Do you want a happy, healthy, long life?

It’s amazingly unsurprising how this lines up with what Jesus commanded us.

Excellent article via Eric J. Swanson » What makes for a happy and healthy life?.

For over 75 years (yes you read that right) Harvard University has been tracking and studying the lives of 724 men from two different control groups. The first group was from among the best and brightest—a group of sophomore men at Harvard. The second group was from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, chosen specifically from the “most troubled and disadvantaged families…most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water.” They wanted to discover “What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life?” Known as the Grant Study, it is the longest longitudinal study of men—following the lives of men beginning at age 18 to well into their 90s. The results of the study are contained in the 2014 book, The Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.

The authors of the study created what they called the “Decathalon of Flourishing”-a list of ten accomplishments, “which included career success and professional prominence, mental and physical health, a good marriage, supportive friendships, closeness to one’s children, the ability to enjoy work, love, and play, and a subjective level of happiness and measured the level to which each man in the study had achieved these events between the ages 65-80.”

So what did they learn? Read more…