哈佛医学教授TED演讲：什么样的人活得更美好（中英文）
什么样的人才能活得更美好？
演讲者：罗伯特.瓦尔丁格
翻译：同济大学赵旭东教授
——罗伯特.瓦尔丁格教授在TED-X关于75年研究报告的励志演讲稿
生命进程中，是什么让我们保持健康和幸福？如果你现在开始着手规划未来最好的人生，你会把时间和精力花在哪里？回答有很多种，我们已经被无以计数的有关生活中最重要事物的图景轰炸了。媒体上充斥着那些富有、高声望、建立起自己事业帝国的成功人士故事。并且我们对这些故事坚信不疑。有个最新的调查，询问1980-2000年生的年轻人，他们最重要的人生目标有哪些。超过80%的人说，他们主要的生活目标是要变富有。这群年轻人中，还有50%说他们另一个主要生活目标是成名。
What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy? There are lots of answers out there. We are bombarded with images, what’s most important in life. The media are filled with stories of people who are rich and famous and building empires at work. And we believe those stories. There’s a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were. And over 80% said that the major life goal for them was to get rich. And another 50% of those same young adults said another major life goal was to become famous.
我们总是被告诫要投入工作，努力奋斗，完成更多。我们似乎觉得要生活得更好，这些就是我们需要追求的。可事实真是这样吗？这些真的是在人类生命历程中帮助他们保持幸福感的东西吗？
And we are constantly told to lean into work, and to push harder, and achieve more. We are given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life. But is that true? Is that really what keeps people happy as they go through life?
人一生中所做的选择以及这些选择怎样影响他们，我们几乎无从得知。我们对于人生绝大多数的理解，是从他人的回忆中获得的。我们知道，人是不可能有完整清楚的记忆的。我们生命中大部分发生过的事情我们都遗忘了。有时我们记忆形成过程简直充满创造性。马克·吐温曾经说过类似的话。他说道，“我人生中一些最悲惨的事情根本就没发生过。” 研究显示，随着年龄的增长，我们实际上以一种更积极的方式在保存我们的记忆。我想起一张广告上说的：“任何时候开始拥有幸福的童年，都不算晚。”
Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them,those pictures are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about human life, we know from asking people to remember the past. And as we know,hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in our lives. And sometimes memory was downright creative. Mark Twain understood this. He’s quoted as saying, “some of the worst things in my life never happened”.(Laughter) And research shows us that we actually remember the past more positively as we get older. And I’m reminded of a bumper sticker that says, ‘it’s never too late to have a happy childhood”. (Laughter)
但要是我们能够观察整个人生呢？要是我们能从人们青少年时期一直追踪到老年，去观察到底什么才是真正能够帮助人们保持幸福、健康的东西呢？我们已经做到了。
But, what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age, to see what really keeps people happy and healthy? We did that.
哈佛成人发展研究可能是目前有关成年人生活研究中历时最长的。75年间，我们追踪了724位男性。年复一年，我们询问他们的工作、家庭生活、他们的健康状况，当然我们在询问过程中并不知道他们的人生将会怎样。
这样的研究极为稀少。几乎所有类似的研究都在10年内流产了，原因可能是失访率太高，或者没有足够的经费支撑，或者研究者兴趣点转移或去世以后没有其他人接手。但是多亏了运气以及几代研究者的坚持，这项研究成活下来了。
在最早的724名男性中，大约有60位还在世，并继续参与这项研究，他们绝大多数都已经超过90岁了。现在我们正开始研究他们总数超过2000个的孩子们。而我是这项研究的第四任领导者。
The Harvard Studyof Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life, that’s ever been done. For 75 years, we’ve tracked the lives of 724 men. Year after year asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out.Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects of this kind fallapart within a decade, because too many people drop out of the study or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted or they die and nobody moves the ball further down the field. But through combination of luck and persistence of several generations of researchers, this study has survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their nineties. And we are now beginning to study themore than 2000 children of these men. And I’m the 4th director of the study.
从1938年起，我们追踪了2组男性。第一组在加入研究时还是哈佛大学大二的学生。他们属于Tom Brokaw所说的“最伟大的一代”。他们都在第二次世界大战期间完成大学学业。之后绝大多数人为战争工作。
另外一组我们追踪的群体是波士顿最贫穷区域的男孩。正是因为他们来自于20世纪30年代波士顿麻烦最多、最底层的家庭，才被选入我们的研究。多数人都住在出租屋里，许多甚至没有热的或冷的自来水。当他们入选研究之后，所有的青少年都接受面谈和医学检查。我们去他们家里对他们的父母进行访谈。
后来这群青少年长大成人，进入社会各行各业。有的成了工厂工人，成了律师、泥瓦匠、医生，有一位成为美国总统。有的成了酒精依赖者，一些患上精神分裂症。有的从社会底层一路爬升到上流社会。而一些人却沿着相反的方向走过这段人生旅程。
Since 1938, we’ve tracked the lives of 2 groups of men. The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. They were from, what Tom Brokaw has called, the greatest generation. They all finished college during World War II. And then most went off to serve in the war. And the second group that we followed was a group of boys from the Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Boys, who were chosen for this study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in Boston of the 1930s. Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water. When they entered the study, all of theseteenagers were interviewed, they were given medical exams. We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents. And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life. They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, and one president of the United States. Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top. And some made that journey in the opposite direction.
