Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations

In a previous essay, we considered the famous Grant Study, more formally known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The study has received a lot of media attention lately, and the previous essay began to consider why we need the headlines to change. The headline for this second essay gives us one possible alternative—though we still need to understand what the “true wealth of nations” is, as far as a more critical reading of the study might suggest. 

Aside from rewriting some of the headlines related to the Harvard study, we could also think of the title for this essay this way: How Our Culture Might Change if We Took Our Science and Our Wisdom Traditions Seriously. This famous research program has gotten significant press coverage recently, in part because of another general audience book reporting its findings, but the discussion has so far failed to take either the fullness of the science or the fullness of our wisdom traditions into account. This ends up taming the findings, and leaving us all short-changed when it comes to the true wealth of nations and their people. 

The new book is called, The Good Life—a phrase closely associated with the ancient philosophical traditions of Greece and Rome. We suggested that the authors, Robert Waldinger (current director of the study) and Marc Schultz (the associate director), didn’t seem to fully acknowledge and promote the most profound finding of the study they report on in that book. 

We do have an excellent stated finding, and George Vaillant, the study’s previous director, put it rather well about a decade ago: “the seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points . . . to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’”[1] 

But we need the unstated finding—even to make more sense of that stated finding. The unstated discovery of the Harvard study is the most important finding we have about happiness and a meaningful and fulfilling life: That we are relational beings through and through. 

Intellectually speaking, this seems a pleasant and perhaps even an unchallenging fact. But the real lessons of this finding about us would come as a paradigm shift. The nature of a paradigm shift means we can’t even make sense of all of them. Our reason and our emotion can take offense at such lessons, giving rise to defensiveness and reactivity—even scorn and various forms of aggression. 

To understand that, we might consider a few examples of the kinds of things we might have to consider if we saw the Harvard study as support for the fundamental relationality of our lives.

For instance, if we understood the fundamental relationality of ourselves and our world, the fundamental relationality of being, we would realize that parents don’t merely love and care for their child, but they love and care for the whole world. A parent doesn’t produce “offspring” in some narrow or abstract sense. They produce people, and thus they produce the world we share. 

As parents plant seeds of love, diligence, generosity, and so on in their children, they create flowers and fruits of love, diligence, generosity, and so on in the future adult, and the beings around that future adult. Parents can affect whether their child will relate warmly and ethically with others all the way through their lifespan, and they can affect what their children do for a living and how well they succeed at it. 

The Harvard study makes all of this pretty clear, but it looks only at the relationships between parents and their children. When we expand our vision to think of relationality in general, we can see that the proper measure of a culture’s parenting appears in the state of the world as a whole—for which we wouldn’t “blame” them, but according to which we could collectively respond. 

Understanding relationality would also radically reorient the meaning of money. As of now, and in spite of whatever projections we wish to layer over it, money arises as abstracted and alienated relationships. 

Money isn’t “energy,” nor is it a value-neutral “medium of exchange”. Money could function as a medium of exchange—but not a value-free one. However, that’s not at issue, because, in the system of the dominant culture, money has become the intention of the exchange, not a mere facilitator of the exchange. We should find that shocking, because it indicates a profound confusion (or delusion) in our understanding of relationality—and no such delusion comes without terrible consequences, which we already see everywhere around us. 

We orient our culture not toward the production of people, ecologies, sacred values, and the world we share. Instead, we orient our culture toward the production of profit, power, and “stuff”. Profit comes first. Money sits at the top of the hierarchy, and as money and things become more dominant, beings, ecologies, and relationality (the three go totally together) all suffer. We shift from being more to having more. 

The abstract and alienated nature of money in our current context appears clearly in its production, which happens deus ex machina—the god in the machine that adds zeros to create more money. We have no concrete relationships, no flesh and blood, no living ecologies shaping this process. Money just gets produced ex nihilo, by the fiat of the invisible hand of capitalism (the invisible hand does nothing more than to push us toward more money). 

Fundamentally, capitalism has to do with living at a distance from our own body, our own heart, mind, and world. Money facilitates spooky action in a mirage of distance. 

