What Will Make You Happy?

It can be surprisingly hard to know what will make us happy. To take a simple example: Think about the last time you ordered a steak, only to immediately regret not having gone with the chicken. To take a more serious one: Think about a time when you set yourself a serious life goal, and accomplished it, only to realize that you weren’t as fulfilled and satisfied as you’d long imagined.

There are many ways to work around this difficulty, but psychologists at Harvard have been hard at work for nearly 80 years working on one of the most interesting approaches to this question.

The Grant Study, one of the longest running psychological studies in history, followed nearly 300 men from their freshman year of college until their death. The results are summarized by its last director here, and are really quite moving. Readers of the study (or books summarizing it) can learn quite a lot by observing patterns in lives that we can see to be generally happy or generally unhappy.

Today, Meghan will refocus discussion on a question that arose on day one: what is your ultimate goal. We’ll use the tools we’ve learned in the past few weeks to reflect more deeply on our answers. And you’ll be introduced to different philosophers who answer this question in importantly different ways.

2 minutes