You Might Also Like: A Better Way to Money

Robert Waldinger (0:00)

What really matters to you? What do you really care about? And that can include financial things, that can include, I care about being sure I have a comfortable retirement. Those things matter.

Jennifer Borget (0:15)

Welcome back to A Better Way to Money. I'm Jennifer Borget. We've spent this entire series talking about money at life's biggest turning points. Having kids, getting married, surviving a setback, starting over. And through all of these conversations, one question kept coming up in different forms. What does it actually mean to build a good life? Not just a financially secure one, a genuinely good one. I saved today's guest for last because I think his work answers that question better than anyone. Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest running studies of human life ever conducted. His TED Talk on Happiness has been viewed more than 40 million times. And his book, The Good Life, distills eight decades of research into practical wisdom. Today we're going to close out this series by zooming out, looking at the full arc of a life, what the data says about who thrives, and how the decisions you're making right now are quietly shaping who you'll be at 80 Grab our free Family Finances workbook at northwesternmutual.com/podcast.

All right, let's bring it home.

So for anyone who hasn't heard of it, can you tell us what is the Harvard study of adult development and what drew you to it?

Robert Waldinger (1:37)

This study is the longest study of human life that's ever been done. It began in 1938

I'm the fourth director.

And it consisted initially of a group of Harvard College sophomores and a group of inner city boys from Boston's poorest and most troubled families. And there were 724 of them. And then eventually we brought in their spouses and we brought in their children. Almost all of the original men in the study have died. They're only about 10 still alive and they're all over age 100 And but the baby boomer children are very much still alive and we've been studying them. And so it's a real effort to study what helps people thrive as they go through life. What are the paths to thrive in? And what drew me was just the incredible experience of being able to look at one person's records, which were this high, and being able to read about what somebody thought about life when he was 19, and then what he thought about life when he was 30, and what his life was like when he was 60, and how he looks back on life in his 80s. It was just wonderful to be able to view entire lives as they unfold through time.

Jennifer Borget (3:11)

Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of data.

So after this, like 85 plus years of data, what do you think is the single most important thing that the studies actually taught us about trying to live well?

Robert Waldinger (3:26)

Well, two things. One didn't surprise us. It was that taking care of our physical health, taking care of our bodies really matters for how long we live and how long we stay relatively healthy. So that's the thing that didn't surprise us because many other studies had already started to reveal these things.

What surprised us was that the people who stayed happy and stayed healthy, the longest were the people who had close, warm connections with other people. That people's relationships actually predicted how long they were going to live and stay healthy. We didn't believe that because the question was, well, how could your relationships actually get into your body and shape your health, shape your physiology? How could that even be possible? Now, many other studies have begun to find the same thing, and we've been spending a lot of time in our laboratory, working to understand how that actually works, how relationships foster good health.

Jennifer Borget (4:41)

You talked about how you noticed different people and how they aged and felt as they got older. Can you give us some examples of people in the study that really show how relationships impact our health?

Robert Waldinger (4:54)

Yeah. One in a sad way, there was a man who was super accomplished, really accomplished lawyer and won all kinds of awards and worked really hard, but he never really got along with people very well. He had a first marriage that ended in divorce, and he was estranged from his children. Then he had a second marriage, and that marriage ended in a stalemate. They didn't divorce, but they were at a standoff, really unhappy with each other. His health declined so badly later in his life, and he really had a miserable end of life because of that. On the other hand, there was another man who was not very so accomplished. He was a high school teacher and really happy being a high school teacher. He'd gone to Harvard, but then he taught high school history his whole life, and he really enjoyed it. He enjoyed his students, his colleagues. He had a wife he loved and three daughters who he really cared about and lots of grandkids.