Transcript

What Makes a Happy Life? / Mitl lehet boldog az élet? | Robert Waldinger | TEDxDunapart

[Music] what actually are the conditions that help us be happy and healthy as we go through life for the last century we have measured our well-being as nations as a planet based on one particular measure gross domestic product if we were getting wealthier if our economies were growing we were thriving we were happier but people began to notice about 20 years ago that all of our countries had gotten wealthier as Anna has shown us but that in fact as a species we have gotten less happy so people began to take the study of happiness and well-being much more seriously and now the United Nations prepares a report every year from surveys all over the world asking people what are the things that you need in your life to make you feel like your life has meaning and that you are happy and yes it turns out that making sure you have enough money to take care of the basic needs for yourself and your family that's very important for happiness but once you get beyond taking care of your basic needs the more your income Rises happiness Rises hardly at all so if it's not our gross domestic product what are the things that people say all over the world and they say them with remarkable uniformity they talk about social support believing that they have the support of their neighbors and their society they talk about the belief that they can live a healthy life and that they can get the health care they need for themselves and their children that they have the freedom to make the most important life choices for themselves and everybody all over the world talks about wanting to have opportunities to be generous not just with money but with their energy being able to volunteer and give of their town to other people and finally trust the absence of corruption certainly in our governments but also trust in each other people want to be able to believe that they can trust their neighbors and that that contributes to a healthy life so these are the things that people report in almost every culture in the world what is it that young people think that they're going to need as they go through life we had a survey in the United States about six years ago that asked Millennials people in their 20s what are your most important life goals and over 80% of those young adults said that the most important thing for them in life was going to be to get rich and over half of those same young adults said that their second major life goal was going to be to become famous and finally most of them said that it was very important that they achieve more and more and more at work and that these were the things that were going to lead them to feel like they had led happy lives so what's responsible through this disconnect between what people tell us all over the world about what really contributes to happiness and what people starting out in life think they're going to need well a lot of this has to do with all the messages that come at us all day long about what we should value about what we should care about the idea that the good life gets defined for us through all these media messages and not so much by us so think about it how many of you use social media Facebook Instagram WeChat how many yeah almost all of us do so this is a typical photo right the kind of photo that we put up showing people about our lives if you were coming from outer space and you didn't know anything about human beings and you wanted to know you about human life if your only source of information were Facebook and Instagram you would believe that we were always at a party or we were always on a beautiful beach somewhere and even though we know that this isn't all there is to life it's very difficult to see this and not to believe that somehow we're missing out we're always comparing our insides to other people's outsides I'm always comparing my insides which include sometimes great joy but sometimes waking up in the morning feeling lost and confused feeling sad feeling like I don't know what I'm doing with my life with other people's outsides those curated lives that we present to each other those extraordinary events that Anna was talking about but on the positive side those parties and beautiful beaches that's not mostly our lives so how do we actually learn about real life about what life is like for most of us well most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to report on the past to remember but as we know our memories are full of inaccuracies and gaps and sometimes we make things up the American writer Mark Twain wrote some of the worst things in my life never happened because he knew that we tend to create the past so what I'm gonna tell you about today is this study that is exceedingly rare which is a study that's been going for 80 years following the same people from the time they were children or teenagers all the way into old age 724 people who have been followed now into their 90's for those who are still living and who are still participating with us the Harvard study of adult development is as far as we know the longest study of same people throughout life that has ever been done it began with two groups of young men one was a group of Harvard College students 19 years old who were chosen by their Dean's as being among the best and the brightest and the other was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and boys who families were known to social service agencies for having a great deal of trouble mental illness domestic violence physical illness extreme poverty now all of these 724 people were male that they were all white because in the city of Boston in 1938 when the study began it was 97 percent Caucasian but because they were all male we have made every effort now to bring women in both the wives of these men and now their children who are half women and everything that I present today includes research findings that have been corroborated in studies with women as well as with men because we know that studying only white males is not the way to learn about real life but studying about these men has been an extraordinary source of information so we initially brought them in and interviewed them and did physical exams and we talked to their parents and then all of these men grew up and went into all different professions factory workers lawyers doctors bricklayers one president of the United States John F Kennedy was part of this group and many other people who led wonderful ordinary lives and finally we followed people into retirement so we studied their mental health their physical health their work lives their close relationships and their community relationships the Harvard men were old enough to go to serve in World War so we studied their World War two experiences and as they got older we studied Aging and retirement and we didn't just ask them to remember the past although we did ask them to fill out questionnaires about their lives every two years but we got their medical records from their doctors we brought their wives in and asked them to talk about their deepest concerns with their wives and we videotaped them we drew their blood we scanned their brains and some of these men even donated their brains to us after they died so what did