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- [00:02]
A
From Rotary Magazine. This is the Rotary Voices podcast. I'm Jerome McDonnell. The Human Urge to work with others and make a difference is why Rotary International has flourished for over 120 years. We know Rotary enriches our communities. It brings people together and delivers a sense of purpose, pride and happiness. There's now quite a bit of data that proves that meaningful relationships like these are actually the key to happiness. In fact, good social connections are more critical for long term health and well being than money, fame or iq. We're going to dig into what makes people happy with Mark Scholz. He's one of the authors of the Good Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, a New York Times bestseller. He's a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Mark, I wanted to start with the study itself because it's really pretty remarkable. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been at it for like 85 years. And I wonder if you could speak to the origins of the story and how it's expanded significantly.
- [01:18]
B
Yeah, it is. As you said, it's a remarkable study and its origins are also quite remarkable. So it started in the 1930s, 1938, when, which was an interesting time in our history. So this was in Boston. We were still in the throes of the Depression. It was the eve of World War II. And somehow two separate studies had the idea of trying to study human flourishing. They were interested in trying to understand what led to positive outcomes, even in difficult circumstances, and maybe in circumstances that were quite privileged. So the original sample had 724 participants recruited starting in 1938. About 2/3 of those participants came from the poorest neighborhoods of Boston. So these were folks that were living in really deep poverty, mostly living in tenement buildings without running water. Most of those folks came from families that had recently immigrated to the United States. So there were families that were adjusting to a life that was really quite a marginalized life because of poverty and immigration. The remaining one third were students at Harvard University that were recruited over four years. And those two samples started separately but merged over time because they shared that goal of being interested in two things. One was human thriving and the other was really trying to understand what goes on inside people's heads on a daily level, what kind of makes them tick, what their fears and hopes were. So from the very beginning, it was a heavily interview based study. They were really interested in trying to understand people.
- [02:48]
A
And in time, you've gone into the second generation, you've done the children of the original participants and expanded it to women as well.
- [02:56]
B
Exactly. So the study started 88 years ago. this point, the original sample is all male, based in Boston. Over time, the wives of the original participants became full fledged members. And in the last 10 years we've been working with the children of the original participants. And that's 1300 men and women that we continue to study today.
- [03:17]
A
In the book, you set up a kind of contrast between two people. One is someone who came from the tenements and was in tough circumstances, one who was one of the Harvard participants. And the participant who was in the tougher circumstances ends up being happy. And the Harvard person never quite gets it. Can you walk through their contrasting scenarios?
- [03:42]
B
Yeah. So this is an important finding. So we use stories of people from our study to illustrate the science. And the science is pretty clear from our study and from other studies that the extent to which wealth and income contributes to happiness and well being, psychological wellbeing is pretty modest. It's most important when we get people out of poverty. So going from poverty to middle class is where we see the biggest bump in people's happiness. Probably because we're reducing stress, we're giving people lots more control over their lives. In our study, it's the same that when we look at the two cohorts of individuals, the inner city kids grown up and the Harvard University students who started life in a more privileged perch, they're equally happy in adulthood. So when we trace them across their entire adult life until the end of their life, which we're able to do when we follow them across these eight or nine decades, there's no difference in happiness. And the folks that we profile include people that have grown up again in very poor circumstances. One of the people we talk about in the book is Henry Keene, who grew up in the streets of Boston, very poor circumstances, worked at an early age, came from a home that had a bunch of challenges growing up. He met and married a wonderful woman early in his 20s and lived a life that was quite fulfilling and happy. And that's clear contrast to another person that we profile in the book, who was a lawyer. His name was John Marsden, very successful, graduated from Harvard University, went on to a top law school, was in fact a high profile lawyer and worked for the government for a while and also did some teaching. But he lived a life that was relatively isolated from others and was unhappy. So wealth brings some opportunities and choices for people, but it doesn't systematically bring people more happiness. It has more to do with what we do in life and how we live our lives than the actual wealth that we may have.
- [05:36]
A
And you've got a nice little sentence that really sums it up.
