This article, from ‘The Atlantic’ (no, I hadn’t heard of it either) has been sitting in my virtual ‘to-read’ pile for several days now, due to its intimidating length (for a web article anyway) and potentially weighty subject matter. Now that I’ve read it, I’m so glad that I took the time to do so properly.

It tells the story of ‘The Grant Study’ – an in-depth psychological/physiological/sociological study, taken over the course of almost 80 years, into the lives of a few hundred male Harvard graduates, judged by the founders to be examples of “normal” men. From this group of men emerged a Nobel Prize winner, a Bestselling author and a US president; but from it also came alcoholics, criminals and failures. The aim of the study? A ‘positive psychological’ look into what makes for a successful life.

The answer? There doesn’t appear to be any hard-and-fast rules that a person can follow to be successful – there are only correlations (not smoking is, predictably, a large factor in health and well-being in later life). However, if one piece of advice is to be garnered, it is this: Happiness is what you make it, but it does not come easily or without problems of its own. To paraphrase the author: It’s not easy to accept that one is loved. For a more detailed (and better explained) discussion, you’ll just have to read the article!

Intercut with the details of the study and a profile of its current director/spokesperson, George Vaillant, the article contains extracts from the files on the men involved in the study, names hidden, and presents the reader with several startlingly honest, intelligent and downright philosophical dissections of the lives of men in twentieth century America:

“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.” - Case no.47

Happy reading!