good magazine article

If you have a half hour to kill, try THIS FASCINATING ARTICLE from the new issue of The Atlantic.

It discusses a long-term (“longitudinal”) study of a large group of male Harvard undergrads from the 1940’s, who have been studied intensively throughout their lifetimes in an attempt to study the sources of human happiness. John F. Kennedy was part of the study, it has been revealed, but his records have been sealed until 2040. It sounds as though other celebrities emerged from the group as well.

The article doesn’t really answer the question as to what the sources of human happiness are, but there are a few interesting practical nuggets.

Also, I like what the study says about how misleading a personality can be at one particular age. We all know this is true. At age 17, the teachers’ pets may be destined for dull mediocrity while the troubled rebels may be the ones with the really deep intellectual life, one that simply hasn’t found its voice yet. The same for emotional life… The apparently well-adjusted undergraduate might just be a conformist suck-up, while the more problematic character may simply need longer to develop what is actually a richer and subtler character. Oppenheimer is a textbook case of someone who presented many misleading faces at an earlier age, and who ended up something completely different from what one might have expected.

This plays right into my ontology, of course, since it points to the utter superficiality of tangible surface qualities. There may in fact be no way to figure out what people have inside at age 17 or age 20 or in some cases even age 30. The character is a certain “style” that, before maturity, hasn’t yet adopted a typical and recognizable language.

Schopenhauer also famously mentions that everyone should try to live to at least age 60, because by then the surface distortions have largely worn away and you begin to have some idea of what sorts of people you’ve been dealing with all this time. I’m still pretty far from 60, but have already experienced plenty of surprises when hearing about high school and college friends. Paths of development have not always gone as expected.