The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

BY ROBERT WALDINGER AND MARC SCHULZ

In his compelling work on the history of happiness, Darrin McMahon reminds us that happiness as an individual right is a quite recent addition to the list of fleshly desires and demands. For most of human history, the idea of happiness was linked to a heightened state in which one is lifted by the gods, a gift granted by fate. If given, you were blessed. If not, ‘twas not meant to be.

Not so for us, as Thomas Hardy laments in his famous lines: “If but some vengeful god would call to me from up the sky, and laugh…But not so.” In other words: You’re on your own, kid. In the past two centuries, we’ve managed to make happiness an obligation, an act of personal achievement that’s so damn hard to come by that we’ve propped up billions of dollars in cottage industries to help us find it.

The library of happiness is vast and varied. Populated by self-helpers and healers, thought leaders and therapists, monks, millionaires, and memoirists. Whether grounded in a method, advocating a mindset, channeling the wisdom of tradition, alchemizing personal experience, or some mix of the above, the literature of happiness tends toward trends and, as a genre, thrives mostly on its inability to deliver on what it promises

If we haven’t the gods to thank for the most recent addition to this catalog The Good Life, then we can at least be grateful to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest in-depth examination of adult life ever conducted Starting just after the Great Depression and continuing to this day, the Study began by following 724 men from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds for eight decades, then expanded to include their spouses, and recently expanded again to include more than 1,300 of their Baby-Boomer children The project’s purpose is to answer the question we only began asking a couple of hundred years ago: what makes a happy and meaningful life?

The literature of happiness would like you to think there are no simple answers. Dr. Robert Waldinger, the current director of the Harvard Study, and his co-author Marc Shulz, suggest there actually might be. “Good relationships,” they write, “keep us healthier and happier. Period.”

Having read the ten chapters that somehow remain breezy despite the steady drumbeat of supportive research, one can forgive them for writing the word “Period.” There is a dramatic sense of conclusion to The Good Life that evades most books that approach the same question. Perhaps it’s the approachability and recognizability of the human stories that fill the report. Even a cynic would have a hard time resisting the blend of qualitative and quantitative that extends across the various dimensions of human-to-human interaction: from family to romance to work to casual encounters and beyond— and the constant evolution required.

The Good Life has a timeless quality to its discovered wisdom, but one can’t help but view it through the lens of postpandemic contemporaneity. As societies rethink themselves, as workers rebalance their commitments, as organizations redesign their expectations, as governments reimagine the social contract, one wonders if the Harvard Study can provide us with a direction of travel: toward a society that privileges the relational above the transactional, the accumulation of connections above commodities. We don’t have to travel a new road, of course. We can stay on the old road. At least the publishers will be happy.

And where she taught me to eat the world.”

For those who wonder what legacyleaving ought to look like, here is an artifact to study a story of how “the young get older, and the older get wiser, and the wiser sometimes find wonder again, before whatever comes next ”

Humans across time and cultures, claimed James Frazer in The Golden Bough, like their gods to die.Something resonates about a melting Icarus or an arrow-pierced Baldr. It’s nice, of course, when the gods come back with a one-off reboot like Jesus of Nazareth or Dionysus. Should they, like Persephone or Osiris, die and come back often, we embed them into our understanding of time and season. Something to aspire to.

In his entertaining, educational, existential, and downright enjoyable documentary series Limitless, Chris Hemsworth, best known for his cheeky, gargantuan depiction of the Norse god Thor in the Marvel universe, aims to best them all and live forever. Well, not quite forever. But for as long as he can. And he aims to find out how.

Surprisingly slight in the months between filming, the casually charismatic Hemsworth employs a list of coaches and instructors to help him push the boundaries of his mental and physical capabilities in the search for longevity and wellness. [One such coach, is Peter Attia, who is interviewed on page 34.] The journey ventures to epic locations, includes feats of daring physicality and surprising intimacy, and along the way offers illuminating insights into the new science of health

In Hemsworth, viewers find an awkward and approachable earnestness that’s often lacking in celebrity actors who try their hand at documentary work The extraordinarily likable Leonardo DiCaprio and Zac Efron, for instance, shed nearly all charisma when they drop their characters and become themselves Hemsworth is the opposite, somehow becoming more magnetic through vulnerability

And vulnerability is, Hemsworth reminds us in the end, the road we all travel The title of his show, one hopes, is purposefully ironic This is a show very much about limits They can be pushed They can be redefined with knowledge and persistence If yours are set with self-defeating closeness, the coaches say in various voices then limits can be reset But they cannot be exceeded That human life comes with an expiration date is a truth universally despised But the acceptance of this, and the ability to thrive within the awareness of denouement, is the work of Hemsworth’s contemplation And the work of a lifetime