#308 — The Long Game
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Summary
Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and the co-founder of the Lifelong Research Foundation. He is also a Zen priest and teacher, and he teaches meditation in New England and around the world. In this episode, we discuss the limitations of relying on self-report to assess a person s well-being, the benefits of walking the problem of taking our primary relationships for granted, and some of the paradoxes thrown up by the Harvard study. We also talk about why it can be hard to figure out what makes us happy, the effects of alcohol, smoking, and exercise, the primacy of relationships, the diminishing importance of wealth status versus feeling valued, the connection between good relationships and physical health, and marital satisfaction, introversion versus extroversion, mortality and loss, acquiring experiences versus things, and how to deal with the problems of being dead from being a person. We also discuss the guru disciple relationship and the possibility of enlightenment, and his new book, The Good Life Lessons from the World's Scientific Study of Happiness, which he wrote along with his co-author Mark Schultz, which will be released later this year. This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation with Dr. Waldinger about his life and his research on the Harvard Study of adult development, which is the longest study of adult life that has ever been done, and which is based on the research he conducted at Harvard. In this podcast, Dr. Waltzinger and I discuss his life, his family life, and what it means to him, and why it's important to him to be a Zen teacher and a teacher, even in the 21st century. What does it mean to be happy? And what does it teach us about happiness? And why it matters so much to him that we should all be happy, even if we don't have any idea about it? This is a good life lesson from the world's longest scientific study of happiness, written by a man who doesn't even though he's not a doctor? Thanks for listening to the making sense podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the Making Sense Podcast! To find out more about the Making sense podcast, go to making sense, and to check out our newest podcast, "Making Sense" by clicking here. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast, become a subscriber!
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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today i'm speaking with robert waldinger robert is a professor of psychiatry at harvard medical school
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and the director of the harvard study of adult development at massachusetts general hospital
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he also has a new book out based on this study called the good life lessons from the world's
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scientific study of happiness which he wrote along with his co-author mark schultz robert is also the
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co-founder of the lifespan research foundation he received his undergraduate degree from harvard
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and also his medical degree from harvard medical school and he's been at harvard ever since he's
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a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and he is also a zen priest and he teaches meditation in
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new england and around the world so today robert and i speak about the harvard study mostly we discuss
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the limitations of relying on self-report to assess a person's well-being we cover economy's remembering
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and experiencing selves and some of the paradoxes thrown up there we talk about why it can be hard
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to figure out what makes us happy the effects of alcohol smoking and exercise the connection between
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work and fulfillment the primacy of relationships the diminishing importance of wealth status versus
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feeling valued the connection between good relationships and physical health having kids
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experience and marital satisfaction introversion versus extroversion mortality and loss acquiring experiences
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versus things the benefits of walking the problem of taking our primary relationships for granted
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quantity versus quality of time the self and self states the guru disciple relationship and the possibility of enlightenment
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i am here with robert waltinger bob thanks for joining me it's a pleasure to be here
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so uh we have many overlapping interests here we were just talking offline about uh having passed one another
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at a ted conference you have uh famously given one of the most uh well-watched ted talks of all time
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that was on a subject that we're going to get into here and about which you have just published a new book
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titled the good life lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness which i i think will
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have just come out when this podcast drops yes so i obviously haven't read it yet but um we'll talk about
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the academic work upon which the book is based so um first um welcome bob thanks for joining me and
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please uh introduce yourself by just giving us your your potted bio uh what have you
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focused on low these many years as an academic well i am a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst
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by clinical training and my specialty is psychotherapy so each day i do psychotherapy
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as part of my work but then i also do research and i run this study that i think we're here to talk
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about the longest study of adult life that's ever been done and then in my off hours i am a zen
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priest and teacher i'm actually a roshi a fully transmitted zen teacher nice well hence the the many
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overlapping interests here when were you born your um i was born in 1951 okay so uh yeah so you would
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have been i guess you would have been 16 in the summer of love did so did the the 60s pass you by
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or did did they capture you uh in the in the prime of your life i grew up in des moines iowa
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and the 60s sort of passed des moines by in that it was a very quiet conservative place
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right i was pretty enthusiastic about the vietnam war when i was growing up in des moines iowa
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that all changed when i went to college interesting and you went to harvard as an undergraduate
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i did and then you're and you're still at harvard that's right i've been there my whole adult life
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interesting so let's spend a moment on the zen piece i think we're going to want to leave it aside
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as we get into your your research and then bring it back at the end but um just tell me how did you
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get into zen and and or you perhaps uh other forms of meditation what was the the doorway in for you
