What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness | Robert Waldinger | TED Talks

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[Robert Waldinger] What keeps us health and happy as we go through life?

If you were gonna invest now, in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy?

There was a recent survey of Millennial's, asking them what their most important life goals were.

Over 80% said that a major life goal for them was to get rich.

And another 50% of those same young adults, said that another major life goal was to become famous.

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 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, hind sight is anything but 20/20.

We forget vast amounts of what happens in life.

And sometimes memory is downright creative.

But what if we could watch entire lives, as they unfold through out 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 are 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 dropout of the study, or funding for the research dries up.

Or the researchers get distracted or they die, and no body moves the ball further down the field.

But through a combination of lucky 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 90's.

And we are now beginning to study more than 2,000 children of these men. And I am 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. They all finished college during WWII, and then most went off to serve in the war.

And the second group that we 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 Boston in 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 interviewed their parents. And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life.

They became factory workers, and lawyers, and brick layers, and doctors.

One President of the United States.

Some developed alcoholism, some 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.