Adaptation to Life

I first became aware of the Grant Study when the book by George Vaillant entitled 'Adaptation to Life' was published.  The study is a project that started in 1938.  They interviewed 268 Harvard freshmen and then proceeded to follow them longitudinally for years to come.  They looked at all sorts of factors that they thought might be associated with a successful life, including physical features, family relationships, financial resources, intelligence, drinking habits, personality traits, and a host of other factors.  They defined a successful life in a number of different ways.  They tried to include various aspects of 'success'. including happiness, building and sustaining a successful marriage and friendships, fame and fortune, and so on.  True, this is a very select sample, and true it is only men, but there have been some very interesting lessons learned.  There have been various publications over the years but now that the project is 75 years old, it might be coming to an end.

 

Vaillant has shepherded the project over the past several decades and has published a book "Triumphs of Experience" to delineate the major findings of the study--the condensed version of which were published in 'The Atlantic' and the powerful correlation between the warmth of your relationships and your health and happiness in old age--so live generously. Some of the other outcomes include the following:

 

Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter. There was no significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150.

 

Aging liberals have more sex. Political ideology had no bearing on life satisfaction—but the most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an average age of 68, while the most-liberal men had active sex into their 80s.

 

Freud was right--a good relationship with your mother matters long into adulthood. Specifically:

• Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.
• Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.
• Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
• On the other hand, warm childhood relations with fathers correlated with lower rates of adult anxiety, greater enjoyment of vacations, and increased “life satisfaction” at age 75—whereas the warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on life satisfaction at 75.

Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.  Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce; it was strongly correlated  depression ); and—together with associated cigarette smoking—it was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death.