Happiness: A Quick-Fix or a Longterm Project?
It is not an uncommon occurrence to be faced with quotes stating “choose happiness” or simply “be happy”. But is it really that easy? Harvard researchers decided to find out.
In November 2015, Robert Waldinger gave a TEDtalk entitled “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness”, highlighting the results of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This study, which has been running since 1939 and aims to define healthy aging, examined two cohorts of men: one- a group that began as Harvard sophomores, and the other- a group of youth from inner-city Boston neighbourhoods. They have since been followed up as frequently as every two years with questionnaires, health exams, and in-person interviews to collect data on everything from their health, marriage, job, community, and overall life satisfaction. Now on it’s fourth research director, one has to ask, is this study still measuring what it was set out to measure? Is it really still relevant over 75 years later?
First comes the question of who participated in the study. In this case, it was 724 white males. Representative of today’s population or that in 1939? Not so much. But taking into account the start date of the study, that could provide some of the rationale behind this decision.
Demographics aside, how did this study measure “happiness”? What does that really entail? Firstly, the study employed questionnaires to examine the men’s careers, relationships, hobbies, and satisfaction with many areas of their life. These were administered every two years since the study began, which gives this study the advantage of being fairly prospective as compared to retrospective, and thus limiting the effect of faulty long term memory. That being said, two years is large window over which to determine the average quality of relationships or job satisfaction. This window could also contain any number of meaningful changes within it which are likely not reflected in the men’s responses. Second, they used data from the men’s doctors about their physical health. Collected every 5 years, this data has most likely gotten more accurate and possibly more relevant over time, as medical techniques and tests have seen great improvement since the 1940’s. Lastly, some of the participants (and now their wives and children notes Waldinger in his talk) have been interviewed at varying intervals to discuss the quality of their relationships and other, more detailed aspects of their lives.
So, with all of this information, the team at Harvard examined the data and extracted that the quality of close relationships over time is really key to life satisfaction and happiness in aging. Waldinger emphasizes that this is not a short exercise, and instead it is the long-term impact that really makes the difference. Though this leads to a warm and fuzzy end to Waldinger’s talk, I found myself asking “Is this still true for a more modern day population? What will millennials think by the time they reach the age of 80 or above?” I’m guessing that social networks, wearable technologies, and modern healthcare advances weren’t on their radars in 1939.
Though I think this study is the closest thing we currently have to assessing life happiness in the traditional sense of the term, I’m not sure it still captures all of the contributing factors in today’s society. I would be curious to see what would happen if results were collected from a cohort beginning in 2016, using a new, possibly more clearly stated, definition of happiness and additional methods of measuring this over time. For example, does being connected via a social network show the same benefits as having meaningful relationships face-to-face? Can this help address the issue of loneliness addressed by Waldinger in his TEDtalk? If this new data was compared to the original study, would there be differences in what makes us happy and satisfied in old age? I will hazard a guess and say that yes, it certainly would! But the more important question may be: are these differences meaningful and could they help us to lead more fulfilling, happy lives? In this case, I suppose that only time will tell.
