A Harvard study began in 1937 has tracked 268 males (all Harvard students when the study began) to find out, put simply, what makes people happy. The study is intensely detailed with everything from one-on-one interviews to obscure measurements like the “hanging length of the scrotum.”

Joshua Wolf Shenk is, if we believe him, the first person to be given access to the records of the study and what it has revealed. Much of it is counterintuitive.

The study has yielded some additional subtle surprises. Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by 63. More broadly, pessimists seemed to suffer physically in comparison with optimists, perhaps because they’re less likely to connect with others or care for themselves.

Maybe most interesting are the excerpts from case files included in the article, some of which read like dystopian short stories about the privileged and East Coast elites.

In all Vaillant’s literature—and, by agreement, in this essay, too—the Grant Study men remain anonymous. (Even the numbers on the case studies have been changed.) A handful have publicly identified themselves—including Ben Bradlee, the longtime editor of The Washington Post, who opened his memoir, A Good Life, with his first trip to the study office. John F. Kennedy was a Grant Study man, too, though his files were long ago withdrawn from the study office and sealed until 2040. Ironically, it was the notation of that seal in the archive that allowed me to confirm JFK’s involvement, which has not been recognized publicly before now.

Just as interesting is the man who has been the long-time patron of the study, George Vaillant.

Indeed, the lives themselves—dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting—resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. The physical material—wispy sheets from carbon copies; ink from fountain pens—has a texture. You can hear the men’s voices, not only in their answers, but in their silences, as they stride through time both personal (masturbation reports give way to reports on children; career plans give way to retirement plans) and historical (did they vote for Dewey or Truman?; “What do you think about today’s student protesters, drug users, hippies, etc.?”). Secrets come out. One man did not acknowledge to himself until he reached his late 70s that he was gay. With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

George Vaillant has not been just the principal reader of these novels. To a large extent, he is the author. He framed most of the questions; he conducted most of the interviews, which exist, not in recordings or transcripts, but only in his notes and interpretations. To explain the study, I needed to understand him, and how the themes from his life circled back to inform his work (and vice versa).

“What Makes Us Happy?” is a bit long, but worth the time.