Money, if we make use of it at all, should be about relationships. It should empower our relational dancing with each other and with the natural world (an ethical fact that would likely limit its use and scope). Money should ultimately come down to relationality, and the promises we make to each other—the responsibilities that go with “rights”. 

Importantly, promises can be sincerely and respectfully renegotiated. In a culture that educates for character, we would never see this in terms of the disingenuous moralizing of debt (our current regime), but would respect that we are all lived by powers we pretend to understand, and we can help each other let the powers of wisdom, love, and beauty live themselves through us. 

The Harvard study could get us to rethink money, debt, and the economy in general. Alas, it will not do so without the input of more skillful philosophical thinking and creativity. 

We can go a little further along these lines: If we understood the lessons of relationality in the Harvard study, and if we brought that insight together with other available research, we would finally recon with the ancient spiritual truth that money cannot buy us love or happiness, and we would do something about the fact that we have created a world in which poverty can buy us a lot of misery, and can put tremendous strain on our practice of love. A mature culture wouldn’t tolerate such a situation, especially when it accepted that success in life has more to do with love than anything we might imagine as blamable on the one we choose to view as a failure. 

Another example: We would likely develop a notion of “relational style,” a notion that includes but transcends the currently popular “attachment theory”. Deepening our relational sensitivity would lead us to understand and eventually wonderstand our thinking, speaking, and action in the world as primarily relational. That would make even our values relational, which would lead us to ask, “What is most important in my relationship with the Cosmos? What do I want to relate with—because it will constitute me?” Here we fall into errors of language, and perhaps we would even see the Indo-European languages evolve in the direction of process and relationality, as we find in languages like Blackfoot and Mohawk. 

And here’s an exceptionally important example of what we would do if we understood the nature of relationality more fully, as illustrated in the Harvard study: We would begin reimagining our cities and towns to feature far more biodiversity and biomass—trees, birds, pollinators, grasses, waters, shrubs, and so on. We would re-envision and reorganize cities and towns so they become 70-80% “green space,” including ecologies for solitude and for social gathering. 

This goes together with a whole host of things we would do if we understood the nature of relationality. For instance, we would recognize that we don’t mine minerals or extract fossil fuels, but we actually mine and extract interwovenness—we mine and extract what we are. That realization calls for a revolution in how we continue human culture, which means how we continue the interwovenness of the world. 

We would focus a lot more community effort on replenishing watersheds, reregulating hydrological cycles, reducing pollution, and protecting the beings who live with and take care of our waters. We all need access to clean water—a notion that seems ridiculously obvious, until a culture has so misunderstood relationality that it poisons and misuses its own waters. And we would likewise practice replenishing our mental and physical energies, reregulating our sleep cycles, reducing toxins in our minds and bodies, and in general cultivating positivity, joy, love, warmth of heart, gratitude, cooperation, and mutual illumination, mutual liberation. 

We can think of this in many ways. For a kind of basic perspective, let’s assume something reasonable—that George Vaillant was correct to say that the millions of dollars and countless hours of work amount to one thing: “Happiness is love. Full stop.” We then need to understand the nature of love. If that nature accords with the rest of the Harvard study findings, and with finds from other branches of science as well as from the wisdom traditions, then we must conclude that the nature of love is relationality. We thus arrive at the ecology of love, and its inescapable corollary: the love of ecology. 

We encounter here one of the major drawbacks of the study: Because the researchers don’t seem to be aware that they are verifying our relational nature, they fail to make connections to Nature, fail to highlight and honor the ecology of love and the love of ecology a truly good life demands. The nature of Nature is the very relationality and interwovenness that comes through in the Harvard study data—the true wealth of nations, our true abundance. 

But of 36 instances of the word “nature” in The Good Life, not a single one refers to the natural world (instead, it refers to things like “human nature” or “the nature of social media”). This functional absence of the ecologies we depend on—and which educate (nourish), and thereby strengthen, broaden, and deepen our relational skill—takes the danger out of the findings, taming them and thereby taming us. 

