Making Sense with Sam Harris - #308 — The Long Game

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Waldinger about the Harvard Study of Adult Development. They discuss the limitations of relying on self-report to assess a person’s well-being; Daniel Kahneman’s remembering and experiencing selves; why it can be hard to figure out what makes us happy; the effects of alcohol, smoking, and exercise; the connection between work and fulfillment; the primacy of relationships; the diminishing importance of wealth; status vs feeling valued; the connection between good relationships and physical health; having kids and marital satisfaction; introversion vs extroversion; mortality and loss; collecting experiences vs things; the benefits of walking; taking relationships for granted; quantity vs quality time; the self and self states; the guru-disciple relationship; and the possibility of enlightenment. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Robert Waldinger. Robert is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also has a new book out based on this study called The Good Life,

Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, which he wrote along with his co-author Mark Schultz. Robert is also the co-founder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and also his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and he's been at Harvard ever since. He's a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he's also a Zen priest, and he teaches meditation in New England and around the world. So today, Robert and I speak about the Harvard study, mostly.

We discuss the limitations of relying on self-report to assess a person's well-being. We cover economists remembering and experiencing selves and some of the paradoxes thrown up there. We talk about why it can be hard to figure out what makes us happy, the effects of alcohol, smoking, and exercise, the connection between work and fulfillment, the primacy of relationships, the diminishing importance of wealth, status versus feeling valued, the connection between good relationships and physical health, having kids and marital satisfaction, introversion versus extroversion, mortality and loss, acquiring experiences versus things, the benefits of walking, the problem of taking our primary relationships for granted, quantity versus

quality of time, the self and self-states, the guru-disciple relationship, and the possibility of enlightenment. And now I bring you Robert Waldinger. I am here with Robert Waldinger. Bob, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. So we have many overlapping interests here. We were just talking offline about having passed one another at a TED conference.

You have famously given one of the most well-watched TED Talks of all time. That was on a subject that we're going to get into here, about which you have just published a new book titled The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, which I think will have just come out when this podcast drops. So I obviously haven't read it yet, but we'll talk about the academic work upon which the book is based.

So first, welcome, Bob. Thanks for joining me. And please introduce yourself by just giving us your potted bio. What have you focused on, Lo, these many years as an academic? Well, I am a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst by clinical training, and my specialty is psychotherapy. So each day I do psychotherapy as part of my work, but then I also do research and I run this study that I think we're here to talk about, the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. And then in my off hours, I am a Zen priest and teacher. I'm actually a Roshi, a fully transmitted Zen teacher.

Nice. Well, hence the many overlapping interests here. When were you born? I was born in 1951. Okay. So you would have been, I guess you would have been 16 in the summer of love. So did the 60s pass you by or did they capture you in the prime of your life? I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and the 60s sort of passed Des Moines by in that it was a very

quiet, conservative place. I was pretty enthusiastic about the Vietnam War when I was growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. That all changed when I went to college. Interesting. And you went to Harvard as an undergraduate? I did. And you're still at Harvard? That's right.

I've been there my whole adult life. Interesting. So let's spend a moment on the Zen piece. I think we're going to want to leave it aside as we get into your research and then bring it back at the end. But just tell me, how did you get into Zen and perhaps other forms of meditation? What was the doorway in for you? always been preoccupied by my own mind and all the stupid stuff that I worried about that really didn't amount to anything. And I realized that most other people I knew were also worried about these things, like, was I achieving enough, right? Or was I important enough? All these things that when we think about being dead, you know, 100 years from now and no one remembering us, what difference does all this make? Surely there's no one at Harvard who's thinking about those

things. No, nobody else except me. Right. So, right. So this idea of, you know, why, why is this preoccupation with mattering, with being so important? Why is it something that so many of us are stuck in? And I was thinking about this as a teenager because I was a high achieving teenager. And it wasn't until my 30s when somebody gave me a book about Buddhist philosophy that I thought, oh, this begins to make some sense. And then it wasn't really until my 50s that I wandered into a Zen group, five minutes walk from my house, where there was a teacher there who was really down to earth and sensible. And I thought, I could learn from this guy. So I started studying with him and sitting with his Zen group