- [05:38]
B
We do. And this is really hard for scientists. So I always love being asked this question, to say something simple. And this is a study that's gone on for almost 90 years, has hundreds of papers. I think we're at 17 books now from the study. But this simple conclusion that we draw in the Good Life, the book that we wrote recently, is that it's relationships that keep us happier and healthier throughout the lifespan.
- [06:02]
A
And that's a beautiful thing. And I mean, there's. You have a largely positive framing on this, that you can change your relationships, and if you're lonely, you cannot be lonely anymore. The stories of people who are lonely are very striking. And one of the previous directors, George Valant, went and talked to a man in Montana, Butte, Montana. Can you tell that story and kind of the way people get lost without relationships?
- [06:29]
B
Yeah. So, again, I want to embed it on a larger context, and then I'm happy to talk about our man in Montana. We have a crisis in loneliness that I think is quite significant, and it's a real public health challenge, and it's one that's been talked about by the previous surgeon general in the United States. It's one that is acknowledged in other Western countries. When we take surveys, in a given week, about 20 to 30% of the population will indicate that they feel alone, which means that they don't feel like other people really know them or are looking out for them or really have their back. So that's quite a kind of sense of isolation that turns out to have important health implications. Lots of research from thousands of studies suggests that loneliness is as significant a risk factor for health outcomes, even for premature death, smoking about a pack of cigarettes, or obesity. So we're talking about something that's quite prevalent and also something that's quite risky. The individual we highlighted from Montana had grown up in really interesting circumstances, really nurtured by his sister in particular, because his parents weren't always present and involved in his life. His mom had some challenges with mental health, so she was absent at key times during his childhood. But he had grown out of touch with everyone, including his sister. So the study would check in, and there were several occasions where he would say, you know, my sister Rosalie, do you know what's happening with her? Or later in life, is she still alive? So he had become so distant from important connections in his life that he was depending on the study for reminding him or Connecting him with people that were important from his family. He lived essentially in a trailer park, and his only connection was with a woman who was older than him and had more physical needs, who he would literally go over and watch television and help her into bed at night. And that was his primary connection. He had lost touch with his children, who he cared about very much, but worried about kind of burdening them by reaching out. So he had grown more and more isolated as life went on, and it had a real impact on how fulfilling his own life was. And there are many stories like that in the study as well.
- [08:39]
A
George Valiant, who did the interview, renders the detail so fine. He gets in the car with this guy and he notices the past. Passenger seat, seat belt has dust on it, and he thinks, oh, my gosh, this guy does not have any passengers in his car.
- [08:54]
B
Well, what makes this study remarkable is this attempt to really understand people up close. So from the beginning, it included people who are well trained in observations, had lots of clinical experience where they had worked with clients in other settings. So we make these very close observations that I think are important, important and are lost if you're only depending on questionnaires or online interviews that are really digitally mediated. So this was a study the very beginning. They went to all 724 homes. Can you imagine that? Of all the participants? So that's the nature of the relationships that we developed with people over time. So we could notice those seatbelts.
- [09:34]
A
Absolutely. It pays off. It just so resonates. What do you think your main contributions have been?
- [09:40]
B
My personal ones are the study itself.
- [09:42]
A
The study is that you guys took it over.
- [09:44]
B
Yeah. So I got involved in a study a little over 20 years ago. We brought in some modern techniques, and what that means is some of the things that people listening might imagine. Bringing people into the lab and looking at their brains as they're doing tasks. So modern scanning techniques that allow us to understand what's going on beneath the surface, including the brain. We also brought people in the lab so that we could look at their bodies as they were responding to things like stressful encounters, watch how their heart rate might recover after such an encounter. But we also brought in a greater focus on emotion and the role that emotions play, both in maintaining relationships or making them challenging, but also in our own health as well. So I think we built on what was an incredible set of resources from the study. Years and years of interviews and questionnaires, and then we just enlarged some of the repertoire that we have been using to understand people. Really fun I think in psychology, this is what makes my life interesting, when we come at things in different ways. So I can ask you, Jerome, how you're feeling today, and you might give me one answer. And I can also use my observation powers to see whether I really believe what you're saying or whether there's other evidence. We could ask a friend of yours, and we can do things like begin to peer into the brain. So we've tried to build on these core strengths of the study by bringing in these different perspectives that allow us to get to know people in a different way.
