At 22, the future feels like something we can shape if we make enough good choices. We ask what work we'll do, who we'll marry, where we'll live, what we'll believe, and what kind of person we hope to become.
Those choices matter because some of them change everything. But I've come to think the two decisions that matter most may be years apart.
The first is the life we decide to build. We choose a direction, fall in love, take a job, raise children, make friends, worship, save money, and put together a future we can almost see. Nobody gets every choice right, but most of us spend the first half of adulthood trying to create a life that resembles the one we imagined.
“The lessons aren’t about wealth, or fame, or working harder and harder,” said Waldinger in a 2015 TED Talk that has been viewed nearly 50 million times.
”The clearest message is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.”
“The clearest message is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period … It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier; they are physically healthier and live longer than people who are less well connected.”
The data collected by the study over decades, consisting of medical records, brain scans, in-person interviews and questionnaires, is a treasure trove of information that can be used for research beyond that of Waldinger’s group.
As of now, the Harvard Study is collaborating with researchers from the Boston Veterans Administration, Northwestern University, University of Malmo in Sweden, and Bryn Mawr College.
One of those collaborations looks at lead exposure in childhood, through air and water, and its potential impact on physical and mental health by using the study’s data on participants and the neighborhoods where they grew up, including lead exposure, and their physical and mental well-being throughout their lives.
This collaborative study also aims to examine whether long-term effects of exposure to lead affect levels of juvenile delinquency, dropping out of school, or developing dementia later in life.
Wealth and professional success don't carry the weight many of us once assumed they would.
Then life gets a vote, sometimes without warning. A doctor says a word you never expected to hear, a marriage ends, a company eliminates your job, a parent dies, a child struggles, money gets tight, or your body stops cooperating.
The future you carefully arranged can suddenly look nothing like the one standing in front of you. Somewhere inside that change comes the second decision: Who am I going to be now?
I think that choice may reveal more about us than everything that came before it. We can become angry at the world, keep score for years, blame somebody for every disappointment, or withdraw from people who still love us because they remind us of what we lost.
We can also decide that pain doesn't get to write the rest of the story. Psychologists describe resilience as successful adaptation to difficult experiences through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility.
The process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. A number of factors contribute to how well people adapt to adversities, predominant among them (a) the ways in which individuals view and engage with the world, (b) the availability and quality of social resources, and (c) specific coping strategies.
Psychological research demonstrates that the resources and skills associated with more positive adaptation (i.e., greater resilience) can be cultivated and practiced. Also called psychological resilience.
Resilience doesn't mean pretending loss doesn't hurt; it means suffering can be real without becoming our identity.
To determine the association between meaning in life and all-cause and cause-specific mortality, and whether associations vary by depression or sociodemographic factors.
Methods:
Participants were UK Biobank cohort members who reported on their meaning in life in the mental health assessment from October 2016 to July 2017 (N=153,505). All-cause mortality and cause-specific mortality were identified from ICD-10 codes from national death registries through December 2022.
Results:
Over the up to six-year follow-up, every standard deviation higher in meaning in life was associated with a 15% decreased risk of death from any cause (HR=.87, 95% CI=.85-.90, p<.001). The association was attenuated but remained significant accounting for socioeconomic, clinical, and behavioral risk factors (HR=.91, 95% CI=.88-.94, p<.001). Meaning in life was associated with reduced risk of death from 7 of the 8 cause-specific deaths examined: external cause (47%), respiratory (41%), nervous (32%), digestive (25%), or circulatory (15%) systems, COVID-19 (28%), and cancer (8%). Depression concurrent with the meaning assessment did not explain or moderate these associations, which indicated that meaning was similarly protective when concurrently experiencing psychological distress. The association between meaning and all-cause mortality was similar across age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status but slightly stronger among female than male participants.
Conclusion:
Feeling that one’s life has meaning is associated with lower risk of mortality, particularly causes of death due to the respiratory system, nervous system, or COVID-19. Given that meaning in life can be modified through intervention, future research could address whether it could be a useful target of intervention.
Science can't tell us why one person keeps moving when another gives up, but it continues to find evidence that purpose and connection matter.
Age changes the questions we ask. When we're young, people want to know what we're going to do with our lives. Careers, marriages, families, faith, and responsibilities often grow from the answer.
Later, life may ask something harder: What are you going to do with the life you actually got? Few of us reach middle age carrying every dream we started with. There are names we miss, doors that closed, mistakes we'd undo, and versions of ourselves we thought we'd become.
Maturity may begin when we quit measuring life against the plan and start asking what good we can still do with years in front of us.
The first great decision says, "Here's the life we want."
The second says, "Here is the person I will be, even now."
We don't control every chapter, and we never did. But until the last page, character remains a choice.
"Dirty Harry writes for PJ Media, apparently." - Redstater in a Blue Apocalypse
David Manney writes for PJ Media with the outlook of someone who has spent nearly sixty years watching the world with both eyes open. He leans on plain language, lived experience, and a stubborn belief that character still matters, even when no one is paying attention. A former graphic designer, marketing content specialist, marketing professional, journalist, and technical writer, he tries to sort truth from noise and share what he sees without theatrics.
He lives in the Midwest with his wife, who is smarter than he is and far more graceful about it, along with their two dogs, Watson and Mabel. Manney often jokes that he has never faked sarcasm in his life, and most days his columns prove it. Follow him on X here.
