Lessons from the World’s Longest Happiness Study

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And Paul writes the cocktail lifestyle is all about being with friends, which according to our next guest is the key to happiness. Dr. Robert Waldinger has been investigating the human experience since 1938. Now, he’s sharing all he’s learned in his new book, “The Good Life”, and here he is with Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Dr. Robert Waldinger, welcome to the show.

DR. ROBERT WALDINGER, AUTHOR, “THE GOOD LIFE” AND DIRECTOR, HARVARD STUDY OF ADULT DEVELOPMENT: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: You’ve written, “The Good Life”, you’ve been a co-author of it which is, “Lessons from the World’s Longest Study — Scientific Study of Happiness”. And you talk about happiness, but boy, all of us have different definitions of that. Some people for happiness would be going to the beach and relaxing. Some people for happiness would be throwing yourself into work and accomplishing something, or you know, being able to invent things. How do you define happiness?

DR. WALDINGER: Well, what we find in research is that happiness falls into two big buckets. One is that hedonic sense of happiness. Am I having a good time right now? That is the beach, that’s the wonderful part, right? Then there is, what is called, eudaimonic happiness. Its well-being. It’s a sense of whether my life has meaning and purpose. And we all want some of both but some people really want the parties more, and some people want the sense of meaning more in their lives.

ISAACSON: And are those happiness equal?

DR. WALDINGER: They’re not equal, they’re different, but they complement to each other. If I have a sense that my life has meaning and purpose, I am more likely to feel happy more hours of the day. So, they work together.

ISAACSON: Tell me about the study. Where does that come from? What’s the Harvard part of it?

DR. WALDINGER: Yes. So, this was started in 1938 as two studies that did not know about each other. A study of Harvard college undergraduates and a study of boys from Boston’s poorest and most disadvantaged families. And it was, in both cases, a study of thriving. How do young adults stay on good developmental paths? And that was unusual. And so now, we followed them for 85 years, which is unheard of, never been done before. The same people through their entire life.

ISAACSON: Well, that’s really cool that you have the privileged ones and then the ones from a poor neighborhood in Boston. Another privileged one, of course, very famously, included John F. Kennedy when he was an undergraduate. Was there a difference between the rich and the underprivileged?

DR. WALDINGER: Yes, and let me just say, we’ve now since included many women. So, we have gender balance. But, yes, there was a big difference that the underprivileged people lived, on average, 10 years less than the Harvard undergraduates. And we think that has a lot to do with level of education and the fact that the Harvard undergraduates got the messages about taking care of your health sooner than the less educated people.

ISAACSON: And when you talk about the change in demographics, you just said you have more women in the study. Tell me about the changing demographics now, about race, about ethnicity, how do you change the composition of those in the study?

DR. WALDINGER: We only brought in women, but we did not change the ethnicity. We — our value is being a study that has this information about the same families across three generations. So, if we were to start bringing in new, more diverse groups, we would not have that backlog of information. So, what we do is we rely on the findings of other studies. So, people of color, people around the world, and we make sure that our findings dovetail with those other studies before we put them out to the world.

ISAACSON: Can money buy happiness?

DR. WALDINGER: No, it cannot. It turns out that our intercity, underprivileged group was just as happy on averages as our privileged Harvard group, and many other studies document this. Money does not buy happiness. It doesn’t make you unhappy either. It’s separate from happiness.

ISAACSON: And so, how in a study, do you define somebody who’s truly happy or is it just up to them to tell you, hey, I’m happy?

DR. WALDINGER: Well, I would say the basic components are to be engaged in activities that you care about and to be engaged with people who you care about and who care about you. That if you’ve got those two components, you are very likely to be having a happy life.

ISAACSON: How important our relationships?

DR. WALDINGER: They’re hugely important. It turns out that when we look at what predicts who is going to be happy and healthy as they grow older, relationships are the strongest predictor. They’re stronger than your cholesterol level, they are stronger predictor than your blood pressure. We didn’t believe that at first, and then other studies began to find the same thing.

ISAACSON: In the book, though, there are certain people, probably — you know, both with permission and pseudonyms, I want to ask about a couple of them. John Marsden (ph) and Leo DeMarco (ph), is it?