- [11:08]
A
One of the things that seems to be in flux is what is a definition of happiness? What is a definition of contentment? How do you know if somebody is just having a bad day? Or what kind of data do you use there?
- [11:23]
B
It's a great question. And I would say this is one of those fun kind of concepts that's both in flux and also has ancient origins. So in our book the Good Life, we talk a little bit about the origins of two types of happiness. We really come from the Greeks. It was Aristotle that really popularized these ideas. So it's a distinction between hedonic happiness, which is kind of momentary joy, and pleasure. So that's that fleeting feeling that just feels great when we have it. But it's impossible to sustain that feeling all the time. We all have ups and downs. And part of life, any engaged life, also includes negative emotions like sadness and frustration and anger. So that's the hedonic side, which is really our feelings. And then the other side is more of a sustained sense that life is good. And it's not the kind of ups and downs or the waves. It's really the sea of our life. I have a sense that my life is satisfying, and I have a sense of purpose and meaning. So we examine both of those things. So we've asked people over eight days to keep careful track of their emotions on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, how they're feeling. And we step back and we ask people more generally about how they're experiencing life. Is it satisfying? How do they think their life compares to what they had hoped it might compare? And as I suggested, we watch people, we observe them very carefully to get a sense of what it looks like from a carefully trained eye, how they're doing. So again, when we stress them out, if they say they don't get perturbed, we get to see if that's true in the lab by watching their heart rate, watching their skin conductance, which is whether they're sweating or not and watching their signs, you know, their facial signs and bodily signs of how they're doing emotionally.
- [13:06]
A
Most people who are listening to this podcast are Rotarians or know a Rotarian or affiliated with Rotary International. And I think everybody knows that giving back is a wonderful soul, satisfying thing to do and enriches your life and is satisfying and makes a for a purposeful life. How did debt data flew up?
- [13:27]
B
Yeah. So again, really important in science to go beyond individual studies. So in the good life, we really attempted to integrate studies from around the world, not just folks who came from Boston and not just folks that were born in the 1920s. Lots of research evidence that giving back, being generous, doing kind things to others, not only helps the recipient, but gives a benefit to the giver as well. There's a temporary emotional benefit that comes with it. So that hedonic hit that we get, we feel good, we feel a sense of purpose in that moment, but it also has more sustained impact on us. It improves our sense of purpose, as you suggested. And I think it helps remind us that life is bigger than us. What Rotarians do is a kind of wonderful example of that has benefits both for the recipient and especially true for the giver as well.
- [14:18]
A
Are there people in this study you can think of who did some volunteering or community engagement that really turn their life around?
- [14:26]
B
I think there are lots of examples in our study of people who give back. I know we're talking to an audience that might be largely Rotarians, but I think that giving and being kind to others doesn't only have to be in the context of being a volunteer. So I want to mention one person from our study who we highlight, and he's really the contrast that we use from the lawyer that I mentioned at the top of the broadcast. This is a man we call Leo. And Leo was a kind of gifted writer even in high school. He was a kind of observer of people, and he liked taking notes and writing about them. And he told great stories. He went to Harvard and the war broke out while he was in Harvard and he volunteered for service. He served in the Pacific Theater, and he stayed in close contact with his family. His dad unfortunately died near the end of the war before he got home, and his mom was starting to show the symptoms of what later became known as Parkinson's. He took copious notes during his time in the Pacific Theater with the idea that he would write a book about this. And he went home to Vermont, where he had grown up, to be with his family and to help his Mom. And he took a job in a local high school. There happened to be a history job, which is what he had majored in when he was in college, and he ended up working in that job for the rest of his life. He was an unusual history teacher, though he was beloved by lots of students, beloved by his community. He was also beloved by colleagues who found him very generous of spirit. And he spent a lot of time mentoring people. So there are lots of ways that we give back. And it's certainly clear from our study and again, from many others that those that have those kind of community ties, whether they're through voluntary efforts or even through their job, which happens to be the kind of job that embeds them in an important community, they're clear benefits to them. So Leo lived a life that was embedded in relationships at work, also at home, and he was one of the happiest people in our study.