about 20 years ago, and the rest is history. What was the first book that connected with you? It was Wherever You Go, There You Are, the Jon Kabat-Zinn book. Yeah. So if it was Jon's book, how come you didn't get into mindfulness practice of the Vipassana sort? Well, I tried for a while. There's a Vipassana center in Cambridge, Mass, near where my office was. But I found that the Vipassana tradition doesn't have much contact with teachers. You can listen to teachers give Dharma talks, but you don't meet with them regularly. And I would get lost. I'd get tired and kind of hopeless about my messy mind. And it wasn't until I started sitting with James Ford, my Zen teacher, and I saw that Zen has a tradition of very short interviews frequently. And that was the way that I found that someone could help me realize, oh, yeah, my messy mind is normal. realize, oh yeah, my messy mind is normal. And here's how you begin to enter into an ongoing practice of mindfulness and meditation. So that was really the bottom line, which is that for me,

a little more frequent contact with a wiser elder mattered a lot. And I'm not familiar with James. Who was his teacher? James Ford's teacher was John Tarrant, who is still living and still teaching out West. And again, I haven't spent really any time in the Zen tradition. Are you doing primarily koan practice or are you doing just sitting practice? koan practice or are you doing just sitting practice? Zen has two main streams of practice now, at least in the West. One is the soto practice, which is just sitting. And so the core of our practice that I'm involved in is a lot of sitting, but also the Rinzai school, which is a koan practice school. And so I teach koans. I've studied hundreds of koans in my time and find that also a really helpful way into this thing we call waking up. Yeah. Well, we have Henry Shookman on the app who has been

very helpful to a lot of people. I don't know if you've ever met Henry, butman on the app, who has been very helpful to a lot of people. I don't know if you've ever met Henry, but he runs the Zen Center out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have not met him, but I would like to, actually. Very nice guy. Okay, well, as I said, I think we'll bring Zen back in, because we're going to talk about the nature of human well-being and perhaps the nature of the self. And we're going to start with your academic work, but I'll be interested to know how your experience in meditation practice informs your view of the ultimate goal here and just

how you conceive of living a good life altogether. But let's start with the Harvard study of adult development. What has that project been? It predates you by some considerable number of years. Tell us the history there and how you came to run it. Sure. The Harvard study of adult development is, as far as we know, the longest study of adult life that's ever done. And what's unique about it is it has followed the same people from the time they were teenagers all the way into old age. Most of them have died. A very few are still living. And now we've been studying their children, most of whom are baby boomers. About 2,000 people in all, but started out with two very different groups of young men. The first group was a group of

Harvard College undergrads from the classes of 1939 to 1942. Were there only men at Harvard at that point? There were only men at Harvard and only white men. And this was a study of normal young adult development. So of course, if you want to study normal young adult development, you study all white guys from Harvard. It's the most politically incorrect sample you could possibly have now. And we're constantly having to explain to NIH why they still want to fund us. But the other study was also started at Harvard, at Harvard Law School, by a professor named Sheldon Gluck and his wife, a social worker named Eleanor Gluck. They were interested in juvenile delinquency and why some children from really difficult

backgrounds managed to stay on good developmental paths and stay out of trouble. So these were kids who were selected not just from Boston's poorest families, but from families known on average to five social service agencies for problems like domestic violence and severe mental illness and severe physical illness. So these were kids born with many strikes against them. So my predecessor, George Valiant, who was the third director of the study, put both of these studies together and started studying the Harvard men and the inner city men as kind of contrasting groups. And then when I came on 20 years ago, I brought in the wives of the original men and then reached out to the second generation, more than half of whom are

