The Good Life (2)

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        The Good Life (2)
        Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost i mpossible 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 our lives. And sometimes memory was 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. And 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 Studyof Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life, that’s ever done. For 75 years, we’ve tracked 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 this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects of this kind fallapart 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 combination of luck and persistence of several gene rations of researchers, this study has survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participat ing in the study, most of them in their nineties. And we are now beginning to study themore than 2000 children of these men. And I’m the 4th direc tor of the study. BY --- Dr. Robert Waldinger


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