- [16:21]
A
It's interesting you return to Leo again later in the book for an example of someone who was so happy and doing so much. And I think Rotarians can relate to this. You're volunteering so much, you're kind of spreading yourself thin and maybe not doing enough at home.
- [16:38]
B
And.
- [16:39]
A
And he has to make an effort to address paying attention at home. How does he do it?
- [16:45]
B
So important to say? He was someone who typically attended to his family. He was pretty committed and engaged with his kids and his wife. But we tell a story there where his kids in particular are feeling neglected. He was working really hard in the school. He was asked increasingly to take on administrative responsibilities. So he was a key figure. And. And I think we worry about figures like that, that they might get burnt out, that it might become a job that becomes just about stress and not about that sense of purpose or meaning. He did okay on that front, but his family said, dad, we'd like you to pay attention to us. We'd like you to be present. This was before cell phones, but they were asking for him to be in the room with them and to be present. Not worried about work, not worried about what he was going to do next. And he told the study, that study, it wasn't something we learned from the kids as an important reminder for how critical it was to stay connected to people. It's gotten so much harder. Right. In our modern world, we have incredible numbers of distractions, including those computers that we put in our pockets, which are cell phones that distract us all the time. So an important lesson here is that our attention is one of the few things that we really have the ability to control and we can lavish our attention on what we choose to. Really important to think about who we are and are we giving it to the people and the things that we think are important in our life?
- [18:10]
A
Yeah. And in the book you ask people to do some exercises themselves and add up how much time they're spending with people they really like and love. And you do it with your co author in the book. And it's kind of startling.
- [18:26]
B
It's incredible when we start to, you know, the estimates vary depending on studies. So it's really hard to get good data on how much time people are spending on screens. But the lower end these days is about five hours a day. And not all that is productive work time. Some of it is at work, but a lot of it is scrolling through social media, just getting distracted by silly things that are on that phone. Could be games or stuff like that. So if we think about trying to recover some of that time that we're giving somewhat mindlessly to a device and to really redeploy it right in a different direction, that's really the critical idea here. It's a current challenge that it's hugely important for people at all stages of the lifespan.
- [19:10]
A
You do end up quantifying. Like here, Bob and I are going to have this much time to get these many hours and it's a small amount compared to the screen hours.
- [19:19]
B
Exactly. So if we do the screen count and we estimate if you're on the low end, maybe it's only two or three hours a day. But Bob and I live in different cities. This is my co worker and co author. We talk to each other each week. But I've seen Bob two or three times in the last year. And if I add up that amount of in person time and multiply that Times, Bob is 11 years older than I am. Then our life expectancy, yeah, it's not that many hours left. Right. It's 30 or 40 hours maybe left that we might have together. And that reminds us of how precious that time really is.
- [19:54]
A
The book is so good at talking about different stages of life. And the study lends itself to looking at the different perches that people land on and then move on to the next perch. And they have to pivot, they have to make adjustments. Can you walk us through some of the changes? Because it's very striking when people are younger, they focus on themselves and then they focus on doing good in the world and doing other things and then you end up older.