women. So now we have women. What we do not have are people of color, because in Boston in 1938, the city was 97.4% white. The waves of migration of people of color didn't happen until after World War II. So what exactly is being studied? What forms of data are you acquiring on these people? And I can imagine it's come in layers over the years as new methodologies have come online. So what do you know about these people? big domains of life all the way through mental health, physical health, work satisfaction, work promotion, who got fired, relationships of all kinds. So we've studied all of those domains starting in 1938 up to the present. But as you've mentioned, we brought online new methods as they came into being. So for example, we started drawing blood for DNA and for mRNA when that wasn't even conceived of in 1938 when the study was begun. We have scanned the brains of many of our participants, something that people would have thought was pure fantasy in 1938. So what we've done is become a kind of history

of scientific methods of studying the human condition. So the focus of the study is well-being specifically, or have you just pulled that out as a variable of interest? What is the actual, from the NIH's point of view, what does adult development mean? Right. Well, it is well-being in the broad sense, right? So not happiness. Happiness is a momentary thing, and we can talk more about that if you're interested. But really, when we think about well-being, when we think about human thriving, that encompasses our bodies, our minds, our social

connections, all of that. And that is what the study was designed for way back in 1938. That's not a new selection process on my part. That's pretty interesting, actually. I wouldn't have thought that, I don't know why, I would have been skeptical about that framing being historically likely at that period. But it's just 1938 does not seem like the year or even decade where I would imagine an academic department would have decided, okay, we're going to think about human flourishing, eudaimonia, well-being. We're on the cusp of World War II. The Great Depression is not even a distant memory.

You would think we have more practical problems to worry about, so it's interesting that that was what was birthed in that year. Well, it was radical for its time. And in fact, there's a famous quote of the earliest directors who said, there's been so much time and energy spent on what goes wrong in human development. We want to study what goes right. And you're absolutely correct that this was almost unheard of at that time to devote time, energy, money to that. What's an interesting sidelight is that the Harvard study was funded by W.T. Grant, the department store magnate. And he was interested in funding a study to determine

which young man would make really good department store managers. So that's why he was interested in a study of what he thought were the best and the brightest. But the physicians who founded the study were really interested in this whole concept of human flourishing. founded the study were really interested in this whole concept of human flourishing. So how much of the data is correlated in the end with self-report on the part of your subjects? So you've got all of this data on people. Increasingly, you have modern data like their genotypes and the results of neuroimaging experiments. But the cash value, one imagines the cash value of much of this is in the self-report of the subjects who are telling you how good their lives are or aren't. I'm sure you also do observational work to form your own judgments about just what their life outcomes really are in terms of their level of flourishing. I mean, there's some, I

guess, objective measures like wealth and health and the size of their social networks, and we can get into all of that. But how much at the end of the day is it a matter of simply asking people questions and having them tell you how happy they are or how fulfilled they are, how much meaning they find in their lives? A great deal of our data is just that, it's self-report. But as I think I've said, and I think you know, we've brought in other views, other lenses through which to look at each person. So we began to ask spouses to fill out questionnaires about their partner. We had a children's questionnaire, fill out a questionnaire about your dad, right? And then when I came on, we began to videotape them. So we would videotape couples talking to each other. These were now in their late 70s, early 80s. We asked them to talk to each other about their greatest fear. not just for verbal content, but for emotion expression and for physical behavioral signals,

we began to then bring them into our lab and stress them out. We would deliberately put them into fight or flight mode with a stressor and then watch how quickly they calmed down. So what we would do is bring in other forms of observation to supplement our bedrock, which was, as you say, self-report. Well, we should probably talk about some of the limitations of self-report too. I mean, this is a concept that will be familiar to my audience. I've spoken to Danny Kahneman before and spoken about his distinction between the remembering and

experiencing selves, both with him and with others on this podcast. So I don't know if you have thoughts about that you want to bring in, but I guess before we go there, I'm just thinking about the math and the ravages of time here. So if the study started in 1938, we're talking about people, the first cohort were people who were born around 1920? Exactly. And the inner city group were born on average nine years later, 1929. Okay. later, 1929. Okay. So what percentage of the study participants are still alive,

apart from the people you've enrolled subsequently, like their children? There were 268 original Harvard College men, and less than 10 are still alive. And there were 456 inner city men and fewer than 40 are still alive. Right. And they would all be in their late 90s, early 100s. Yeah. Okay. Well, before we talk about what we've learned, what are your thoughts about the limitations of just asking people about their lives and the kind of data you can get and just the kind of witnesses people tend to be with respect to what it's like to be them over the course of time? Sure. Well, you're right that, of course, there are tremendous limitations in what people tell us. First of all, in what they can tell us, because we are blind to so much about ourselves, but also what they're willing to tell us, even though we assure them of confidentiality.

