Abstract- 20200201- 18

What Makes a Good Life? Lessons on Happiness

An EcoChi Vital Abstract

This talk was presented at an official TED Conference in November 2015 in Brookline Massachusetts, and was posted on YouTube Jan 25, 2016 under “featured best talks and performances”, speaker: psychiatrist Robert Waldinger.

What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to put your investment into your best future life, where would you put your energy? There was a recent survey of Millennials asking them about their life goals and 80% of them said a major life goal was for them to get rich and another 50% of those same young adults said another major life goal was to become famous. Constantly told to lean into work, to push harder and achieve more and we are given the impression that these are the things we need to go after 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 hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life and sometimes memory is downright creative. 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 to old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy? 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 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. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90's. We don't just send them questionnaires. We interview them in their living rooms, we get their medical records from their doctors, we scan their brains, we talk to their children, videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns. About a decade ago we finally asked, what are the lessons that come from life? What are the lessons I learned about wealth or fame or working harder and harder? The clearest message that we got from this 75-year study is that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Three big lessons about relationships. The first: social connections are really good for us and the loneliness kills. The second big lesson that we learned: it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters. We have followed our men all the way into their 80s to see if we can predict a happy healthy octogenarian when we gather everything, we knew about them at age 50. It wasn't their middle-aged cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The third big lesson: is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies they protect our brains. I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain more than a century ago he was looking back on his life. “There isn't time so brief as life. For bickering’s, apologies, heart-burnings, calling to account. There is only time for loving and but an instant so to speak. For that, the good life is built with good relationships.”