- [20:21]
B
I can talk a little bit about it. Obviously each Stage has its own complexities and details. But the one big picture element which you started to pick up on is that there's a real difference. When we look at young people, meaning people in their 20s and 30s, and we compare them to people later on in the lifespan. So 60s, 70s, 80s. And that difference has to do with your sense of how long your time horizon is. This is a theory that's called socio emotional selectivity theory. It's a mouthful to say. And the idea is that as we get older and recognize that we have limited time left, that our lifespan is limited, we kind of double down on what's most important to us. And it's a neat thing that older people seem to figure out. This is what we might call wisdom. It's certainly emotional wisdom. They seem to figure out that spending time with people that they care about is probably most important, important, and that's what they invest their time in generally. So if you look at happiness across the lifespan, older people are actually some of the happiest people compared to younger people or middle aged people. And that's incredible when you think about the challenges of aging, right. Our health becomes more of a question mark. Our friends may not be around, We've lost a central purpose in not working, perhaps if we're retired. So quite surprised that older people are happy in the way, in comparison to others. And part of it is that they figure out how to put themselves in situations that make them happier. Young people have very different tasks. Their timeline is long, so really their goal should be learning and growing in different ways, meeting new people. And studies show that the longer your sense of your timeline is, the more invested you are in growing and learning. So that's a big difference from young to old, old. And in each sort of period of life has its own kind of complexities and challenges. So, you know, midlife is a big area, but that's often a time when people are established at work. They might have families that are beginning to be grown up. At that point, their kids might be ready to leave the home or perhaps have left the home. So it's often a time where we need to reengage with the question of purpose and meaning in our life. What are we doing that gives us a sense of purpose and meaning that gets us up in the morning? Really critical. As we get older, we start to think a lot about our legacy, like what's going to happen after I leave this planet? Will people remember me? Or the things that I've done. So we call that generativity as an important Idea that begins to kick in as you age. A kind of desire to give back in the way that Rotarians do. That leaves the planet in a better place than we might have come into it. And that could be by doing things for other people, volunteering, contributing in meaningful ways to the development of someone you care about. A grandchild. It could be. Those are generative things. Or at work, becoming a really cherished mentor, like that schoolteacher that I mentioned
- [23:16]
A
before in the midlife section. You do have some interesting longevity markers that you discover in the study. Can you talk about what you see when somebody is 50 and what predicts future longevity?
- [23:31]
B
Yeah, I feel like I worry every once in a while. Drew, I'm going to fail the quiz here that I wrote the book, and I'm not going to remember, but I know exactly what you're talking about. So, yeah, we looked and this was really George Valiant. This was before Bob and I were involved in the study. He was interested in trying to understand factors in middle age that would be associated with people thriving in late life. So we're talking late 70s, 80s, and we're talking about both psychological well being and physical well being. And he looked at a variety of factors. And the best predictor was the quality of one's relationship, particularly with a primary partner. So this was with a loved one. And that was more important in predicting physical and psychological health than things like cholesterol or whether you had grown up in a poor neighborhood in Boston or in a wealthy neighborhood wherever you grew up, if you went to Harvard, or even how much money you were making across your career. So this was really one of the key findings in the study that suggests that the power of relationships in shaping our psychological health, and maybe more surprising to most of us, our physical health as well. And we know that clearly from the research literature we now have on loneliness. It's a risk factor for our physical health and premature dying. Same thing with the quality of our closest connections. We can look at it in the positive directions as well.
- [24:47]
A
One of the things the book is good at is giving us ideas about what to do when we are in a tough spot. Because every life has a lot of tough spots. You profile a woman, and her name's Peggy Keene.
- [25:03]
B
Yeah. So Peggy's actually the daughter of Henry Keene, who we talked about right at the top of the interview. Henry was from the Boston sample, grew up in a tough neighborhood, worked in various jobs over his career, married well, had a lovely wife, Rosa, and they had a beautiful relationship. And they had a daughter, Peggy. And, and we asked all our participants, the second generation participants, to describe the toughest experience they had in a life, their most upsetting or scary experience. And Peggy chose to talk about this. It was a choice to get married. And after she got married to a man that she really cared about, she really came to grips with the fact that she wasn't interested in being married to a man, that she was gay. And this was something that she had been struggling with for a long time. And, and she felt incredibly guilty for engaging, you know, for moving forward with this marriage. She cared deeply about this man. She worried about her family, who was quite religious, Catholics. Her family rallied to her and really supported her as she figured out a way to get out of the marriage and to do decently by the guy that she had married. And she found a woman that she fell in love with. And they've been in a long term relationship since that time. Soon after, the marriage dissolved. So she surrounded herself both by family that was incredibly supportive in a way that surprised her because of their deep religious values and the particular issue about her sexuality, but also surrounded herself with people that she loved. She had that support, connections at work and in her community as well. So Peggy thrived and she faced an incredible challenge. But through the support of others, the connection of others, she was able to really thrive. Yeah.
- [26:47]
A
And later in life, when she's got problems at work, you print her data in the book, all her personal data is, I've got great friends, I feel confident that I can fix things. I feel better. She's all confidence, even though she's having a hard time.
