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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