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i had always been preoccupied by my own mind and and all the stupid stuff that i worried about
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that really didn't amount to anything and and i realized that most other people i knew were also
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worried about these things like was i achieving enough right or was i important enough all these
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things that when we think about being dead you know 100 years from now and no one remembering us
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what difference does all this make surely there's no one at harvard who's thinking about those things
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no nobody else except me right so right so this idea of you know why why is this preoccupation with
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mattering with being so important why is it something that so many of us are stuck in and i was thinking
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about this as a teenager because i was a high achieving teenager and it wasn't until my 30s when
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somebody gave me a book about buddhist philosophy that i thought oh this begins to make some sense
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and then it wasn't really until my 50s that i wandered into a zen group five minutes walk from my house
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where there was a teacher there who was really down to earth and sensible and i thought i could learn
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from this guy so i started studying with him and sitting with his zen group about 20 years ago and the
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rest is history what was the first book that connected with you it was wherever you go there you are
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the john kabat-zinn book yeah so if it was john's book how come you didn't get into mindfulness practice
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of the vipassana sort well i i tried for a while there's a vipassana center in cambridge mass near where
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my office was but i found that the vipassana tradition doesn't have much contact with teachers
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you can listen to teachers give dharma talks but you don't meet with them regularly and i would get
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lost i'd get like tired and kind of hopeless about my messy mind and it wasn't until i started sitting
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with james ford my zen teacher and i saw that that zen has a tradition of very short interviews
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frequently and that was the way that i found that someone could help me realize oh yeah my messy
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mind is normal and here's how you begin to enter into an ongoing practice of mindfulness and meditation
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so that was that was really the bottom line which is that for me a little more frequent contact with
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a wiser elder mattered a lot and i'm not familiar with james is it who was his teacher james ford's
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teacher was john tarrant who is still living and still teaching out west and again i haven't spent
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really any time in the zen tradition are you doing primarily koan practice are you doing just
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sitting practice zen has two main streams of practice now at least in the west that one is the
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soto practice which is just sitting and so the core of our practice that that i'm involved in is
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a lot of sitting but also the rinzai school which is a koan practice school and so i teach koans i've
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studied hundreds of koans in my time and find that also a really helpful way into this thing we call
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waking up yeah well we have uh henry shookman on the app who's who um has been um very helpful to a
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lot of people he's i don't know if you've ever met henry but he's he runs the uh zen center out in
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santa fe new mexico i have not met him but i would like to actually very nice guy okay well as i said
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i think we'll bring zen back in because we're going to talk about the nature of human well-being
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and perhaps the nature of the self and we're going to start with your academic work but i'll be
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interested to know how your experience in in meditation practice informs your your view of the
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the ultimate goal here and just how you conceive of living a good life altogether but let's start with
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the the harvard study of adult development what has that project been it predates you by some
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considerable number of years tell us the history there and how you came to run it sure the harvard
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study of adult development is as far as we know the longest study of adult life that's ever done and
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what's unique about it is it has followed the same people from the time they were teenagers all the way
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into old age most of them have died a very few are still living and now we've been studying their
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children most of whom are baby boomers about 2 000 people in all but started out with two very
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different groups of young men the first group was a group of harvard college undergrads from the classes
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of 1939 to 1942 were there only men at harvard at that point there were only men at harvard and only white
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men and this was a study of normal young adult development so of course if you want to study normal young
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development you study all white guys from harvard it's the most politically incorrect sample you
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could possibly have now and we're constantly having to explain to nih why they still want to fund us
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but the other study was also started at harvard at harvard law school by a professor named sheldon gluck
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and his wife a social worker named eleanor gluck they were interested in juvenile delinquency and why
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some children from really difficult backgrounds managed to stay on good developmental paths and stay out of
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trouble so these were kids who were selected not just from boston's poorest families but from families
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known on average to five social service agencies for problems like domestic violence and
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severe mental illness and severe physical illness so these were kids born with many strikes against
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them so my predecessor george valiant who was the third director of the study put both of these studies
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together and started studying the harvard men and the inner city men as kind of contrasting groups and