- [27:00]
B
I think there are a few lessons to draw from. That one is that not everything in our life has to be perfect. And it's not likely to be perfect. Right. Studying people across their entire lifespans, over 700 people, really over thousands. If we include, include that second generation, the one thing we know for sure is that there will be challenges in life. So for this generation, the original generation, it was the Depression, it was World War II, maybe for folks growing up more recently, it was Covid. It's uncertainty about the environment and the future of our planet. There are always challenges, both at the societal level and the personal level. It's really how we navigate those challenges that's critical. And being able to put things in perspective helps a lot. So that's one important lesson. I think the other one is tied to what we just talked about, which is Peggy had the benefit of really beautiful parenting growing up. So her family, her parents were present, they were engaged they were warm, they cared about her. They didn't shy from sort of thinking about moral decisions and moral outcomes. So she had a model of at least the importance of thinking about how it means to be connected to someone in a way that you love them and really care about them. And we think our research suggests that those things literally get into our head. That sense that there's someone out there looking out for us, we call it attachment. And we carry that sense with us in our future connections with others. So even when she married this man who she knew deep down it didn't make sense to be married to, she had this resource to fall back on, and that was the family connection that not only was still present, but in some ways she carried with her in her kind of heart and her mind. And that's a really important idea.
- [28:38]
A
Towards the end of the book, you talk about how even lonely people can change at any time. And you've got an example of a man you call Andrew Deering, and he really does profile as a saddest life trajectory, as you can imagine. And he ends up happy at the end. Can you talk a little about him?
- [28:58]
B
Yeah. So I'm going to give away the end, as you kind of did, before we start saying more about Andrew. But he was happier. I don't think he was one of the happiest at the end, but he was happier. So Andrew lived a pretty dismal life, as you suggested. He was very isolated from others, so he felt very much alone. We asked him repeatedly throughout his life, did he have friends, if so, how many? And he consistently said to the study, I don't have friends. And part of it was that he was in a marriage that was not particularly satisfying and with a woman who was in many ways afraid of social connection. She didn't like to leave the house, didn't like to socialize with others, and he really suffered in large part because of that. Andrew was an interesting guy. He thrived in his work. The one thing he loved was his ability to fix watches. He was a watch repair person. Used his dexterity for years to do this watch repair. Felt it, you know, it's a sense of purpose and meaning. In his 60s, he began to have trouble doing that work. Both his eyes and his hands also were beginning to become more problematic. And his doctor said to him, I think you should begin to think about two things. One, whether that relationship with your partner is one that you want to continue in because you've complained about it for years. And the other is you need to take care of your body better. So he decided, after a lot of thought, to separate from his wife, at least temporarily. And he joined a gym. And that was the big decision that really turned things around. He went to the gym every day at the same time, and he figured out that people come at the same time to gyms every day. So he got to know people that were there. Most of them were younger than him, but it turns out he had an interest in old movies that they thought was kind of cool. So he would have people to his apartment to watch old movies with him, and they began to grow fond of each other so much. So this was in his late 60s. When we interviewed Andrew, in his 70s, we said, Andrew, do you have friends? And it was as if the interviewer was ready to go on to the next question. Andrew says, yes, several. So this is an important story. I think the title of that chapter is It's Never Too Late. Andrew lived a pretty sad, lonely life until his early 70s, when he managed to turn things around because of some important changes in his life. So we talked about the idea that we were pretty optimistic about change. Change happens all the time in people. Sometimes it's intentional, as it was in the case of Andrew, with some help from a doctor. But often life transitions are opportunities for us as well. When we retire, there are opportunities that come up. There are also challenges that arise as well. But people change. That's one of the consistent themes in the study. Change is ever present in our lives, and he certainly changed for the better.
- [31:43]
A
Do you have any advice for people who are by nature not coupled? There's statistics that say, like, 20% of people over 50 are living alone. And these people need connections and need all kinds of connections. What kind of things should they do?
