TED演讲幸福无关财富.名望和工作

TED 演讲:良好的生活，基于良好的人际关系

哈佛大学在75年里追踪了724段人生，发现“幸福”无关富有、名望和辛勤工作，良好的人际关系让我们保持健康和快乐。

正如马克·吐温所说：“生命如此短暂，我们没有时间去互相争吵、道歉、发泄和责备，时间只够用于去爱。

TED 演讲英文文稿:

TED 演讲中文文稿:

00:11

What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to invest now in yourfuture best self, where would you put your time and your energy? There was a recent survey ofmillennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that amajor life goal for them was to get rich. And another 50 percent of those same young adultssaid that another major life goal was to become famous.

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00:49

(Laughter)

00:51

And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. We're given theimpression 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 forthem, those pictures are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about human life weknow from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory isdownright creative.

01:35

But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we could studypeople from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keepspeople happy and healthy?

01:54

We did that. The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult lifethat'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 waywithout knowing how their life stories were going to turn out.

02:24

Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decadebecause too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or theresearchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down t

he field. Butthrough a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers, thisstudy has survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study,most of them in their 90s. And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children ofthese men. And I'm the fourth director of the study. 03:14

Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. The first group started in the studywhen they were sophomores at Harvard College. They all finished college during World War II,and then most went off to serve in the war. And the second group that we've followed was agroup of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the studyspecifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in theBoston of the 1930s. Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water.

03:53

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 factory workers and lawyers andbricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States. Some developed alcoholism. A fewdeveloped schizophrenia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the verytop, and some made that journey in the opposite direction.

04:34

The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would bestanding 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 themyet one more set of questions about their lives.

04:59

Many of the inner city Boston men ask us,

"Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life justisn't that interesting." The Harvard men never ask that question.

05:10

(Laughter)

05:19

To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires. We interviewthem in their living rooms. We get their medical records from their doctors. We draw their blood,we scan their brains, we talk to their children. We videotape them talking with their wives abouttheir deepest concerns. And when, about a decade ago, we finally

asked the wives if they wouldjoin us as members of the study, many of the women said, "You know, it's about time."

05:49

(Laughter)

05:50

So what have we learned? What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands ofpages of information that we've generated on these lives? Well, the lessons aren't about wealthor fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this 75-yearstudy is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. 06:22

We've learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are reallygood for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected tofamily, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longerthan people who are less well 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 shorterlives than people who are not lonely. And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than onein five Americans will report that they're lonely.

07:18

And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so thesecond big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it'snot whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your closerelationships that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for ourhealth. High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad forour health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warmrelationships is protective.

07:56

Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them atmidlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarianand who wasn't. And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, itwasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It washow satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in theirrelationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem tobuffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. Our most happily partnered menand women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, theirmood stayed just as happy. But the people who

were in unhappy relationships, on the dayswhen they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain.

09:03

And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that goodrelationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in asecurely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people whoare in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need,those people's memories stay sharper longer. And the people in relationships where they feelthey really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memorydecline. And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time. Some of ouroctogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they feltthat they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't takea toll on their memories.

10:00

So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this iswisdom that's as old as the hills. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? Well, we'rehuman. What we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good andkeep 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. It never ends. Thepeople in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirement were the people who hadactively worked to replace workmates with new playmates. Just like the millennials in that recentsurvey, 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. Butover and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the bestwere the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.

11:20

So what about you? Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or you're 60. What might leaning in torelationships even look like?

11:30

Well, the possibilities are practically endless. It might be something as simple as replacing screentime with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, longwalks 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 thegrudges.

12:03

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."

12:33

The good life is built with good relationships.

12:38

Thank you.

12:39

(Applause)