Chapter 1: What Makes a Good Life? 1 WHAT MAKES A GOOD LIFE? There isn''t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that. Mark Twain Let''s begin with a question: If you had to make one life choice, right now, to set yourself on the path to future health and happiness, what would it be? Would you choose to put more money into savings each month? To change careers? Would you decide to travel more? What single choice could best ensure that when you reach your final days and look back, you''ll feel that you''ve lived a good life? In a 2007 survey, millennials were asked about their most important life goals. Seventy-six percent said that becoming rich was their number one goal. Fifty percent said a major goal was to become famous. More than a decade later, after millennials had spent more time as adults, similar questions were asked again in a pair of surveys. Fame was now lower on the list, but the top goals again included things like making money, having a successful career, and becoming debt-free. These are common and practical goals that extend across generations and borders.
In many countries, from the time they are barely old enough to speak, children are asked what they want to be when they grow up--that is, what careers they intend to pursue. When adults meet new people, one of the first questions asked is, "What do you do?" Success in life is often measured by title, salary, and recognition of achievement, even though most of us understand that these things do not necessarily make for a happy life on their own. Those who manage to check off some or even all of the desired boxes often find themselves on the other side feeling much the same as before. Meanwhile, all day long we''re bombarded with messages about what will make us happy, about what we should want in our lives, about who is doing life "right." Ads tell us that eating this brand of yogurt will make us healthy, buying that smartphone will bring new joy to our lives, and using a special face cream will keep us young forever. Other messages are less explicit, woven into the fabric of daily living. If a friend buys a new car, we might wonder if a newer car would make our own life better. As we scroll social media feeds seeing only pictures of fantastic parties and sandy beaches, we might wonder if our own life is lacking in parties, lacking in beaches.
In our casual friendships, at work, and especially on social media, we tend to show each other idealized versions of ourselves. We present our game faces, and the comparison between what we see of each other and how we feel about ourselves leaves us with the sense that we''re missing out. As an old saying goes, We are always comparing our insides to other people''s outsides . Over time we develop the subtle but hard-to-shake feeling that our life is here , now, and the things we need for a good life are over there , or in the future. Always just out of reach. Looking at life through this lens, it''s easy to believe that the good life doesn''t really exist, or else that it''s only possible for others. Our own life, after all, rarely matches the picture we''ve created in our heads of what a good life should look like. Our own life is always too messy, too complicated to be good.
Spoiler alert: The good life is a complicated life. For everybody. The good life is joyful. and challenging. Full of love, but also pain. And it never strictly happens ; instead, the good life unfolds , through time. It is a process. It includes turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls.
And of course, the good life always ends in death. A cheery sales pitch, we know. But let''s not mince words. Life, even when it''s good, is not easy. There is simply no way to make life perfect, and if there were, then it wouldn''t be good. Why? Because a rich life--a good life--is forged from precisely the things that make it hard. This book is built on a bedrock of scientific research. At its heart is the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an extraordinary scientific endeavor that began in 1938, and against all odds is still going strong today.
Bob is the fourth director of the Study, and Marc its associate director. Radical for its time, the Study set out to understand human health by investigating not what made people sick, but what made them thrive. It has recorded the experience of its participants'' lives more or less as they were happening, from childhood troubles, to first loves, to final days. Like the lives of its participants, the Harvard Study''s road has itself been long and winding, evolving in its methods over the decades and expanding to now include three generations and more than 1,300 of the descendants of its original 724 participants. It continues to evolve and expand today, and is the longest in-depth longitudinal study of human life ever done. But no single study, no matter how rich, is enough to permit broad claims about human life. So while this book stands directly on the foundation of the Harvard Study, it is supported on all sides by hundreds of other scientific studies involving many thousands of people from all over the world. The book is also threaded with wisdom from the recent and ancient past--enduring ideas that mirror and enrich modern scientific understandings of the human experience.
It is a book primarily about the power of relationships, and it is deeply informed, appropriately, by the long and fruitful friendship of its authors. But the book would not exist without the human beings who took part in the Harvard Study''s research--whose honesty and generosity made this unlikely study possible in the first place. People like Rosa and Henry Keane. "What is your greatest fear?" Rosa read the question out loud and then looked across the kitchen table at her husband, Henry. Now in their 70s, Rosa and Henry had lived in this house and sat at this same table together on most mornings for more than fifty years. Between them sat a pot of tea, an open pack of Oreos (half eaten), and an audio recorder. In the corner of the room, a video camera. Next to the video camera sat a young Harvard researcher named Charlotte, quietly observing and taking notes.
"It''s quite the question," Rosa said. " My greatest fear?" Henry said to Charlotte. "Or our greatest fear?" Rosa and Henry didn''t think of themselves as particularly interesting subjects for a study. They''d both grown up poor, married in their 20s, and raised five kids together. They''d lived through the Great Depression and plenty of hard times, sure, but that was no different from anyone else they knew. So they never understood why Harvard researchers were interested in the first place, let alone why they were still interested, still calling, still sending questionnaires, and occasionally still flying across the country to visit. Henry was only 14 years old and living in Boston''s West End, in a tenement with no running water, when researchers from the Study first knocked on his family''s door and asked his perplexed parents if they could make a record of his life. The Study was in full swing when he married Rosa in August of 1954--the records show that when she said yes to his proposal, Henry couldn''t believe his luck--and now here they were in October of 2004, two months after their fiftieth wedding anniversary.
Rosa had been asked to participate more directly in the Study in 2002. It''s about time , she said. Harvard had been tracking Henry year after year since 1941. Rosa often said she thought it was odd that he still agreed to be involved as an older man, because he was so private otherwise. But Henry said he felt a sense of duty to participate and had also developed an appreciation for the process because it gave him perspective on things. So, for sixty-three years he had opened his life to the research team. In fact, he''d told them so much about himself, and for so long, that he couldn''t even remember what they did and didn''t know. But he assumed they knew everything, including certain things he''d never told anyone but Rosa, because whenever they asked a question he did his best to tell them the truth.
And they asked a lot of questions. "Mr. Keane was clearly flattered that I had come to Grand Rapids to interview them," Charlotte would write in her field notes, "and this set a friendly atmosphere for the interview. I found him to be a cooperative and interested person. He was thoughtful about each answer, and often paused for a few moments before he responded. He was friendly though, and I felt that he was like the stereotype of the quiet man from Michigan." Charlotte was there for a two-day visit to interview the Keanes and administer a survey--a very long survey--of questions about their health, their individual lives, and their life together. Like most of our young researchers embarking on new careers, Charlotte had her own questions about what makes a good life and about how her current choices might affect her future.
Was it possible that insights about her own life could be locked away in the lives of others? The only way to find out was to ask questions, and to be deeply attentive to every person she interviewed. What was important to this particular individual? What gave their days meaning? What had they learned from their experi.