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then when i came on 20 years ago i brought in the wives of the original men and then reached
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out to the second generation more than half of whom are women so now we have you know we have women
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what we do not have are people of color because in boston in 1938 the city was 97.4 white yeah the waves
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of migration of people of color didn't happen until after world war ii so what exactly is being studied
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what forms of data are you acquiring on these people and i can imagine it's it's come in layers over the
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years as new methodologies have have come online so what what do you know about these people well
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exactly so we have studied the big domains of life all the way through mental health physical health
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work satisfaction work promotion who got fired relationships of all kinds so we've studied all of
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those domains starting in 1938 up to the present but as you've mentioned we brought online new methods as
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as they came into being so for example we started drawing blood for dna and for mrna when that wasn't even
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conceived of in 1938 when the study was begun we have scanned the brains of many of our participants
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something that people would have thought was pure fantasy in 1938 so what we've done is become a kind
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of history of scientific methods of studying the human condition so that the focus of the study is
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well-being specifically or or have you just pulled that out as a a variable of interest what what is what
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is the actual you know from the nih's point of view what is the what does adult development mean right
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well it is well-being in the broad sense right so not happiness happiness is a you know is a momentary
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thing and we can talk about more about that if you're interested but really when we think about
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well-being when we think about human thriving that encompasses our bodies our minds our social
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connections all of that and that is what the study was designed for way back in 1938 that's not a new
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selection process on on my part that's pretty interesting actually i i wouldn't have thought
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that i don't know why i would have been skeptical about that framing being sort of historically likely
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at that period but it's just 1938 does not seem like the year or even decade where where i would
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imagine an academic department would have decided okay we're going to think about human flourishing
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eudaimonia right well-being uh you know we're on the cusp of world war ii either the great depression is
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not even a distant memory right you would think we have more practical problems to worry about so it's
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it's interesting that that was what was uh birthed in that year well it was radical for its time and in
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fact there's a there's a famous quote of the earliest directors who said there's been so much time and
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energy spent on what goes wrong in human development we want to study what goes right and and you're
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you're absolutely correct that this was almost unheard of at that time to devote time energy money to that
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what's an interesting sidelight is that the harvard study was funded by wt grant the department store
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magnate and he was interested in funding a study to determine which young men would make really good
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department store managers so that's why he was interested in a study of what he thought were the
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best and the brightest but the physicians who founded the study were really interested in this whole concept of
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human flourishing so um how much of the data is correlated in the end with self-report on the part of
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your your subjects so you've got all of this data on people uh increasingly you have modern data like
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their genotypes and the results of neuroimaging experiments but the cash value one imagines the cash
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value of much of this is in the self-report of the subjects who are telling you how good their lives
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are or aren't i'm sure you you also do observational work to form your own judgments about just what you
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what their life outcomes really are in terms of their level of flourishing i mean there's some i guess
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objective measures like wealth and health and the size of their social networks and and we can we can get
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into all that but how much at the end of the day is it a matter of simply asking people questions
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and having them tell you how happy they are or how fulfilled they are how much meaning they find in
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their lives a great deal of our data is is just that it's self-report but as i think i've said and i think
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you know we've brought in other views other lenses through which to look at each person so we began to
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ask spouses to fill out questionnaires about their partner we began we had a children's questionnaire
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fill out a questionnaire about your dad right and then when i came on we began to videotape them so we
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would videotape couples talking to each other these these were now in their late 70s early 80s we asked
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them to talk to each other about their greatest fear we videotaped them we systematically coded those
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videotapes not just for verbal content but for emotion expression and for physical behavioral signals we began
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to then bring them into our lab and stress them out we would deliberately put them into fight or flight
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mode with a stressor and then watch how quickly they calmed down so what we would do is bring in other
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forms of observation to supplement our bedrock which was as you say self-report well we should probably
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talk about some of the the limitations of self-report too i mean this is a concept that will be familiar
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to my audience i've spoken to danny kahneman before and and spoken about his distinction between the
