From the TED talk, “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness,” Robert Waldinger says that a recent survey shows that when asked what was the most important life goals, 80 percent responded by saying they wanted to get rich and another 50 percent of those young adults said they wanted to become famous.  He goes on to say that were constantly being told to work harder and achieve more. That in order to have a good life we need things. He asks the audience what would happen if we could watch our whole lives unfold through time? What would happen if we study people from the time we were teenagers to the old ages to see what really kept us happy and even healthy? In fact, they did that. “Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile communication and I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I’ve found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they’ve quickly come to seem familiar,just how we do things.” When the teenagers entered the experiment they were all interviewed and given medical exams. He says that “They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors,one President of the United States.Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia.Some climbed the social ladderfrom the bottom all the way to the very top,and some made that journey in the opposite direction.”  He goes on to end his TED talk by saying that the people in the 75-year study were the happiest in their retirement. Where the people who had actively worked stopped. The people who fared the best were the ones who leaned into relationships with family, friends, and the community.