we learn well there were over 200 papers generated from this study and over 20 books and one finding kept emerging one result that we didn't believe when we first saw and the finding was this that the people who stayed the happiest and the healthiest as they went through their adult lives were the people who were more connected to other people and that means people who saw more people every day who spent more time socializing with other people and not just seeing more people having more people in your life but having warm close relationships so the people who felt securely connected to at least one other person that somebody would be there if they were really sick or scared or in trouble those were the people who seemed to stay the healthiest what we mean by that is that they developed the diseases of aging less soon they were less likely to get diabetes heart disease arthritis that their brains didn't decline as fast as they grew old compared with younger people and we thought how could this be so now we are trying to understand all the mechanisms by which the quality of our relationships actually gets into our bodies and our brains but this finding has been corroborated by other research groups all over the world one of the things we find is that the experience of loneliness is very bad for our health that that experience of being less can to others then you want to be turns out to bring physical decline cognitive decline and of course make us less happy and in the United States one in four people reports that they are less connected to other people than they want to be one of the things we get to look at when we ask people to report about their lives time after time after time is what happens to relationships over time so marriage for example how satisfied we are in our marriage is at its highest we're the most satisfied when we first begin with our partners no surprise and then when our first child is born marital satisfaction goes down but then when the last child leaves home and moves out marital satisfaction goes up again and then in the United States only if your children come back to live at home does marital satisfaction go down again but the other thing that we learn about these relationships our close relationships our friendships is that you don't have to be smooth all the time arguing is not a problem that really what we need in our relationships is a bedrock of affection and respect and as long as that is there doesn't matter if you argue so the other thing we can learn about is what makes us happiest so we're constantly given these messages that we will be happier if we buy things a wonderful car or a beautiful TV but it turns out that the best things in life are not things that when we actually use our resources to get new experiences rather than new material objects we're happier for longer and we actually get a bigger boost in happiness so why is that well actually when we buy things material things lend themselves to comparing so if I buy a big flat-screen TV I bring it home I'm all excited but then I go to my neighbor's house and he's got a bigger flat-screen TV and I tend to compare myself makes me less happy but new experiences bring us into contact with new people this was a on a family trip that my wife and my sons and I went to in Alaska with people we had never met before but also these new experiences bring us into new kinds of relationships with the people we love and that people were close to with our friends and our family so I've told you about the importance of relationships now I'm going to give you some bad news which is that we have stopped investing in relationships so Robert Putnam was a sociologist is a sociologist in the United States who writes about what he calls the decline in social capital how much are we investing in each other how much do we go out in the evening how much do we attend church or synagogue or mosque how much do we volunteer in our communities and what he found was that in the 1950s in the United States and soon thereafter in Europe and other parts of the world people stopped stopped seeing friends stopped going out stopped having family dinners and what did that coincide with in the United States in the 1950s what wonderful new invention entered into all of our houses can you guess television so we all stopped going out and we sat in our living rooms and watched these screens so then Robert Putnam went back in the late 90s and the early 2000s and he found that again our investment in our communities had gone down further by 25% for example in several of these parameters actually more than half in joining clubs and civic organizations down by a third in family dinners which are so important for child development and family cohesion in 1983 when Putnam asked Americans do you have anybody that you can confide in 12% said there was no one in the world they could talk to about personal matters and in 2003 that had more than - one in four people saying there was no one they could confined him so what do we do with this decline in investment in each other well this next wave was fueled by these wonderful screens that we are so attached to and what happens is that our closest relationships are easy to neglect when we are all on our phones and on our laptops and on our tablets the other thing we talked about is how worried we are about our children and what these screens are doing to our children but in fact what are they doing to us so how do we lean into relationships how do we change this trend that is dragging us all away from investing in each other so now I'd like to bring a quote from one of my Zen teachers who wrote attention is the most basic form of love attention is the most basic form of love if you think about it our undivided attention is the most precious thing that we have to give each other and that's something you can decide to do in any moment you can decide to pay undivided attention to each other when you're out on the break rather than everyone being on their phones so our undivided attention we can give during date nights with spouses to liven up relationships that have been going on too long we can give our undivided attention to each other at family dinners where we make sure we make time to eat together we can volunteer in our communities all of these are ways to give what our most precious resource to each other so my take-home messages are simple that science tells us that human connection is a major source not just of happiness but of our health that technology has the power to isolate us just as it has the power to connect us and we need to learn more about how these things work and that our lives can be structured to actively combat isolation but that it's something we have to work at we have actually been trying to bring these findings from our lifespan research out into places where people can use this content to invest more in each other and in themselves so I'd like to close with a quote from one of my favorite writers Maya Angelou who wrote my mission in life is not merely to survive but to thrive and to do so with some passion some compassion some humor and some style so investing in each other is something we can do to fulfill this mission we can do it right now thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you [Music]