I’m currently reading “The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness,” by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. The book has been cited in many articles I’ve read, so I figured it was time to go back to the source.
Here, the source is the 80-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development (now overseen by Drs. Waldinger and Schulz) that has been examining in quite astonishing detail the lives, health and happiness of the original 724 participants, and now, three generations later, more than 1,300 of their descendants. The goal of the study: To understand what contributes to human flourishing.
One-third of the original participants (the study began in 1938) were Harvard students, and the other two-thirds were poor boys from inner-city Boston. As the authors note in the opening chapter, we’d likely predict that, given their educational advantage (although not necessarily wealth – a number of them were on scholarships), Harvard students would thrive, while the disadvantaged kids would struggle. But of course nothing in life is so simple, and they concluded that self-centered subjects – not those who were denied educations or jobs best matched to their abilities – were the least likely to find happiness in life.
The book is quite addictive for me, actually. As a teen, I was irritated by the lack of wisdom around me – in adults, yes, but also in myself, because I was too young to have witnessed the plotlines of lives unfolding, which made it difficult to write fiction with any sort of authenticity. Cautionary tales are part of the fabric of small-town life, and my dad (a wise man) used to repeat what some old-timer had done (or, more likely, what he shouldn’t have done), and this oral history functioned in the same way as the stories recounted in Waldinger and Schulz’s book.
The difference is that Dad’s stories were from an onlooker’s viewpoint (following, no doubt, intense community scrutiny), while Waldinger and Schulz have the information from the source, captured through regular interviews, while the details were fresh and not diluted or polluted by faulty memory. And so, in the chapter on marriage, they can trace the lifetime of a man who, trained to work the horse-drawn plow alone on his parents’ farm, achieved a scholarship and Harvard education, and then married and had three children – and despite an unconflicted, 59-year-long marriage with his wife, never managed to have an emotionally intimate relationship with her because his early self-sufficiency grew into an inability to confide, to invest and trust, in others. “There’s nothing pulling us apart,” he told a researcher when he was 72, “but we’re not bound together.”
Consider the abundance of what can be learned by examining a single human life kaleidoscopically – through long interviews, regular questionnaires, home visits, medical testing, questioning children and spouses and parents and more – and then consider that Waldinger and Schulz boiled the whole study down to one very basic conclusion: “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.” (10)
Circle back to my upbringing on a small dairy farm, and you see what good relationships look like on a community level. My dad could recite the family trees of any number of local families. He knew where they lived and what they farmed. He had cordial relations with our neighbors; if we needed help, they were there, and if they needed help, we returned the favor. If the cows got out and some neighbors drove by, you knew they’d be stopping. My dad had a back surgery when we were in high school, and many people offered support – helped us do the chores, milk the cows and generally keep the place running – while he was recovering.
Today, in contrast, few of us have that kind of deep, history-inflected connection with our communities. Many of us move around and settle wherever we find jobs, and participation in clubs, organizations and churches has greatly fallen. All the loneliness and social isolation exacerbated by the pandemic continue to weigh on society, and we’ve all heard the statistics about screens and teens – mental health is in decline across all age groups, but especially the young. Suicide rates of Americans ages 10-24 rose 62 percent from 2007 to 2021, according to the latest data released by the Centers for Disease Control.
For older adults, meanwhile, loneliness and social isolation, as observed by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, “is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity” (“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” 2023)
The good news is that we, as a Christian community, are uniquely positioned to offer neighborly support. I heard a terrible story last year about a woman in the Diocese of La Crosse who was very ill, to the point of needing anointing from her priest, and she was trying to raise a large family of young children almost entirely alone – her husband traveled for his work. Although she was a parishioner, she had no family or close friends nearby; a parish employee who learned of the situation took her groceries, but there was no meal train, no offer of childcare so she could rest. This was a vibrant parish in a small metropolitan area; doubtless many people would have helped, had they known, but the parish had no one appointed to organize volunteer efforts.
Maybe one of our tasks as a Christian community is to recognize that isolation creates problems, even for those who attend our churches, and seek ways to help. Organizing a meal train for a family, for example, is as simple as going to MealTrain.com and starting one.
When I was sick with the flu in graduate school, my friend Shauna brought over a pot of chicken soup. She was from Southside Chicago – her father and brother were both ministers – and that was just customary for her family. It was wonderfully kind, a gift I have not forgotten, especially since we barely knew each other. In this culture shaped by screen time, social isolation and loneliness, it can be difficult to break into the private spaces of other people’s lives, but as Waldinger and Schulz remind us, our lives will be all the richer for trying. We don’t want to look back on our parishes, on our relationships, and say, “There’s nothing pulling us apart, but we’re not bound together.”
