What Makes Us Happy?

What does it mean to be a good company?  Why is it that some companies are able to survive a major crisis that like some mass extinction evolutionary event will obliterate many of their competitors or reduce them to shadows of their former selves?  What is the magical combination of organizational resiliency, culture and leadership that enables such companies to adapt to rapidly changing market environments? 

These are questions I have been thinking about a lot in the last few years, especially as part of my teaching responsibilities at MIT and Imperial College.

A few weeks ago, I came across an excellent article, asking related but much, much tougher questions.  “What Makes Us Happy?” is the title of the article by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the June issue of The Atlantic.  It is based on a study of adult development called the Grant Study.  The study was started in 1937 by selecting a group of healthy, well adjusted Harvard undergraduates and has subsequently followed its subjects for more than 70 years.

The original purpose of the study was an attempt to analyze the forces that produce normal young men.  Over a four year period, about 268 Harvard students were carefully selected in their sophomore year as the most normal and well adjusted in their class.  Twenty dropped out early for various reasons, and the remaining 248 have continued to participate in the study ever since (or until their deaths), receiving a questionnaire every two years, providing records of physical examinations every five years, and participating in personal interviews every fifteen years or so.  The study has also been talking to the participants' families to gather their own observations.

The Grant study is one of the longest-running and most exhaustive longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being ever undertaken.  I learned about it, and about Shenk’s Atlantic article in this May 12 New York Times OpEd, They Had it Made by David Brooks.  Brooks was clearly fascinated by the Grant study and by Shenk's article, which he called brilliant and superb, sentiments I totally share:

“By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university.  They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted.”

“And yet the categories of journalism and the stereotypes of normal conversation are paltry when it comes to predicting a life course.  Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s.  A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague.  The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success.”

Shenk focused “What Makes Us Happy?” on George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and Professor at the Harvard Medical School, who for the past 42 years has been the chief curator of the Grant study. 

 “Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life?”, asks the article in its introduction.  The answer, according to Vaillant, is that the course of our lives will mostly depend on how we respond to the problems that we will inevitably encounter - from the truly tragic to the relatively minor.  Psychoanalysts call these responses adaptations or defense mechanisms, that is, “the unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort - depending on whether you approve or disapprove - a person’s reality.” 

Vaillant believes that these defense mechanisms are the mental equivalent of basic biological processes, much like our blood clots on its own when we cut ourselves so we don’t bleed to death.  They represent our unconscious responses to pain, conflict and uncertainty, and can spell our redemption or ruin.

He identifies four categories of adaptions.  Psychotic - like paranoia, hallucination or megalomania; immature - acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria; neurotic defenses, including intellectualization and repression, which are common in normal people; and mature adaptations, which include altruism, humor, suppression and sublimation. 

Vaillant sees adaptations as “arising organically from the pain of experience and playing out through the whole lifespan,” writes Shenk in the article.

“Most psychology preoccupies itself with mapping the heavens of health in sharp contrast to the underworld of illness . . . Social anxiety disorder is distinguished from shyness.  Depression is defined as errors in cognition.  Vaillant’s work, in contrast, creates a refreshing conversation about health and illness as weather patterns in a common space. ‘Much of what is labeled mental illness,’ Vaillant writes, ‘simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms.  If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic.  If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.’”

The unique quality of the Grant study is its long term view of the lives it explores.  It feels less like a psychiatric analysis and more like biographies looking to make sense of the whole life of each of its subjects.

By almost any normal measure, you could say that the 248 subjects originally chosen for the study in the early 1940s had it made.  They were young, bright, ambitious and were attending one of the world’s most prestigious university.  But, a couple of decades later, by age 50, almost a third of the men had suffered incidents of mental illness.  They experienced a variety of turmoils in their middle years, but as they aged, their defenses became more mature.  Vaillant found that between ages 50 and 75 altruism and humor grew, while immature defenses were more rare. 
 
“This means that a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading,” writes Shenk.  “A man at 20 who appears the model of altruism may turn out to be a kind of emotional prodigy—or he may be ducking the kind of engagement with reality that his peers are both moving toward and defending against.  And, on the other extreme, a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may turn out to be gestating toward maturity.”

While each life is unique in its own way, certain patterns do emerge.  For example, Vaillant has identified seven factors that best correlate with and predict healthy physical and psychological aging.  They include the transition to mature adaptations, as well as  education, a stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, moderate exercise and a healthy weight.  In general, the more of these factors a man had, the better he aged both physically and psychologically.

But even more important than these seven factors is the power of relationships.  “It is social aptitude,” wrote Vaillant, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.”  Relationships can come from a variety of sources - family, friends, colleagues, - it is the warm connections that count.  “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people,” said Vaillant in an interview a year ago when asked what he had learned from following the Grant Study men.

So, is there any kind of formula for a happy life?  Sigmund Freud dismissed the notion that there was any such thing as a normal life, let alone a happy one.  He famously remarked that he hoped at most to transform his patients “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”

But, can we at least achieve some semblance of graceful aging?  George Valiant believes we can, as he observes toward the end of this very nice and brief interview:  “The take-home lesson is to always enjoy were you are now . . .  The job isn’t conforming, it is not keeping up with the Joneses  . . . it is playing, working and loving, . . . loving is probably the most important.  Happiness is love.  Full stop.”  

Comments

[Michael Saunby]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

That so many had mental illness doesn't surprise me greatly. These men were expected to do well, to lead others - and perhaps that wasn't what they were really suited to. It seem that many senior managers, and politicians, will be divorced, overweight drunks.

I wonder how they would compare with those who became successful despite a less promising start to life? i.e. those who chose the life rather than inherited it.

[hezranov]

it is interesting..

[Bob]

Thanks Irving.
I met you at Reilly's funeral. We sat at the same table. Your comments rang true to me. Good relationships and love are the very basis of mental health. And Riles loved you, you know that. Why else would he have hung out so long at IBM and written so many good speeches?

[Eugene Lewis]

Hi Irving,

I worked at the Comp Center as an operator on the 7094 Computer from 1962 - 1964. I worked for DR. Roothan and Bill Worley.

I remember all the student programmers in CB17.
Vince Kruskal, Dave Shuman, Danny Rosenfeld, Mike Nedelsky, Steve Mohl and many others. I met Vince on a plane ride to New York in 1969. I talked to Dave Shuman several Years ago, he lives in Barrington and was working for Shields Enterprise in Illinois.

Jesse Seymore still has a consulting firm. Serge Kunitzky passed away in 1997.

I left the university in 1965, and worked as a programmer until 1977. I was an Independent Consultant until I retired in 2000.

I still work from home in Chicago upgrading PC Hardware to keep me busy.

I am happy that you have had an outstanding career, and I wish you continued success.

I would like to hear from you.

Gene Lewis

[Jony Wong]

We changed our marketing direction quickly, so we keep the fast growth in last year. This make us happy. Of course this is only the result not the reason. For the reason, I think different companies have different reasons.