“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
In my high school graduation book, I remember answering this question. With the whole world in front of me, heading off to college, trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. Gathering advice from different people, reading widely, experiencing what high school offered me, and looking ahead to the future. I wrote, “I want to be happy.”
Decades later, I’m still trying to figure out what that means.
Robert Waldinger is a Harvard psychiatrist that runs the longest continuing study on health. He’s the fourth director of the program that has been running more than 75 years. Men were recruited as teens in the 1940’s. Every couple years, these men are still asked to complete a voluntary series of questions and tests. Even their families are interviewed. One of the many parameters that researchers now explore is happiness.
What are your life’s goals?
In youth, most will answer money, fame, and achievement.
But will these make a good life? Will money, fame, and achievement make us happy?
As the years of wisdom catch up with us, the answer to the question changes. The long-term Harvard study shows a correlation between health and happiness. However, this still begs the question that I’ve been asking myself since I graduated high school: What makes you happy?
The Harvard study reveals that supportive relationships and social connections improve health and wellbeing. In the opposite direction, loneliness negatively affects our health.
How will you create your own good life?
Robert Waldinger encourages us to update our goals and our daily decisions to nurture social connections. Perhaps we can replace screen time with a phone call to reconnect with a friend. Perhaps we can actively nurture and strengthen the health of current relationships with partners and friends. Perhaps with each major life shift, we should consciously recruit supportive social connections. How will my friends change from school to work to retirement? Perhaps wealth, fame, and status are not the only things we need to be happy. Perhaps we as humans need connection… and perhaps there is even more to this equation for happiness…. The study continues…
Watch the TED Talk by Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness
Check out the book