And many people have told us things they've never told anyone else. We all tend to present ourselves in certain lights and avoid presenting ourselves in other ways. And so all of that has to be taken into account. Now, that said, one of the ways we can use self-report is to look for things that are not explicit and conscious. So for example, tone of voice. Now we can look for word choice. Natural language processing is now a way of using AI to look at the ways that people speak and infer from that certain things about their mental state. So in addition, we did interviews to understand security of attachment. And that does something that Mary Main, the founder of this interview called, we surprise the unconscious. We get people to tell us things that they don't know

they're telling us. So there are ways to use self-report beyond the literal surface data that it gives us. That said, we do have to supplement with all these other methods that we've started to talk about. What's an example of something that might reveal security of attachment that would be unconscious that might come up in an interview? Sure. So the adult attachment interview has a very particular structure where it starts out, you're talking about your romantic partner. And it says, the interviewer asks, give me five words to describe your relationship. And then someone will list the five words. And they might be, you know, loving, challenging, unhappy, could be anything. And then the interviewer

asks, give me two examples that illustrate each of these words. So give me two examples that illustrate how the relationship is loving. What we find is that people who are insecurely attached will very commonly have what we call incoherent responses. And what that means is that in response, giving an example of what's loving about the relationship, they will give you an incidence with their partner that wasn't at all loving, that doesn't sound loving to the observer, and that this is not something usually that the speaker is aware of. And that is one of the hallmarks of an insecurely attached person's interview. That's interesting. So how much of a time commitment is it for all of these subjects, or has it been? In any given year, I mean, now we're talking about some very old people, those who are still alive, but I mean, just in any, you know, roll the clock back 30, 40 years, what kind of time commitment was it in any given year for people to just give you their responses?

Most years, it was just a questionnaire. And actually, it was every two years. The questionnaire was often 20 pages long with some open-ended questions where you'd be asked to write a sentence or two in longhand as a response, and some checklists and some rating scales. So usually those questionnaires would take an hour, 90 minutes to complete. Then about every 10 years, someone from the study would go sit in their living room and interview them for four hours. In addition, we would ask people to send us their medical records or give permission for their doctors to send us medical records. So we brought in data from their visits to hospitals and to healthcare providers. And then finally, we've had lab visits, we've had home visits,

as I say, where we record them talking to each other. So I would say that most years, it's been, you know, an hour to 90 minutes of their time. But then some years, maybe every five to 10 years, it's a half day or even a full day of time. This reminds me of those Michael Apted documentaries, which you no doubt have seen, 7 Up and 14 Up and 21 Up. It was just really a fascinating document to take snapshots of people's lives in this way. with one family's file, and it's enormously thick. And you can start leafing through the pages, and you are walking through someone's life, and then their spouse, and then their children, and it's really quite an amazing experience to do this. So back to Kahneman for a moment. So this disjunction between the remembering and experiencing self that he believes he's found.

