In the fall of 1966, at a university in the Northeast, 350 students signed up for a psychological survey on personal development and happiness. In 1977, Susan Krauss Whitbourne, then a young psychology professor, came across the study and decided to expand it. She tracked down the study's original participants and questioned them every decade until she had forty years' worth of data. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Whitbourne reveals the findings of this extensive project, a seminal piece of research into how people change over the course of their lifetimes. The results indicate something fascinating: No matter how old or how content you might currently feel, it is never too late to steer your life toward a greater sense of purpose and satisfaction.

Western society often paints a pessimistic view of aging, a "best years are behind you" attitude. But Whitbourne challenges this notion and posits that it's possible to find fulfillment at any age. Guided by her research, she identifies five different life pathways and provides a questionnaire that will help you discover which one you are currently on:

• The Meandering Way You have a low sense of identity, lack priorities, and feel lost, unable to settle on a clear set of goals.

• The Downward Slope You seem to have it all, until one or two poor decisions send your life into a spiral.

• The Straight and Narrow Way You embrace predictability, shy away from risk, and don't enjoy shaking up your routine

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• The Triumphant Trail Your inner resilience has allowed you to overcome significant challenges that could have left you despondent.

• The Authentic Road You take a bold and honest look at your life, assess whether it's truly satisfying, and take the necessary risks to get back on track.

Whitbourne shows how you can work yourself off a negative pathway and onto one that is more fulfilling. And if you identify yourself as being on one of the more positive pathways, you'll learn how to keep enhancing your feelings of satisfaction.

Filled with insight and candid personal profiles of Whitbourne's subjects, The Search for Fulfillment offers proof that change is not only possible but ultimately rewarding. Revolutionary and inspirational, this encouraging book provides a new way of looking at our lives - and a guidepost for making changes for the better, at any age.

Chapter 1

As she sifts through the day's e-mails, Barbara pauses to admire the sparkling diamond on her ring finger, a present from William, her fourth (yes, fourth) husband. (I have changed all of the subjects' names and identifying characteristics but have otherwise stayed true to the information that I have collected about them.) She and William just celebrated their fifteenth anniversary, but Barbara still shudders to think that she burned through three previous marriages in twenty years.

Back when her college pals were in the social whirl, Barbara - now one of the country's leading nuclear physicists - was working furiously in the lab. By the time she was a senior, she had spent two summers training at the premier nuclear research lab in the country. But her parents couldn't understand how a pretty girl like Barbara could be interested in spending all her time in the basement of the science building.

So Barbara made her parents happy by marrying her boyfriend. He was nice enough but not her intellectual equal. And in fact he wasn't so nice when she started spending nights and weekends at school working on her graduate thesis. Once after running an experiment until three in the morning, she stumbled home to find that he had cleared out of their apartment.

Marriage number two lasted ten years and produced her two oldest children. Although she could write her first divorce off to marrying too early, or marrying just to please her parents, she couldn't figure out what exactly she did wrong in the second one. Yet, shortly after it ended, she was once again ready to try again. Marriage number three brought her a lovely boy, ten years after she thought that her motherhood days were pretty much behind her. She never imagined having four husbands, but she never imagined having three children, either.

It took three husbands to get to William, but he was worth it. A medical researcher specializing in neurodegenerative diseases, William retired a few years ago. William doesn't seem to mind Barbara's long hours, her preoccupation, her endless wondering about whether she handled a delicate situation correctly. Yes, Barbara has finally met the man who not only is her intellectual equal but who also really understands what makes her tick.

Still, Barbara is filled with self-doubts. Despite a significant record of scientific accomplishments, she's scarred from her colleagues' hostile reception of her as a pioneering female scientist. And while she appears to have it all - a stimulating job, a beautiful home, a loving husband, and three well-adjusted children, she wonders: Why am I not happier? She knows that she's been tough to live with, and now she is beginning to see, perhaps for the first time in her life, just how tough she has been. This is probably a good realization, but it will not lead to her being able to dismiss her feelings of regret and despair.

Barbara was born with a particular temperament and abilities that blossomed in her childhood. As an adult, she made many choices that changed the course of her life and was also a victim of circumstances beyond her control. Where, then, do we begin if we want to pick apart Barbara's history to figure out how she can feel more fulfilled now?

I've put Barbara's and dozens of her fellow baby boomers' lives under the microscope, in the hope of proving or disproving the assumptions we make about what will bring us happiness, and to show whether and - more important - how we can change as adults. I've used the theory of Erik Erikson to guide me in my analyses, a theory that posits that adults do continue to develop well past the point of physical maturation. But these changes, Erikson believed, don't necessarily happen in a predictable lockstep fashion. Understanding how change occurs and how we can make change work to our benefit is one of the key themes in this book.

Copyright © 2009 by Susan Krauss Whitbourne.

Tags: Happiness

About the Author

Susan Krauss Whitbourne is a pioneer in the study of adult development and has been leading the field for more than thirty years. She received her doctorate in psychology from Columbia University and is currently a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Whitbourne has been interviewed and cited in numerous articles in publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, Redbook and Glamour. A licensed psychologist, she lives with her husband in Amherst, Massachusetts.