This taming may seem innocent, but it puts us and the world we share at risk. The conventional analysis (what the study even allows us to know) perpetuates our ignorance about our relational nature, and about the fact that our relational nature makes us ecological beings—making our highest values ecological or relational too. 

Whatever the authors’ intentions, it’s quite easy in the present context to read The Good Life as a feel-good book about things we can do to self-soothe in the midst of a catastrophe. The book runs the risk of fragmenting our understanding of living a good life—reducing it, abstracting it, and failing to help us turn toward the kind of dangerous wisdom our world rather desperately needs us to work with. 

The Harvard study, like a lot of dominant culture science, thus obscures our fuller nature, including our need for ecological awareness (we could even say ecosensual awareness, or a sense of the sacred in the world and a reverence and gratitude for life) and vitalizing relationships with Nature and non-human beings. It obscures our need for creative, vitalizing, wise, loving, beautiful, sacred relationality, and the practices and ceremonies, the rituals and rites that would make us more skillful and graceful as the relational beings we already are. 

By perpetuating our ignorance and by obscuring truths we very much need to hear, the study risks sending us further down the wrong path—a path we already find nigh impossible to leave, even as we see its terrible consequences. We can’t enjoy a truly good life when we have a limited vision of what we are, what we’re capable of, and what the world demands of us. 

We need the wisdom traditions to help make the promise of the Harvard study a reality—not just the promise of the findings as reported. We cannot overstate the importance of keeping in mind that even the reported findings require the wisdom traditions to make them optimally accessible for us. How do we love our children in such a way that they would carry with them the blessings of “the Cherished” that Vaillant, Waldinger, and Schultz outline? And how do we practice our lives in such a way that, even if we must count ourselves among “the Loveless,” we can still find true peace, happiness, and success in our lives—considered in the most holistic way? 

However, we further cannot overstate the importance of keeping in mind that many of those findings can make us feel warm and fuzzy. But what matters more is everything left mostly at the margins, and even the things left completely out. 

The Harvard study tells us that some people trapped in “The Matrix” experience more suffering than others, and that, even within “The Matrix,” a sense of relative happiness and contentment remains possible. The study fails to tell us that we could (and perhaps should) exit “The Matrix” altogether, realizing a level of meaning, fulfillment, and joy, a level of wisdom, love, and beauty, that can only arise when we achieve this exit out of delusion. 

If we need a headline from this Harvard study, we should have a headline that rings out the Good News, the Gospel of Love. Perhaps it should go like this: Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations: Our Interwovenness. Or perhaps like this: World Peace, Meaningful Life, True Happiness Possible, Study Finds—Just Don’t Look for It in the System We Have, Which Is Still Headed for Catastrophe. That’s a big headline. More than 140 characters (with spaces). We can make an exception and have the headline properly brimming with honesty and promise. 

Then we need the all of the clarifications above, perhaps beginning with this key issue: Love is a trainable skill—one the wisdom traditions know how to train, far more effectively than our sciences do (leave it to science and we will have McLove to add to our McMindfulness)—and it’s crucial for our individual, cultural, and planetary well-being and flourishing. Love is basic to what we are, as relational/ecological beings, so we have both a natural capacity for skillful relationality, and the ability to learn ever more inspired realizations of that natural capacity. 

Love is relational—like the Cosmos itself. It’s not an object we can hand over to someone. That’s why some wisdom traditions teach like this: In giving a gift, there is no giver, no receiver, no gift given. 

In practical terms, when we try to offer love and support to someone, they actually have to have the capacity to receive it—and many of us have encountered people who at first demonstrate a lack of skill in doing that. What we offer thus depends on the one to whom we offer it, as well as depending on us and our entire practice of life. 

Love depends on my practice in offering it, and your practice in receiving it. It only exists in the moment, as a function of a dynamic ecology of mind—a flower that bursts into bloom, and then fades. We have the capacity to conjure this blooming again, and again, and again, and again. In some cases, it becomes more subtle and profound each time, deepening, expanding into the whole Cosmos. Indeed, each moment of love is the Universe.

[1] See: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/thanks-mom/309287/

And: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/