What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life?
If you were going to invest now
in your best future self,
where would you put your time
and your energy?
There was a recent survey of Millenials
asking them what their most important
life goals were,
and over 80% said that the major life goal for them
was to get rich.
And another 50% of the same young adults
said that another major life goal was
to become famous.
And we're constantly told to lean into work
to push harder and achieve more.
We're given the impression that these are the things
that we go after in order to have a good life
Pictures of entire lifes, 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.
Mark Twain understood this.
He's quoted as saying,
"Some of the worst things in my life never happened."
(Laughter)
And research shows us that we actually remember the past more positively
as we get older.
I'm reminded of a bumper sticker that says,
"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."
(laughter)
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?
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.
Studies like this are exceedingly rare.
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.
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.
The were from what Tom Brokaw has called "the greatest generation".
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 water.
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 life.
They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors,
one President of the United States.
Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia.
Some climbed the social ladder
from the bottom all the way to the very top,
and some made that journey in the opposite direction.
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 of questions about their lives.
Many of the inner city Boston men ask us,
"Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting."
The Harvard men never ask that question.
(Laughter)
To get the clearest picture of these lives,
we don't just send them questionnaires.
We interview them in their living rooms.
We get their medical records from their doctors.
We draw their blood, we scan their brains,
we talk to their children.
We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns.
And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives
if they would join us as members of the study,
many of the women said, "You know, it's about time."
(Laughter)
So what have we learned?
What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages
of information that we've generated
on these lives?
Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder.
The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this:
Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.
We've learned three big lessons about relationships.
The first is that social connections are really good for us,
and that loneliness kills.
It turns out that people who are more socially connected
to family, to friends, to community,
are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer
than people who are less well connected.
And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic.
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others
find that they are less happy,
their health declines earlier in midlife,
their brain functioning declines sooner
and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.
And the sad fact is that at any given time,
more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely.
And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd
and you can be lonely in a marriage,
so the second big lesson that we learned
is that 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.
It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health.
High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection,
turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced.
And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.
Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s,
we wanted to look back at them at midlife
and to see if we could predict
who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian
and who wasn't.
And when we gathered together everything we knew about them
at age 50,
it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels
that predicted how they were going to grow old