- [32:01]
B
Yeah, I talked about relationships keep us healthier and happier throughout the lifespan. But it's really all types of relationships that matter. It doesn't have to be a loved one or a primary partner, an intimate partner. It could be friends. It could be family members. It can be neighbors if you're close and connected to them. So there are lots of people in life that we can form these incredible connections that keep us vital and energize us and really protect our bodies. That's the first critical piece. And then I think we can also talk about people being lonely in marriages. Right. So there are a number of people that have been married for years. One fellow in our study who've been married, and it wasn't a good marriage, he felt quite isolated and lonely. So this is a challenge for Everyone. The next thing I think is critical is really to recognize that 20 to 30% of the population talks about feeling lonely. It's normal to experience that sense of loneliness, certainly at different periods in your life. So the critical piece is beginning to lean into relationships. We call this social fitness. That we want to treat our social connections with others in the same way that we treat our physical fitness. So it means really prioritizing that we know that physical fitness is good for our health. Social fitness is also good for our health. So how can I connect with others? How can I use existing connections that I have that are energizing and invigorating for me? How can I spend more time with those people? At work, I'm always thinking before I make a decision, before I make a commitment to collaborate with others. Is this going to be a relationship that will be energizing, interesting, exciting for me, or is this going to be a relationship that I'm going to dread for a long period of time? So we want to be thoughtful and proactive as opposed to let things happen passively. And then there are a bunch of things that we can do. One of those things that we could do is volunteer in our communities with others. So becoming a Rotarian is a great thing. For example, we become close with people by repeated contact over time, typically by doing things together. There's no better thing to give both meaning and connection than volunteering in a meaningful way. So doing things actively with others. I happen to be doing this interview from the UK where I'm on sabbatical at the University of Oxford. I can look out my window and I can see a community garden that's now flooded. Cause it's been raining a lot this spring here at Oxford. But that garden will be active soon with people working side by side. And what that means over time. I can look over and say, jerome, your flowers are growing way faster than mine. What's your secret? Right? And that's how we develop relationships across time. So if you're lonely, it means you need to be more proactive in trying to figure out ways to connect with existing people in your life and to make new connections and really make that a central part of what you're doing every day, every week, just like we would with our physical fitness, like taking a walk or going to the gym.
- [34:55]
A
I thought one of the beautiful sayings in the book was, life is about love and finding a way to cope that does not push love away, that gets at it.
- [35:05]
B
This is a key idea. And this actually starts with research that was done before Bob and I were involved in the study. Again, it was George Valiant. George had this really interesting idea that we all have challenges in our life. It's really about how we cope with those challenges in those days. He called it defenses that we use to deal with adversity. And he had an idea that the coping strategies that were most effective were ones that allowed people to be somewhat realistic about the challenge. So it allowed them to face the challenge. And part of the advantage of facing into those challenges is that it allows me to bring other people into my life. So if my wife says to me, you know, mark, are you okay? And I say, I'm fine, you know, I have this thing that I'm a little worried about, but I'm not going to talk to my wife about it. That means that I'm not opening up the opportunity to connect with my wife and to accept the kind of support she's likely to give me or a friend if it's not going to come from a partner. So when we face challenges realistically and head on, that allows us to engage our support connections that we have with others, the love that we might have that come from others. So that's the real key, because it's impossible to avoid the challenges in life, right? And we illustrate that in lots of ways in the book. But an easy way to think about it is for folks that are aging as they develop medical challenges. It's really important to be able to rely on others and to be realistic about the needs that you have, to be able to lean in and acknowledge, I'm having a hard time. I need more help than I used to. It's also important to give back and to support others in your life.
- [36:37]
A
Well, thanks very much for writing this book and making all this data so accessible to people. It can benefit anyone. The books the Good Life Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Mark Schultz is the co author along with Robert Waldinger. Your co author did a TED talk that is one of the most popular TED Talks of all time about this subject and people can check that out as well. This episode of the Rotary Voices Podcast
- [37:08]
B
was produced by JP Swenson and edited by Wen Huang. Jerome McDonnell was our host. Production by Yusu Kim. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and share it with your friends. The Rotary Voices Podcast is produced by Rotary Magazine, the official monthly publication of Rotary International. Thanks for listening.