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remember the remembering and and experiencing selves both with him and and with others on this podcast so
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i don't know if you have thoughts about that you want to bring in uh but i guess i before we go there
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i'm just thinking about the the math and the uh the ravages of time here so if if the study started in
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38 we're talking about people the first cohort were people who were born around 1920 exactly and so
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inner city group were born on average nine years later 1929 okay so what percentage of the study
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participants are are still alive but you know apart from the people you've enrolled subsequently like
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their their children there were 268 original harvard college men and less than 10 are still alive
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and there were 456 inner city men and fewer than 40 are still alive right and they would all be in their
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late 90s early 100s yeah okay well before we talk about what we've learned what are your thoughts about
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the limitations of just asking people about their lives and when the kind of data you can get and
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just the kind of witnesses people tend to be with respect to what it's like to be them over the course of
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the time sure well you're you know you're right that of course there are tremendous limitations
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in what people tell us first of all on what they can tell us because we are blind to so much about
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ourselves but also what they're willing to tell us even though we assure them of confidentiality and
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many people have told us things they've never told anyone else we all tend to present ourselves in
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certain lights and avoid presenting ourselves in other ways and so all of that has to be taken into
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account now that said one of the ways we can use self-report is to look for things that are not
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explicit and conscious so for example tone of voice now we can look for word choice natural language
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processing is now a way of using ai to look at the ways that people speak and infer from that
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certain things about their mental state so in addition we did interviews to understand security of
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attachment and that does something that that mary main the founder of this interview called we we
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surprise the unconscious we get people to tell us things that they don't know they're telling us so
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there are ways to use self-report beyond the literal surface data that it gives us that said we do have to
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supplement with all these other methods that we've started to talk about what's an example of something
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that might reveal security of attachment that would be unconscious that might come up in an interview
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sure so the adult attachment interview has a very particular structure where it starts out you're
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talking about your romantic partner and it says the the interviewer asks give me five words to describe
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your relationship and then someone will list the five words and they might be you know loving challenging
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unhappy it could be anything and then the interviewer asks give me two examples that illustrate each of
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these words so give me two examples that illustrate how the relationship is loving what we find is that
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people who are insecurely attached will very commonly have what we call incoherent responses and what that
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means is that in response is giving an example of what what's loving about the relationship they will give you
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an incidence with their partner that wasn't at all loving that doesn't sound loving to the observer and that
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this is not something usually that the speaker is aware of and that is one of the hallmarks of an
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insecurely attached person's interview that's interesting so how much of a time commitment
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is it for all of these subjects or has it been i mean so in any given year i mean now we're talking
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about some very old people those who are still alive but i mean just said in any you know roll the clock
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back 30 40 years what kind of time commitment was it in any given year for people to
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just give you their responses most years it was just a questionnaire and actually it was every
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two years okay the questionnaire was often 20 pages long with some open-ended questions where you'd be
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asked to write a sentence or two in longhand as a response and some checklists and some rating scales
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so usually those questionnaires would take an hour 90 minutes to complete then about every 10 years
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someone from the study would go sit in their living room and interview them for four hours
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in addition we would ask people to send us their medical records or give permission for their doctors to
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send us medical records so we brought in data from their visits to hospitals and to health care providers
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and then finally we've had lab visits we've had home visits as i say where we record them talking to each
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other so i would say that most years it's been you know an hour to 90 minutes of their time but then some
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some some years maybe every five to ten years it's a half day or even a full day of time this reminds
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me of those michael apted documentaries which you no doubt have seen seven up and 14 up and 21 up
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it was just really a fascinating document to take snapshots of people's lives in this way well that's
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it you know and one of the things that happens when you go to our if you go to our files you can
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literally sit down with one family's file and it's enormously thick and you can start leafing through
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the pages and you are walking through someone's life and then their spouse and then their children
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and it's really quite an amazing experience to do this so um back to kahneman for a moment the so this um
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this disjunction between the remembering and experiencing self that he uh believes he's found and and