DR. WALDINGER: Yes, yes. So, yes, those are pseudonyms to protect their privacy but they’re real people. And John and Leo were our happiest and our least happy men in the whole study. John and Leo were both Harvard undergraduates. So, they were set up to have good lives, privileged lives, right? And yet, what we found was that Leo was just naturally good at staying connected to other people. He was a high school teacher his whole life. He loved his students, he loved his colleagues, had a good marriage, grandchildren who he taught to sale, all of that. John, on the other hand, was quite high achieving. But fairly withdrawn and had the sense that he didn’t really want to spend much time with people. He had two unhappy marriages. He ended life very lonely and unhappy himself.

ISAACSON: Explain the cause and effect there because you say, if you’re engaged with people then you’re likely to be happy. But you can reverse and say, if you’re the type of person who’s happy, you’ll be engaged with people. Which one causes which?

DR. WALDINGER: That’s exactly right. Your point, it’s by directional that they work together. And so, we know that when we are less happy, we’re less likely to engage with people. When we’re physically ill, we’re less likely to be able to engage with people. And so, what we’re talking about is a kind of platform of well-being. What we encourage people to do is to pay attention to their connections with other people. Pay attention to their relationships because it supports us, particularly when hard times come, when depression comes, when physical illness comes, when pandemics come.

ISAACSON: Well, when pandemics come, it’s a lot harder to do relationships. It’s a lot harder to engage with other people, which is what you’ve just said. How bad was the pandemic for world happiness?

DR. WALDINGER: The pandemic was bad. That lockdowns really isolated us from the people we rely on for that sense of well-being and that sense of belongings. But that said, people found ways through social media, for example, to connect with each other. I have a friend who found his elementary school friends on Facebook, and now they have coffee online every morning — every Sunday morning. And they’re —

ISAACSON: But you — but in your book you talk about people connecting on social media and you wrestle with the problem of, is that really a connection? Does social media make us happy? The fact that I’m on, you know, Facebook in the morning, does that cause happiness?

DR. WALDINGER: The research says that it depends on how we use social media. If we are active in reaching out to people, like in the example of the men having coffee with his friends, yes. We are — well-being rises. But if we simply, passively consume other peoples curated lives on social media, you know, those beautiful pictures of beaches and parties, that makes us feel more depressed. It makes us feel like we’re missing out.

ISAACSON: Were you able to look at teenagers, especially, because when you talk about that, things like TikTok and some of these other apps that show all of your friends at parties you weren’t invited to has been a real cause, it seems, in many studies of deep unhappiness.

DR. WALDINGER: Yes, that there — well, we know that teenagers are more susceptible to that sense of, I’m missing out. I don’t belong. Other people have life all figured out and I don’t. That the — adolescence is a time of identity formation. And so, we’re trying to figure out who we are in the world. And when we look at other people’s lives that are not the whole story of anybody’s life on social media, we can end up feeling like we are wrong. We don’t fit in. That’s the problem. And adolescents are more vulnerable to it than other age groups.

ISAACSON: Are we becoming more lonely and is that a cause of unhappiness?

DR. WALDINGER: We are becoming more lonely. Now, one in three people in the world reports that they feel lonely. That was on the rise long before COVID. That the path of least resistance, unfortunately, is to become less connected to each other overtime. And so, part of what we are advocating based on our research and what we write about in our book is the idea that we have to be proactive in maintaining these connections because otherwise our path leads us towards isolation more and more.

ISAACSON: Why does our path lead to that way?

DR. WALDINGER: We think it has to do in part to technology. That these wonderful screens that we’re so addicted to, that are designed to capture and hold our attention, take us away from each other. And there is good research on this that we invest less and less in our social lives as technology captures our interest and our attention from the advent of television in the 1950s in the United States to all the screens that began to dominate our lives in the early 2000s.

ISAACSON: And happiness, when you talk about engaging and being with other people, well, we quit going to movie theaters during COVID. And even now, when we decide we’re going to watch things on streaming services instead of being in community places, is that a cause of community and happiness?

DR. WALDINGER: It is. That community involvement makes us happier. It makes us feel more like we belong and that our community investment has gone down. Volunteering for community organizations, going to houses of worship, joining clubs, all of that has gone down. And yet, we know that we feel more connected to each other and we feel greater individual well-being when we do those things.

