【TED 精听练习文本】What makes a good life?
2016-02-26 22:10阅读：
What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life?
If you were going to invest now in your future best
self, where would you put your time and your energy?
There was a recent survey of millennial asking them what
their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent
said that a major life goal for them was to get rich.
And another 50 percent of those same young adults
said that another major life goal was to become
famous.
And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder
and achieve more. We're given the impression that
these are the things that we need to go after in order to
have a good life. Pictures of entire lives, of the
choices that people make and how those choices work out for them,
those pictures are almost impossible to get. Most of
what we know about human life we know from asking people to
remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but
20/20.
We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life,
and sometimes memory is downright creative.
But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold
through time? What if we could study people from the time
that they were teenagers all the way into old age to
see what really keeps people happy and healthy?
We did that. The Harvard Study ofAdult Development
may be the longest study of adult life that's ever been
done. For 75 years, we've tracked the lives of 724 men,
year after year, asking about their work, their home
lives,their health, and of course asking all along the way
without knowing how their life stories were going to turn
out.
Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects
of this kind fall apart within a decade because too many
peopledrop out of the study, or funding for the research
dries up, or the researchers getdistracted, or they
die, and nobodymoves the ball further down the field. But
through a combinationof luck and the persistence ofseveral
generations of researchers, this study has survived.
About 60 of our original724 men are still alive,
still participating in the study, most of them in
their90s. And we are now beginning to study the more
than 2,000children of these men. And I'm the fourth director
of the study.
Since1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. The
first group startedin the study when they were sophomoresat
Harvard College. They all finished college during World War
II, and then most went off toserve in the war. And
the second group that we've followed was a group of boys
fromBoston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for
the study specifically because theywere from some of the
most troubled and disadvantagedfamilies in the Boston
of the1930s. Most lived in tenements,many without hot and
cold running water.
When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were
interviewed. They were given medicalexams. We went to their
homes and we interviewed their parents. And then these
teenagersgrew up into adults who entered all walks of life.
They became factoryworkers and lawyers and bricklayers and
doctors, one President of the UnitedStates. Some
developedalcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. Some
climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the
very top, and some made that journey in the opposite
direction.
The founders of this study would never in their wildest
dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75
years later, telling you that the study still continues.
Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff
calls up our men and asks them if we can send them
yet one more set of questions about their lives.
Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, 'Why do you keep
wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting.'
The Harvard men never ask that question.
To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just
send them questionnaires. We interview them in their living
rooms. We get their medicalrecords from their doctors.
We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to
their children. We videotape them talking with their wives
about their deepest concerns. And when, about a decade ago, we
finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of
the study, many of the women said, 'You know, it's about
time.'
So what have we learned? What are the lessons that come from
the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've
generated on these lives? Well, the lessons aren't
about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The
clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this:
Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
Period.
We've learned three big lessons about relationships. The
first is that socialconnections are really good for us, and
that lonelinesskills. It turns out that peoplewho are more
socially connected to family, to friends, to community,
are happier, they'rephysically healthier, and they live
longer than people who are lesswell connected. And
the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People
who are more isolated than they want to be from others find
that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in
midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and
they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. And
the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in
five Americans will report that they're lonely.
And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be
lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we
learned is that it's not just the number of friends you
have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed
relationship, but it's the quality of your close
relationships that matters. It turns out that livingin the
midst of conflict is really bad for our health.
High-conflict marriages,for example, without much affection,
turn out to be very badfor our health, perhaps worse than
getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm
relationships is protective.
Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we
wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we
could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy
octogenarian and who wasn't. And whenwe gathered together
everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't
their middleage cholesterol levels that predicted how they
were going to grow old. It was how satisfied theywere in
their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied
in their relationships atage 50 were the healthiest atage
80. And good, closerelationships seem to buffer us
from some of the slings and arrows of getting old.
Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in
their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical
pain, their mood stayed just as happy. But the people
who were in unhappy relationships, on the days when they reported
more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional
pain.
And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and
our health is that good relationships don't just protect our
bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that
beingin a securely attached relationship to another person
in your80s is protective, that the people who are in
relationships where they really feelthey can count on the
other person in times of need, those people's memoriesstay
sharper longer. And the people in relationships where
they feel they really can't count on the other one,those are the
people who experience earlier memory decline. And those good
relationships, they don't have to be smooth allthe time.
Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each
other day in and day out, but as long as they felt
that they could really count on the other when the going got
tough,those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories.
So this message, that good, close relationships are good for
our health and well-being, this is wisdom that's a sold as
the hills. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore?
Well, we're human. What we'd really like isa quick
fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good
and keep them that way. Relationships are messy and they're
complicated and the hard work oftending to family and
friends, it's not sexy or glamorous. It's also
lifelong. Itnever ends. The people in our 75-year study who
were the happiest in retirement were the people who had
actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates.
Just like the millennialsin that recent survey, many
of our men when they were starting out as young adults
really believed that fameand wealth and high achievement
were what they needed to go after to have a good life.
But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown
that the people who fared the best were the people who
leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with
community.
So what about you? Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or
you're 60. What might leaning in to relationships even look
like?
Well,the possibilities are practically endless. It might be
something as simple as replacing screen time with people time
or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new
together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out
to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years,
because those all-too-common family feuds take a
terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges.
I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain. More than a
century ago, he was looking back onhis life, and he wrote
this: '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.'
The good life is built with good relationships.
Thank you.
