Happiness: A Lifelong Exploration

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What makes us happy? Money, work, fame? We are publishing the famous TED talk by psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, where he talks about the results of a unique 75-year study of people and their satisfaction with life, which showed that it is not achievements and gains that are important to us and our well-being, but the connection with people, mutual understanding and the quality of relationships

What makes a person happy? Wealth, fame, great achievements? We hardly consider these answers to be correct - and nevertheless we continue to live in accordance with them: we are fighting for career growth, we are striving for higher wages or an increase in income, we are trying to become more visible and popular in our field. A series of experiments and surveys confirm this. But there are other studies that suggest that such things have little effect on our happiness. In particular, the study, which will be discussed today, is perhaps the largest in its field - 724 people participated in it, and it lasted - attention! - 75 years old. It seems more than enough to follow human life in its development, to change human views and priorities. Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, the fourth leader of this long project, says:

“Since 1938 we have been studying the lives of two groups of men. At the beginning of the project, the participants in the first group were second-year students at Harvard College. They all graduated from college during World War II, and most of them went to war. The second group we studied was a group of boys from the poorest areas of Boston who were selected for the study precisely because of their belonging to the most disadvantaged and disadvantaged families in Boston in the 30s. Most of them lived in rented apartment buildings without running water.

At the beginning of the project, all the boys were interviewed. All passed medical examinations. We came to their house and talked to their parents. Then these young men became adults, each of them - with his own destiny. They became factory workers, lawyers, builders and doctors, and one even became the President of the United States. Some of them became an alcoholic. Some developed schizophrenia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom to the very top, while others traveled in the opposite direction.

The founders of the project, even in their deepest dreams, could not imagine that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling that the project is still ongoing. Every two years, our patient and dedicated staff call our members and ask if they can send them another questionnaire about their lives."

So, what conclusion did scientists come to after seven and a half decades? At first glance, it turned out to be the most commonplace - it is not achievements or acquisitions that make us happy, but good relationships (with loved ones, with friends, colleagues, children).

Yes, we can be existentially alone and lost (because that's our nature). Yes, alone we can draw strength and become stronger. Yes, it can be a guarantee of development. But happiness, precisely happiness, helps us to experience the consciousness that we have a real connection with at least one living being, that there is someone who understands our position and shares it with us.

So why can't we internalize this simple truth? Why, from generation to generation, do we focus on work, profit and achieving more? And what would happen if we could see life completely as it develops in time?

Watch Robert Waldinger's TED talk about this unique 75-year-old research project and share with us three important lessons from this research.

“The truth that good, intimate relationships contribute to our well-being is as old as the world. Why is it so difficult to assimilate and so easy to neglect? Because we are people. We prefer momentary decisions, we would get something from which our life will become better and will remain so. And relationships have no guarantees, they are complex, confusing and require constant effort, commitment to family and friends. There is no glitz or glamor in it. And there is no end. This is the work of a lifetime. In our 75-year study, the happiest retired participants were people who actively made co-workers playmates. Just like the millennial generation in that recent poll, many of our men, as they entered adulthood, sincerely believed that wealth, fame and great achievement were what they needed to live fulfilling and happy lives. But over and over again over the course of 75 years, our research has confirmed that those people who relied on family relationships, with friends, with like-minded people lived better."

Yet it is a pity that sometimes a lifetime is not enough to understand this simple and seemingly obvious truth.