7. Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness | TED Talk

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Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness | TED Talk

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00:35

What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time
and your energy? There was a recent survey of millennials¹ asking them what their
most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them
was to get rich. And another 50 percent
of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous.

00:38

(Laughter)

01:21

And we’re constantly told
to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. We’re given the impression that these
are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life. Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make
and how those choices work out for them, those pictures
are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people
to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight² is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts
of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory
is downright creative.

01:38

But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we could study people
from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people
happy and healthy?

02:10

We did that. The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study
of adult life that’s ever been done. For 75 years, we’ve tracked
the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work,
their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way
without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out.

02:59

Studies like this are exceedingly³rare. Almost all projects of this kind
fall apart within a decade because too many people
drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball
further down the field. But through a combination of luck and the persistence
of several generations of researchers, this study has survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90s. And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children of these men. And I’m the fourth director of the study.

03:35

Since 1938, we’ve tracked the lives
of two groups of men. The first group started in the study when they were sophomores
at Harvard College. They all finished college
during World War II, and then most went off
to serve in the war. And the second group that we’ve followed was a group of boys
from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were
from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s. Most lived in tenements,
many without hot and cold running water⁴.

04:18

When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were interviewed. They were given medical exams. We went to their homes
and we interviewed their parents. And then these teenagers
grew up into adults who entered all walks of life⁵. They became factory workers and lawyers
and bricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States. Some developed alcoholism.
A few developed schizophrenia⁶Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom
all the way to the very top⁷, and some made that journey
in the opposite direction.

04:44

The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be
standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that
the study still continues. Every two years, our patient
and dedicated research staff calls up our men
and asks them if we can send them yet one more set