasies,” Lewise Gregory,
the original staff social worker, wrote. “He has a delightful,
spontaneous sense of humor … [a] bubbling, effervescent quality.” “My
family considers it a great joke that I am a ‘normal boy,’” you wrote.
“‘Good God!’”You ducked the war, as a conscientious objector. “I’ve answered a
great many questions,” you wrote in your 1946 survey. “Now I’d like to
ask you people a couple of questions. By what standards of reason are
you calling people ‘adjusted’ these days? Happy? Contented? Hopeful? If
people have adjusted to a society that seems hell-bent on destroying
itself in the next couple of decades, just what does that prove about
the people?”You got married young, and did odd jobs—including a stint as a
guinea pig in a hospital study on shipwreck survival. You said that you
were fascinated by the “nuts” on the psychiatric ward, and you wondered
whether you could escape the “WASP cocoon.” You worked in public
relations and had three kids.You said you wanted to be a writer, but that looked like a
distant dream. You started drinking. In college, you had said you were
the life of the party without alcohol. By 1948, you were drinking
sherry. In 1951, you reported that you regularly took a few drinks. By
1964, you wrote, “Really tie one on about twice a week,” and you
continued, “Well, I eat too much, smoke too much, drink too much liquor
and coffee, get too little exercise, and I’ve got to do something about
all these things. “On the other hand,” you wrote, “I’ve never been more
productive, and I’m a little wary of rocking the boat right now by
going on a clean living kick … I’m about as adjusted and effective as
the average Fine Upstanding Neurotic can hope to be.”After a divorce, and a move across the country, and a second
marriage—you left her for a mistress who later left you—you came out of
the closet. And you began to publish and write full-time. The Grant
Study got some of your best work. When a questionnaire asked what ideas
carried you through rough spots, you wrote, “It’s important to care and
to try, even tho the effects of one’s caring and trying may be absurd,
futile, or so woven into the future as to be indetectable.” Asked what
effect the Grant Study had on you, you wrote, “Just one more little
token that I am God’s Elect. And I really don’t need any such tokens,
thank you.”In the early 1970s, Dr. Vaillant came to see you in your small
apartment, with an old couch, an old-fashioned typewriter, a sink full
of dishes, and a Harvard-insignia chair in the corner. Ever the
conscientious objector, you asked for his definition of “normality.”
You said you loved The Sorrow and the Pity
and that, in the movie, the sort of men the Grant Study prized fought
on the side of the Nazis, “whereas the kooks and the homosexuals were all in the resistance.” You told Dr. Vaillant he should read Joseph Heller on the unrelieved tragedy of conventionally successful businessmen.Your “mental status was paradoxical,” Dr. Vaillant wrote in his
notes. You were clearly depressed, he observed, and yet full of joy and
vitality. “He could have been a resistance leader,” Dr. Vaillant wrote.
“He really did seem free about himself.” Intrigued, and puzzled, he
sent you a portion of his manuscript-in-progress, wanting your
thoughts. “The data’s fantastic,” you replied. “The methodology you are
using is highly sophisticated. But the end judgments, the final
assessments, seem simplistic.“I mean, I can imagine some poor bastard who’s fulfilled all your
criteria for successful adaptation to life, … upon retirement to some
aged enclave near Tampa just staring out over the ocean waiting for the
next attack of chest pain, and wondering what he’s missed all his life
What’s the difference between a guy who at his final conscious moments
before death has a nostalgic grin on his face as if to say, ‘Boy, I
sure squeezed that lemon’ and the other man who fights for every last
breath in an effort to turn back time to some nagging unfinished
business?”You went on to a very productive career, and became an important
figure in the gay-rights movement. You softened toward your parents and
children, and made peace with your ex-wife. You took long walks. And
you kept drinking. After a day in your “collar,” you said, you let the
dog loose.“If you had your life to live over again,” the study asked you in
1981, “what problem, if any, would you have sought help for and to whom
would you have gone?” “I’ve come to believe that ‘help’ is for the most
part useless and destructive,” you answered. “Can you imagine Arlie
Bock—God bless his soul—trying to help me work out my problems? … Or
Clark Heath? The poor old boys would have headed for the hills! The
‘helping professions’ are in general camp-followers of the dominant
culture, just like the clergy, and the psychiatrists. (I except Freud
and Vaillant.)”Around this time, Dr. Vaillant wrote about you: “The debate
continues in my mind, whether he is going to be the exception and be
able to break all the rules of mental health and alcoholism or whether
the Greek fates will destroy him. Only time will tell.” Dr. Vaillant
urged you to go to AA. You died at age 64, when you fell down the
stairs of your apartment building. The autopsy found high levels of
alcohol in your blood.In Adaptation to Life, where you appeared as “Alan Poe,”
Vaillant had admired your altruism and sublimation, and your eloquence,
but worried you were “stalked by death, suicide and skid row.” You had
written in retort, “Of course, the prognosis of death is a pretty sure
bet … Hell, I could be dead by the time you get this letter. But if I
am, let it be published … that—especially in the last five years—‘I
sure squeezed that lemon!’”