Love is life
By Vithal C Nadkarni
After spending 75 years and $20 million, the Harvard Grant Study boils down to one straightforward five-word equation, "Happiness is love. Full stop," says George Vaillant in Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.
For 40 years, the psychiatrist led the study that tracked 238 men at Harvard who were
sophomores between 1939 and 1946. Candidates included US President John F Kennedy
and The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, whose identities were kept secret. The writer
Norman Mailer and composerconductor Leonard Bernstein were among those rejected.
The absence of Eve's daughters from this sophomoric sample skews the study.
However, the result seems to suggest that without women, or without love really, no man can
call his life complete or contented!
Those who never gained intimacy with a partner; those who never matured or had learnt to draw
contentment from their work were the subjects most likely to rue over spilt milk in their later life. Vaillant has cogent advice for those sighing
over "lost opportunities" of the road they hadn't taken: reframe the question!
Ask not what you might have lost but focus on what you have gained by taking the path that you actually travelled. There is absolutely nothing out
there in the bush. The only bird that will ever be in your hand is the one in your palm right now.
What if one didn't have anything there? Then it is never too late to go for it, says the shrink highlighting his secondmost significant finding:
people can change a lot; find happiness even in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Just don't say die.
By Vithal C Nadkarni
After spending 75 years and $20 million, the Harvard Grant Study boils down to one straightforward five-word equation, "Happiness is love. Full stop," says George Vaillant in Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.
For 40 years, the psychiatrist led the study that tracked 238 men at Harvard who were
sophomores between 1939 and 1946. Candidates included US President John F Kennedy
and The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, whose identities were kept secret. The writer
Norman Mailer and composerconductor Leonard Bernstein were among those rejected.
The absence of Eve's daughters from this sophomoric sample skews the study.
However, the result seems to suggest that without women, or without love really, no man can
call his life complete or contented!
Those who never gained intimacy with a partner; those who never matured or had learnt to draw
contentment from their work were the subjects most likely to rue over spilt milk in their later life. Vaillant has cogent advice for those sighing
over "lost opportunities" of the road they hadn't taken: reframe the question!
Ask not what you might have lost but focus on what you have gained by taking the path that you actually travelled. There is absolutely nothing out
there in the bush. The only bird that will ever be in your hand is the one in your palm right now.
What if one didn't have anything there? Then it is never too late to go for it, says the shrink highlighting his secondmost significant finding:
people can change a lot; find happiness even in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Just don't say die.