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as far as i know unless his thinking has changed on this he i think he believes it's it's sort of
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conceptually insurmountable which is to say that there's no way of really integrating the uh these
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discordant streams of data so as to produce a picture of human well-being that is truly coherent
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and so to remind people of what's happening here if you when you ask people how good their lives are
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what you're bringing online is the what he calls the remembering self who who's going to give you a
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story a much a global appraisal of how good life is and um there you'll get one story but if you
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prod the person at random intervals throughout their day with a you know kind of an experiencing
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sampling technique where you just you give them a phone app which asks them to rate how happy they are
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you know it when whenever they get pinged unless say you did that 20 times a day for someone over
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the course of a year you find that their stories about how good their lives are don't really mesh
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very well or coherently with the actual moment-to-moment character of their lives as they rate it on a
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spectrum of you know one to ten with respect to their their feelings of well-being and there are many
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reasons for this i mean we have we have various cognitive biases of the sort that kahneman did
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much to conceptualize for us and you know there are things like the like a like recency effects or the
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like the what was called the peak end rule where in any experience what's going to be most salient
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for someone when they're remembering it is the the peak right of the experience in terms of its intensity
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and how it ended right so you can if you imagine you're going on a vacation and um you know it was a
00:28:20.020
wonderful vacation you if we were sampling your experience minute by minute we would find a very
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high state of pleasure but there was one really bad or embarrassing or awkward or awful thing that
00:28:33.460
happened that you'll never forget and there was this you know weird glitch when you were leaving the
00:28:39.780
hotel where they overcharged you for something and they wouldn't back down and you were you just you
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you'll never go to that hotel again right so like this it's like four percent of your experience was bad
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but it was this crucial four percent of you know this peak moment on the trip and the last moments of
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the trip and so when you were when you tell yourself the story or telling anyone else's story about
00:29:02.980
what that trip was like you may have a very negative story to tell and it will seem like an
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irrationally negative story given what your moment to moment experience was actually like but the
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problem is it's the remembering self this is more global reappraising self that is the decider for all
00:29:22.660
future plans right so that so that there's really no one else to talk to apart from using one of these
00:29:28.900
fairly um ephemeral experience sampling techniques so when you talk to this person when or when this person
00:29:35.780
has to then plan their next vacation they're simply going to remember that it was a lousy trip because
00:29:40.500
that bad thing happened and that that hotel was unethical and they're never going to that place
00:29:45.460
again and yet they're actually in truth somewhat delusional about what it was actually like to be
00:29:52.980
them minute by minute over the course if you could just sum the area under the curve of their moment
00:29:59.380
to moment experience that would it would be a story of a very high well-being or high pleasure and you
00:30:06.100
know danny's lesson that he draws from this which i've actually never agreed with is um that you really
00:30:12.820
can't integrate these two selves and that there's just no they're there as far as coming up with a a
00:30:20.340
truly coherent picture of human well-being i don't know if you have a have a take on on that bob
00:30:26.660
well i think that that may explain in part why we are bad at knowing what makes us happy
00:30:35.380
you know what you're what you're saying that that there are these two very disparate
00:30:40.260
sets of conclusions right or experiences there's there's ongoing experience which we really really
00:30:48.580
can't bring to bear on our assessments of our lives or planning for the future and then there's
00:30:54.980
the story the narrative that we create looking back and so we do know from a series of experiments
00:31:02.100
that we are bad at anticipating what's going to make us more happy and what's going to make us
00:31:07.620
less happy so we do end up chasing a lot of chimeras yeah yeah in brief i've spoken about this before but
00:31:16.820
briefly where i think i disagree with danny here is that you really only have one life right and so
00:31:23.540
there really is just oh yeah the the life that's being doled out to you moment by moment and some
00:31:28.900
of those moments are moments in which you tell yourself a story or asked to tell someone else a
00:31:34.420
story that has more global characteristics and the consequences of having good stories to tell
00:31:41.300
also are doled out to you in other moments i mean it matters what kind of story you have to tell
00:31:47.380
about yourself and the kinds of thoughts you think in at four in the morning when you wake
00:31:52.660
up and are brooding about your life and you can become a better and better observer of what it's
00:32:00.420
like to be you you can become a better and better curator of the kinds of thoughts you think you can
00:32:05.700
become a better and better reframer of the kinds of stories you're apt to tell and all of this matters
00:32:11.700
ultimately this is where things like meditation come into the picture but ultimately it is all just
00:32:21.220
the mind and its character moment to moment and they're just these these different aspects to it
00:32:27.620
and i i think we can be more or less corrigible or incorrigible witnesses to what it's like to be us
00:32:35.140
and we can be frankly wrong about what it's like to be you know what it was like to be us over the course
00:32:40.100
of any period of time so you know you can think you had a great vacation because you're remembering
00:32:45.540
a few salient moments but you can actually be wrong about that you you you you're unaware of how much
00:32:51.460
stress you were under and you and what and how awful you were to be with and you're and and this is why
00:32:56.260
it's often good to ask the spouse because the spouse can tell you how insufferable you've been
00:33:01.300
over the course of any period of time and so you know there's there is there is a ground truth there to
00:33:06.980
be gotten to and it's just you know we can get we can be better or worse at that project
00:33:12.500
well you know the other thing i would add sam is this the element of not knowing so we tell ourselves
00:33:19.620
stories in retrospect looking back on our experience but we also tell ourselves stories in the moment
00:33:25.860
and one of the things that meditation does is it shows us if you'd like to continue listening to
00:33:33.620
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