And as far as I know, unless his thinking has changed on this, I think he believes it's sort of conceptually insurmountable, which is to say that there's no way of really integrating these discordant streams of data so as to produce a picture of human well-being that is truly coherent. And so to remind people of what's happening here, when you ask people how good their lives are, what you're bringing online is what he calls the remembering self, who's going to give you a story, a global appraisal of how good life is. And there you'll get one story. But if you prod the person at random intervals throughout their day with a, you know, kind of an experiencing sampling technique where you just, you give them a phone app, which asks them to rate how happy they are,

you know, whenever they get pinged. And let's say you did that 20 times a day for someone over the course of a year, you find that their stories about how good their lives are don't really mesh very well or coherently with the actual moment-to-moment character of their lives as they rate it on a spectrum of one to know, one to ten with respect to their feelings of well-being. And there are many reasons for this. I mean, we have various cognitive biases of the sort that Kahneman did much to conceptualize for us. And, you know, there are things like the, like recency effects or like what's called the peak-end rule, where in any experience, what's going to be most salient for someone when they're remembering it is the peak of the experience in terms of its intensity and how it ended. a wonderful vacation. If we were sampling your experience minute by minute, we would find a very high state of pleasure. But there was one really bad or embarrassing or awkward or awful thing that

happened that you'll never forget. And there was this weird glitch when you were leaving the hotel where they overcharged you for something and they wouldn't back down and you'll never go to that hotel again. So like 4% of your experience was bad, but it was this crucial 4% of this peak moment on the trip and the last moments of the trip. a story or tell anyone else a story about what that trip was like, you may have a very negative story to tell, and it will seem like an irrationally negative story given what your moment-to-moment experience was actually like. But the problem is, it's the remembering self, this more global reappraising self, that is the decider for all future plans, right? So there's really no one else to talk to apart from using one of these fairly ephemeral experience sampling techniques. So when you talk to this person or when this person has to then plan their next vacation, they're simply going to remember that it was a lousy trip because that bad thing happened and that hotel was unethical

and they're never going to that place again. And yet they're actually, in truth, somewhat delusional about what it was actually like to be them minute by minute over the course. If you could just sum the area under the curve of their moment-to-moment experience, that would be a story of very high well-being or high pleasure. And Danny's lesson that he draws from this, which I've actually never agreed with, is that you really can't integrate these two selves and that there's just no there there as far as coming up with a truly coherent picture of human well-being. I don't know if you have a take on that, Bob. Well, I think that that may explain in part why we are bad at knowing what makes us happy. You know, what you're saying, that there are these two very disparate sets of conclusions, right, or experiences. There's ongoing experience, which we really, really can't bring to bear on our assessments of our lives or planning for the future. And then

there's the story, the narrative that we create looking back. And so we do know from a series of experiments that we are bad at anticipating what's going to make us more happy and what's going to make us less happy. So we do end up chasing a lot of chimeras. Yeah, yeah. In brief, I've spoken about this before, but briefly where I think I disagree with Danny here is that you really only have one life, right? And so there really is just the life that's being doled out to you moment by moment.

And some of those moments are moments in which you tell yourself a story or are asked to tell someone else a story that has more global characteristics. And the consequences of having good stories to tell also are doled out to you in other moments. stories to tell also are doled out to you in other moments. I mean, it matters what kind of story you have to tell about yourself and the kinds of thoughts you think at four in the morning when you wake up and are brooding about your life. And you can become a better and better observer of what it's like to be you. You can become a better and better curator of the kinds of thoughts you think. You can become a better and better reframer of the kinds of stories you're apt to tell. And all of this matters. Ultimately, this is where things like meditation come into the

picture. But ultimately, it is all just the mind and its character moment to moment, and there's just these different aspects to it. And I think we can be more or less corrigible or incorrigible witnesses to what it's like to be us, and we can be frankly wrong about what it was like to be us over the course of any period of time. So you can think you had a great vacation because you're remembering a few salient moments, but you can actually be wrong about that. You're unaware of how much stress you were under and how awful you were to be with. And this is why it's often good to ask the spouse because the spouse can tell you how insufferable you've been over the course of any period of time. And so, you know, there is a

ground truth there to be gotten to, and it's just, you know, we can get, we can be better or worse at that project. Well, you know, the other thing I would add, Sam, is this, the element of not knowing. So we tell ourselves stories in retrospect, looking back on our experience, but we also tell ourselves stories in the moment. And one of the things that meditation does is it shows us that. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, Thank you. you