What makes a good life? How important are relationships in helping us lead happy and meaningful lives?
Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED Talk about the Harvard study “What makes a good life?” has been viewed more than 42 million times and is one of the 10 most watched TED Talks ever. He is co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
ROBERT WALDINGER
It's a study of adult lifespan development and when it was started in 1938, it was actually radical to study normal development for two reasons. One is that most of what had been studied was about what goes wrong in development, which we still do because we want to try to help people who are having developmental problems.
So that makes a lot of sense, but to study what goes right in development, that was unheard of. The other thing is that for a long time, we certainly thought about children as developing because you can watch children change every day. That change happens so fast, but many people thought that once you got to be in your 20s, you were kind of done with development. You found a partner, you found a line of work, you were set with regard to your personality, and that was it, then you just lived your life.
And of course, now we understand that there's so much that changes and develops through the course of adult life, but my predecessors (I'm the fourth director) were really, insightful in their understanding of how much there was to learn about all the changes that happen across the adult lifespan.
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One of the big differences I've noticed talking with people from more communally oriented cultures is that American culture has a strong emphasis on the individual on individual happiness, individual achievement on individual self-expression. And there are other cultures where the community, the family, and the neighborhood where they live and the well-being of others are paramount and are the first thing they think about. The most exemplary instance of that is in Bhutan, where they can't even propose a law for the legislature to consider unless they have a full section describing the effect on the community of any given law, the effect on the well-being of the whole population. So nothing is about the individual. It's all about the collective.
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This generation will say to us quite clearly "past generations have messed everything up." And now we're left with the devastating consequences. They're angry, and it's very difficult. How do you get human beings to invest in something that pays off 20 or 50 years down the road? And that's the difficulty. It's not clear that we as humans are capable of really tackling a problem that requires so much long-term thinking. Politicians want results within the same fiscal year, right? And so what do we do with things like climate change or investing in early childhood development?
Again, the payoffs are enormous, but they happen 20 years down the line. So I think that my advice to all of us is to set up structures that are going to last and support these long-term goals. So not just one government that commits itself to slowing climate change, like the current US government. Structure organizations where that won't change over 20, 30, 50 years. How could we do that? Because otherwise, we're just going to have alternating governments with alternating sets of priorities. And an inadequate response to these bigger, longer-term problems.
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One of the clearest things that we find in studying all of these lives is we know that every life has hardship, every life has sorrow, and nobody's happy all the time. Doesn't matter how privileged you are, how rich, how famous, nobody's happy all the time.
And that's important to name because we can sometimes give each other the mistaken impression that if you just do all the right things, you'll be happy. So if you look at somebody else's social media feeds, they're not posting their photos of when they feel miserable or hungover. They're posting their photos of when they've been at a good party or on a beautiful beach. And so we can give each other the impression that everybody else is living their best life and they're happy all the time. And it's just me who has ups and downs. And what we find and what we put in the book through these life stories...we put in life stories, not of happy endings, but of real stories of ups and downs and challenges and joys as well.
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With trauma, you don't ever overcome it completely as we're all the product of all of our experiences. So it's a matter of finding pathways to make things better rather than making past experiences disappear. Past traumas don't ever go away. And in some ways, we know that past traumas can be a source of growth and strength. So it's really a question of how do we help people? So all the people who are being traumatized now in the many wars going on around the world, I mean, this is such a terrible legacy in terms of how much damage is being done and how much healing would need to be done to put people on track for reasonable lives. And it's one of the reasons why trauma is so devastating for children because it gives children the sense that the world isn't safe, people can't be relied on, and they carry that with them all the way into adulthood.
So there's no simple answer, and what we really want to do is minimize trauma as much as we can around the world. And that's where everything that's going on now is heartbreaking. When we think about how many people in the world, children and adults, are being indelibly scarred by what's happening to them.
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There are some people who thrive and can find happiness, even in terrible situations. Other people find life to be miserable and feel themselves to be victims, even in situations that many of us would see as privileged. So there's a huge spectrum in terms of the perspective one has on your own life and your own circumstances, which just means that there's tremendous variation in the effects of trauma. There's tremendous variation in the effects of healthy developmental circumstances. Some people develop in wonderful situations, and they still have terrible lives. They become drug addicted, they become criminals. There's so much variation in the life paths that we take because the influences on us, both biological and social, are so great and so varied. That's what studying all these lives teaches us.
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Well, every study that. follows people over time has to deal with that interesting issue of the historical cohort effect. So our original participants were children during the Great Depression, and the Harvard undergraduate group served in World War II. And all of these were important shapers of life that are different from the big global events shaping the people growing up now. And so we always have to take that into account when we study any group. What are the influences that are very particular to that historical period, and what are influences and developmental processes that are common to all of us, no matter when we grow up?
Having information can make some people happy but for some having information can be frightening, too. There are people who have great suspicion of science, academia and education. So there are all kinds of ways to be in the world and there are all kinds of things that people value. Some of our participants didn't value information that much. They valued other things. And I think we don't understand the effects of the digital revolution on human development, although there's good research now and we're beginning to find out more information in and of itself that doesn't seem to predict whether you're going to be happy or less happy.
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Certainly, the natural world has wonderful benefits. First of all, we are part of the natural world. I'm not separate from the world. And it's that thinking about us as humans as being separate from the world that's gotten us into so much trouble. Being in nature often reminds us that I'm part of this enormous, magnificent whole, and that can inspire more activity to save the planet. But, you know, I'm a Zen practitioner and you can appreciate what's here right now, anywhere, including in a concrete jungle. You can even find amazing things to discover on a concrete sidewalk if you just stop and look. So there are a lot of ways that we can take ourselves off of the automatic pilot which our minds are on a lot of the time, and really come into presence. Certainly, in nature, it's wonderfully beneficial, but even when we're not out in a beautiful setting, we can do that.