ISAACSON: Let me read something from your book, because I love the way the book is written. And maybe you can unpack it for me. You write, life is hard, and sometimes it comes at you in full attack mode. Warm, connected relationships protect us against the slings and arrows of getting old. Expand on that for me.

DR. WALDINGER: Well, when we follow these thousands of lives, we see that life doesn’t just proceed in one direction towards happiness or towards unhappiness, there are ups and downs because challenges are always coming our way. And what we find is that relationships form a kind of safety net for us. That when we asked people who went through the Great Depression and went through World War II, when we asked them what got you through these terrible times? To a person, they mentioned the relationships. It was the people writing letters back home. It was my fellow soldiers. It was the neighbors who helped our family through the depression. And so, what we find is that that safety net of relationships is what helps us all get through the inevitable challenges of a normal life.

ISAACSON: Talking about the challenges and adversity of a normal life or of a life like being part of a Great Depression. To what extent does external adversity. Things that hit you. Bad things that happen that are happening around. To what extent is adversity a cause of unhappiness or maybe, to some extent, is it almost correlated the other way, that if you overcome a lot of adversity, you can become happier?

DR. WALDINGER: Well, it works both ways. That overcoming adversity, when we have the resources, actually makes us feel stronger and more confident in ourselves and be happier. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a psychologist who estimated, well, how much of our happiness depends on our current circumstances? And she estimated from good data that it’s really only about 10 percent. And we find that, for example, people who win the lottery, they should have a hugely happy event, tend — one year after they win the lottery, they go back to their baseline level of happiness pre-lottery. So, what we find is that we all have a kind of happiness that point that we pretty much hover around to some extent, no matter what happens, in our lives.

ISAACSON: And how important are early experiences growing up? Childhood?

DR. WALDINGER: We studied that. What we found was that people who had warmer connections with parents, who are more warmly connected to their partners, 60 years later. And that’s extraordinary to find a connection that lasts 60 years. What we believe is that everybody, every child needs one good warm connection with a caring, reliable adult in order to be set up for well-being as they go through life.

ISAACSON: I was surprised to read that three out of four Americans say they’re lonely. What is driving that number?

DR. WALDINGER: What’s driving the number, you know, we think is in part the digital revolution. But also, the breakdown of traditional structures, because we see this around the world that in India, in China. As people seek opportunity, economic opportunity by moving away from family settlements and villages into big cities, life becomes more anonymous. Families stop having their usual roles. Grandchildren are not there for grandparents to take care of. And parents don’t have grandparents around to help them out. So, all of this breaks down those structures that embed us in webs of relationships. And the question is, is there a way we can recreate those, rebuild those in our more modern society? And that’s a big question we’re all wrestling with.

ISAACSON: Well, what is the answer? What are some of the ways we rebuild that?

DR. WALDINGER: It can be everything from architecture, the way we structure our cities and our neighborhoods to social structures, the way we foster connections instead of fostering disconnection, to the voices we hear in our public life. I mean, think of the voices we hear that divide us from each other, that make us afraid of each other. Those voices are not our friends. And when we really want to do is turn towards those voices that make us feel more connected with each other, more open to other human beings. Being — human beings who are different from us. All of that matters.

ISAACSON: To what extent is happiness under our control? And to — what do you say to people who say, I’m too old to make a change?

DR. WALDINGER: We had many people in our study who said, I am not good at relationships. I’m never going to have them. It’s too late for me. We had people in their twenties say, it’s too late for me. What we find when we started these thousands of lives is that it is never too late. That people find friend groups. They find love at times and in places they never expected to find it. So, if you think it’s too late for you, think again because you just don’t know what’s going to happen as you go through your life.

ISAACSON: And as we go through life after the show, tell us what are the few easiest or most important steps we should take?

DR. WALDINGER: Take small steps to keep connecting with other people that, you know, send that little text, that e-mail. Talk to the people in your life, even the postal carrier, the person who gets you your coffee in the morning at the coffee shop, any of those people. Make connections at work. Send out little feelers. Ask someone to have a cup of coffee. It’s not a huge effort that’s required but it’s a kind of constant practice of what we call social fitness, almost like physical fitness. Do something every day, something small, and you’ll be amazed at the returns you get.

ISAACSON: Dr. Robert Waldinger, thanks so much for joining us.

DR. WALDINGER: Thank you very much for having me.