그들의 주된 인생목표는 부자가 되는 것이라고 답했습니다.
유명해지는 것이라고 답했습니다.
그리고 더욱더 성취하라고 말합니다.
그런 것들을 추구해야만 한다고 세상은 우리를 압박합니다.
좋은 삶을 살기 위해서 말이죠.
한 눈에 보기란 거의 불가능합니다.
우리도 알다시피 깨우치고 나면 그때는 이미 늦죠.
우리는 우리 인생에 일어나는 수많은 일들을 잊어버립니다.
때로는 기억을 완전히 날조해 버리기도 하죠.
그것을 우리는 해냈습니다.
역대 최장 기간에 걸친 인생 연구일 것입니다.
75년 간 우리는 남성 724명의 인생을 추적해 왔습니다.
해마다 그들의 직업과 가정생활, 건강 상태에 관해 설문했죠.
연구자들도 알지 못한 채로 진행되었습니다.
이러한 연구는 극도로 희귀한 것입니다.
이런 종류의 프로젝트는 대부분 10년 이내로 끝나고 말죠.
혹은 연구자들이 죽었는데 그들의 연구를 이어받을 사람이 없기 때문입니다.
이 연구는 살아남았습니다.
지금도 연구에 참여하고 있습니다.
그들 중 대부분은 90대죠.
그들의 2천 명이 넘는 아이들을 연구하기 시작할 것입니다.
저는 이 연구의 네 번째 총 책임자입니다.
1938년부터 우리는 두 개의 집단을 추적해 왔습니다.
그들이 하버드 대학 2학년일 때였습니다.
그 뒤 대부분이 전쟁에 참전했죠.
보스턴의 가장 가난한 지역에서 태어난 소년들이었습니다.
문제 가정 출신이었기 때문입니다.
1930년 보스턴에서 말이죠.
그들 대부분은 냉온수도 제대로 안 나오는 빈민가 공동주택에 살았습니다.
연구자들이 그들의 가정에 방문해 부모님을 인터뷰하기도 했죠.
다양한 직업을 가진 성인이 되었습니다.
그 중 하나는 미국 대통령이 됐습니다.
몇 명은 알코올 중독이 되었고, 몇 명은 정신분열증을 얻었습니다.
몇 명은 그와 정반대의 인생길을 걸었습니다.
꿈에도 상상하지 못했을 겁니다.
그들의 연구가 아직도 계속되고 있다는 얘기를 하고 있을 거라고는 말이죠.
응답해 줄 수 있는지 묻습니다.
보스턴 도심 빈민가의 남성들은 자주 이렇게 묻습니다.
하버드 사람들은 절대 그러지 않지만요.
설문지만 보내서는 안 되겠죠.
아내와 심각한 고민 얘기를 하는 그들의 모습을 촬영하기도 합니다.
이 연구의 교훈은 부나 명예, 혹은 열심히 노력하는 데 있지 않았습니다.
좋은 관계가 우리를 건강하고 행복하게 만든다는 것입니다.
우리는 관계에 관한 세가지 커다란 교훈을 얻었습니다.
고독은 해롭다는 것입니다.
더 행복하고, 신체적으로도 건강하며, 더 오래 사는 것으로 나타났습니다.
긴밀한 사회적 연결이 부족한 사람들보다 말이죠.
또한 고독은 매우 유해한 것으로 드러났습니다.
외롭지 않은 사람들보다 수명이 짧습니다.
미국인 다섯 명 중 한 명 이상은 외롭다고 답하리라는 것이죠.
결혼을 해도 고독할 수 있다는 걸 잘 압니다.
관계의 질이 무엇보다 중요하다는 것입니다.
갈등 속에서 사는 것은 우리 몸에 아주 나쁜 것으로 밝혀졌습니다.
어쩌면 이혼보다도 더 건강에 해로울 수 있다고 합니다.
반면 바람직하고 따뜻한 관계는 건강을 지켜 주지요.
미리 예측해 보려 했습니다.
노년의 인생과 관계가 없었습니다.
중요한 건 그들이 얼마나 만족스러운 관계를 맺고 있느냐였죠.
80세에 가장 건강했습니다.
나이 먹는 고통의 완충제 역할을 해 주는 셈입니다.
마음은 행복하다고 답했습니다.
감정적인 고통에 의해 더욱 극대화된다고 답했습니다.
뇌도 보호해 준다는 것입니다.
그렇지 않은 사람들보다 기억력이 더 선명하고 오래 간다고 합니다.
보다 빠른 기억력 감퇴를 보였습니다.
그러한 좋은 관계가 언제나 원만할 필요는 없습니다.
그런 다툼은 그들의 기억력에 큰 타격을 주지 않았습니다.
옛날 옛적부터 내려오던 지혜죠.
우리는 인간이니까요.
우리는 간단한 해결책을 너무나 좋아합니다.
우리 삶을 계속해서 행복하게 만들어줄 것을 원하죠.
관계 맺기란 골치 아프고 복잡합니다.
매력적이거나 멋진 일도 아니잖아요.
게다가 이건 평생 동안 계속해야만 합니다. 끝도 없죠.
직장 동료와 친구가 되기 위해 적극적으로 노력했던 사람들입니다.
좋은 삶을 살 수 있으리라고 진심으로 믿었습니다.
그러나 75년 동안 우리의 연구는 거듭해서 보여주었습니다.
가족과 친구와 공동체가 있는 사람들이었다는 것을요.
가능성은 사실상 끝이 없겠죠.
몇 년 동안 대화가 끊긴 가족에게 연락을 해 볼 수도 있겠죠.
커다란 손실을 입히게 마련이니까요.
마크 트웨인의 말을 인용하며 이 강연을 마무리하고 싶습니다.
마크 트웨인은 그의 삶을 돌아보며 이렇게 썼습니다.
"시간이 없다. 인생은 짧기에,
다투고 사과하고 가슴앓이하고 해명을 요구할 시간이 없다.
좋은 관계가 좋은 삶을 만듭니다.
감사합니다.
검토: Jihyeon J. Kim
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 millennials
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.
(Laughter)
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 of Adult 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 people drop out of the study,
or funding for the research dries up,
or the researchers get distracted,
or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field.
But through a combination of luck
and the persistence of several generations of researchers,
this study 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 of these men.
And I'm the fourth director of the study.
Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men.
The first group started in the study
when 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 a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods,
boys who were chosen for the study
specifically because they were from some of the most troubled
and disadvantaged families
in the Boston of the 1930s.
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 medical exams.
We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents.
And then these teenagers grew up into adults
who entered all walks of life.
They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors,
one President of the United States.
Some developed alcoholism. 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.
(Laughter)
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 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 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."
(Laughter)
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 social connections are really good for us,
and that loneliness kills.
It turns out that people who are more socially connected
to family, to friends, to community,
are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer
than 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 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 living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health.
High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection,
turn out to be very bad for 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 when we gathered together everything we knew about them
at age 50,
it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels
that predicted how they were going to grow old.
It was how satisfied they were in their relationships.
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50
were the healthiest at age 80.
And good, close relationships 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 being in a securely attached relationship
to another person in your 80s is protective,
that the people who are 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 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 all the 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 as old as the hills.
Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore?
Well, we're human.
What we'd really like is a 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 of tending to family and friends,
it's not sexy or glamorous.
It's also lifelong. It never 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 millennials in that recent survey,
many of our men when they were starting out as young adults
really believed that fame and 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 on his 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.
(Applause)
