My interest in the lives of middle-aged men began in 1949, the year I was five and my 43-year-old father overdosed on sleeping pills. My dad had become increasingly depressed when he couldn’t support his family doing the job he loved. Although he didn’t die, our lives were never the same. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to help other families avoid the suffering my family experienced.
Two other men have been interested in men’s lives for a long time. Robert Waldinger, MD is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Marc Schulz, PhD is associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. They have been friends and colleagues for over thirty years and recently wrote a groundbreaking book on how we can all create happier and more meaningful lives.
In The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Largest Scientific Study of Happiness, they say
“The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938, with the intention of ‘investigating not what made people sick but what made them thrive.’ The initial 724 subjects were young men and boys from the Boston area drawn from two populations: 268 were Harvard undergraduates and 456 were from inner-city and disadvantaged Boston neighborhoods.
Subjects agreed to answer a detailed set of survey and interview questions every two years. Collected over hundreds of lifetimes, the biennial check-ins built detailed portraits of participants’ health using emotional well-being surveys, medical tests and biographical interviews.
We all want to be happy and live a great life, but what does that actually mean? Drs. Waldinger and Schultz begin to answer this question by drawing on the wisdom of the past.
“More than two thousand years ago Aristotle used a term that is still widely used in psychology today bliss. It refers to a stage of deep well-being in which a person feels that his life has sense and purpose.Often contrasted with pleasure (the origin of the word hedonism), referring to the fleeting happiness of various pleasures.”
They go on to say,
“If hedonistic happiness is what you mean when you say you have one good time, then blissful happiness is what we mean when we say Life is beautiful. It’s the kind of prosperity that can withstand both the ups and the downs.”
When my father couldn’t find a job, he blamed himself, he thought he was a failure as a man and that my mother and I would be better off without him. I wrote about his recovery and his journey to find true happiness in my memoir, My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family, and offer an online course for how we can all heal the father’s wound.
Waldinger and Schultz begin their book with a simple question:
“If you had to make a life choice, right now, to put yourself on the road to future health and happiness, what would it be?”
Think about that for a moment. If the genie of happiness gave you a wish, what would you choose?
The authors suggest the ones that studies have shown people have chosen.
“Would you choose to put more money into savings each month? Should we change careers? Would you decide to travel more?’
In a 2007 survey, millennials were asked about their most important goals.
“Seventy-six percent said getting rich was their number one goal, and fifty percent said their main goal was becoming famous.”
What does science really tell us? I encourage you to read the book. It is full of stories and the facts are clear. Here’s the short answer with three important things we’ve learned over the past 86 years of study:
- First, being social is better for our health and well-being – and conversely, loneliness kills.
- Second, having close, higher-quality connections is more important to our well-being than the number of connections.
- Third, having good relationships is not only good for our bodies but also for our brains.
“We once followed people in the Harvard study until they were 80,”
say Drs. Waldinger and Schultz,
“We wanted to look back at them in middle age to see if we could predict who would develop into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who would not. So we put together everything we knew about them at age 50 and found that it wasn’t their midlife cholesterol levels that predicted how they’d age. was how satisfied they were with their relationships. People who were most satisfied with their relationships in their 50s were the healthiest (mentally and physically) in their 80s.”
This is crucial. Throughout human history most people have died by the age of 50. Now, many of us will experience a full second of adulthood in our 80s, 90s and beyond. The decisions we make in midlife will determine whether our future is one of joy and prosperity or despair and misery. (The dictionary offers this example to describe the word: “He had passed directly from middle age to penury.”) You certainly don’t want to be you.
You can hear Dr. Waldinger summarize the Harvard Study at a 13 minute TED talk which has amassed twenty-five million views.
Because joining a men’s group is the only thing middle-aged men need to do to have a great life
I turned 80 last December and feel very fortunate to have focused on relationships my entire life. My wife, Carlin, and I have been happily married for 44 years. Carlin will tell you that one of the main reasons she feels we’ve had a successful 44-year marriage is because I’ve been in a men’s group for 45 years.
For over fifty years, I have been a psychotherapist specializing in helping middle-aged men and their families live fully healthy lives. I have found that middle age is a time when men’s health can improve dramatically or begin to decline. It can be the most passionate, powerful, productive and purposeful period of a man’s life. Or is it a time when men start going downhill.
Even when men recognize the critical importance of cultivating good relationships with their spouse, family, friends, and acquaintances, most would not believe that joining a men’s group was the most important thing a man could do. However, I believe it is.
I was 36 years old when I first joined the men’s team. I believe that being part of the group has been the single most important thing that has contributed to my health and happiness. My latest book, Long live Men! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Men, Close the Lifespan Gap, and Bring Hope to Humanity in detail I learned about life, love, intimacy and the importance of men coming together in groups in middle age.
My friend and colleague, Chip Conley, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modern Elder Academy. In his book, Learning to love middle age: 12 reasons life gets better with age He says middle age can last from 35 to 75 years and details three stages:
- 35 to 50. We tend to go through some of the most challenging physical and emotional transitions—kind of like adult puberty.
- 50 to 60 is the core of middle age when we settle into this new era and see some of the positives.
- 60 to 75 is when we are young enough to continue working and live a very vital life, but old enough to see and plan for what comes next: our senior years.
I was fortunate to be on the men’s team during this early middle age and to still be on the team when I graduated to the Embassy stage.
In my book, 12 rules for good men, I say,
“Rule #1 is to join a group of men. Looking back at our heritage as men and our lives as hunter-gatherers over the past two million years, one of the things that stands out to me is that men spend a significant amount of time in small groups with other men. This happened naturally as men left the camp hunting game to feed their families and tribe.’
In more recent times, men have experienced this deep connection by going to war. As Waldinger and Schultz say in their study,
“Every college student in the Harvard study had plans by the early 1940s. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and every plan, for every student, went out the window—89 percent of college men fought in the war, and their lives were deeply affected by it. However, almost all of the men at the college reported feeling proud that they served, and many remember it as one of the best and most meaningful times in their lives despite the challenges.”
Sebastian Junger is the best-selling author of several books including The Perfect Storm, Tribe, and War. He says,
“Americans fall in love with war, even when they say they don’t believe in it. Young men in the West no longer have a sense of what it means to be a man — and some of them are going to war to find out. We all want peace, but we are all fascinated by the drama of war. It goes beyond our moral convictions.”
I believe that in order to have healthy relationships with spouses, friends and family, we need to take risks and challenge ourselves. We need to find our place in the company of men we can trust in our lives. We must open up to our deepest fears and know that we are fully accepted for who we are. We don’t have to go to war to do that.
I found what I needed in a men’s group and share my experience in a recent article, “Til Death Do We Part: The Life and Times of My 45-Year-Old Men’s Group.” I have participated in a number of powerful men’s group experiences over the years. Here are some resources I recommend:
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