Blood samples, brain scans, and handwritten notes from mostly deceased men can be found in a filing cabinet somewhere in the Harvard Medical School archives. When they were teenagers, they were chosen for a study that very few people believed would be so important. It began in 1938, before the Second World War, before television, and before the term “wellness” was coined. The goal of the study was to determine what distinguishes successful lives from unsuccessful ones. Simply put, they had no idea that the question would still be raised 75 years later.
Formally known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, it tracked two distinct groups. 268 Harvard sophomores from the 1939–1944 classes were among them. The other group consisted of 456 boys from some of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, some of whom were raised without indoor plumbing. Researchers followed up every two years. Surveys, interviews, blood tests, and MRI scans come next. One of the participants went on to become US president. Most didn’t even come close to becoming well-known. It turns out that’s kind of the point.
The study’s current director, Robert Waldinger, has stated that the most obvious conclusion after all this time is almost embarrassingly straightforward: happy and healthy relationships keep people happy. Not money. not a professional success. Really not even good genes. Spending 75 years and countless research dollars to validate what your grandmother could have told you for free is an odd experience. Hearing it supported by decades of cardiovascular data and cognitive testing, as opposed to a fortune cookie, is different.
The study’s conclusion alone is not what makes it compelling. It’s the surface beneath it. By conventional standards, one participant—who would later write about the study under the pseudonym Leo—had everything: an Ivy League education, financial stability, and professional success. In addition, he was among the most lonely men in the study; he was estranged from his wife and kids and fluctuated between relationships without truly settling on one. Decades later, men with significantly lower incomes but stronger, more stable relationships with others appeared to have better health outcomes, sharper memories, and fewer signs of deterioration.
It’s difficult to ignore how severely this goes against the instincts that most of us were brought up with. The formula was to work harder, make more money, and climb higher. According to the Harvard data, the formula was never complete. There is a feeling that connection acts more like a subdued kind of medication, administered over the course of a lifetime in small, unremarkable conversations, whereas loneliness acts more like a slow-acting toxin.
All of this does not imply that money is unimportant, and the researchers do not pretend that it is. Relationship sustainability is obviously hampered by financial strain. However, the depth of a person’s closest relationships continued to predict happiness year after year, but after a certain threshold, higher income ceased to do so.
There are limits to the study. Almost all of its initial participants were white men, which is a small sample of people from which generalizations can be made. The project’s main conclusions are still shaped by the original decades of data, but later stages brought in a more diverse group of about 1,700 people, which has been helpful.
Perhaps the true lesson found in those Harvard archives is that. It’s neither a five-step plan nor a productivity hack. It’s just a long, slow confirmation that the people we make an effort to stay close to might be more important than nearly everything else we pursue.
