What Makes a Good life?

In this Ted talk Robert Waldinger talked about the study in Harvard, which is to study men from their young age till they grew older. They started up with 2 groups of men, the wealthy ones finished college to then serve at war. The other group was the poor group, they became adults which entered all walks of life being successful. Some climbed all the way from the bottom to the top, and some from the top to the bottom. And they discovered that good relationships keep us healthy and make us happier, and that loneliness kills. In fact people that are lonely are reported to be less happy, their health declines earlier in mid life, and their brain functionality declines sooner, and they live shorter lives. And it's not about you having a relationship but the quality of it. Just like the men they studied, the quality of their relationship is what would keep them happy and healthy in life. And another thing they learned is that good relationships keep our brains protected.

This TED talk can somehow relate to the "beguiling truth of beauty"article, because even though the talk is about relationships and the article is about beauty, they are mainly about having a good life. In the talk what makes a good life are good relations and in the article what makes a good life is to stop judging ourselves critically and start appreciating ourselves. And this also applies to the poem "barbie doll". The poem is about the judgements of society on someone's aspects, which leads them to a horrible life with poor brain sanity, but Robert Waldinger explained that lonely people don't have a healthy brain. Even if in the poem what led to an unhealthy brain was the impact of society on a person, it still relates to that by the way of life you get by having an unhealthy brain. Now this whole study succeeded because first they insisted on trying, and secondly they had luck. A lot of other research like these were started but didn't succeed because people died very early or they didn't have a future, or for other reasons. But luckily this one did succeed and probably helped out a lot of people in making their lives better. And just as Mr. Robert ended with a quote for Mark Twain that says: “There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”