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“The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty.”
2018, 46 percent of Americans felt alone, and 43 percent of Americans felt that their relationships were not meaningful.
In other words, the kind of people who don’t know how to manage social interactions outside of work get lonelier when they retire. That describes a lot of successful people I know.
top two loneliest professions, according to the Harvard Business Review, are lawyers and doctors.[17]
Work friendships are so important that 70 percent of people say friendship at work is the most important element to a happy work life, and 58 percent say they would turn down a higher-paying job if it meant not getting along with coworkers.
The positive side of the ledger yielded few surprises: The top three activities were, in order: sex, socializing, and relaxing. The top three happiness-inducing interaction partners were friends, relatives, and spouse (which seem out of order, given the activities list, but no matter). The top three activities for producing negative feelings were working, childcare, and commuting (sorry, kids). The second and third most negative interaction partners were clients and coworkers. But the top spot for negative interactions? The boss. No one wants to hang around with the lonely boss.
More recent research has shown that subordinates objectify leaders by seeing them not as people per se, but as dispensers of power, information, and money.[26]
makes peer-to-peer friendship impossible and leaves the boss, who might be a former colleague, socially alone.
marriage per se accounts for only 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life.[31] The important thing for health and well-being is relationship satisfaction.
The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.
the research finds that contact with unrelated friends is more strongly correlated with well-being than contact with adult children.[42] As two scholars on friendship put it, “Interaction with family members is often dictated by obligation, whereas interaction with friends is primarily motivated by pleasure.”
The first ashrama is brahmacharya, the period of youth and young adulthood dedicated to learning. The second is grihastha, when a person builds a career, accumulates wealth, and maintains a family. This second stage seems fairly straightforward and uncontroversial, but in this stage the Hindu philosophers find one of life’s most common traps: People become attached to its earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime. Sound familiar? This is another description of being stuck on the fluid intelligence curve, chasing Aquinas’s four idols—money,
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To break the attachment to these idols requires movement to a new stage of life, with a new set of skills—spiritual skills. The change can be painful, Acharya said, like becoming an adult for a second time. And it means letting go of things that defined us in the eyes of the world. In other words, we have to move beyond the worldly rewards to experience transition and find wisdom in a new ashrama—and so defeat the scourge of attachments. That ordinarily occurs, if we are diligent, around age fifty. And that new stage? It is called vanaprastha, which comes from two Sanskrit words meaning
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But you must be prepared to walk away from these achievements and rewards before you feel ready. The decline in your fluid intelligence is a sign that it is time not to rage, which just doubles down on your unsatisfying attachments and leads to frustration. Rather, it is time to scale up your crystallized intelligence, use your wisdom, and share it with others.
Most of our days, I am thinking me, me, me. It’s like watching the same dreary television show, over and over, all day long. It’s so boring.
“It’s your road and yours alone,” wrote the Sufi poet Rumi.[16] “Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.”
The lesson is that if you want to make a deep human connection with someone, your strengths and worldly successes won’t cut it. You need your weaknesses for that. If I had gone to a fancy college, it might impress people but it wouldn’t establish a connection with most of them. “Elite” means not many have that distinction, and that distinction is hard to attain. Elite credentials don’t make you relatable. They are a barrier to deep human connection.
“It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering,” replied Colbert. “I don’t want it to have happened . . . but if you are grateful for your life . . . then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.”[10]
“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.”
Sigmund Freud believed that trauma from pain and loss is always harmful to a person, and relief requires getting beyond trauma’s often-hidden mal-effects.
Emerging research shows clearly that most people are resilient—even more, that they grow from losses and negative events.[14]
sadness has persisted in the face of evolution because it brings cognitive benefits.[15] There is evidence that it makes us better at assessing reality in social situations, because we are less likely to flatter ourselves or gloss over negative truths.
“Meaning involves negative affect and worry about loss.”
person of your considerable accomplishment who is unafraid to say, “I once was better at this than I am.”
finding that a significant change in life occurs, on average, every eighteen months, and that lifequakes like his—or those that involve voluntary or involuntary career changes—happen very regularly. Most are involuntary—and thus unwelcome at the time—but nothing is more predictable than change.
even collective transitions on the scale of the slow-rolling, life-changing coronavirus pandemic are normal and regular, happening about once a decade.
even unwelcome transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than they are in real time. Indeed, Feiler finds that 90 percent of the time, people ultimately report that their transition was a success, insofar as they made it through in one piece and with no permanent setbacks. Even better, research shows that we tend to see important past events—even undesirable ones at the time—as net positives over time.[9] This is in part because unpleasant feelings fade more than pleasant feelings do, a phenomenon known as “fading affect bias.”
In fact, it is the difficult, painful transitions that can yield the greatest understanding of purpose in our lives. Research on how people derive meaning has uncovered that we actually need periods of pain and struggle that make us temporarily unhappy.[10] To quote one study from 2013 that surveyed a national random sample of 397 adults, “Worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness.”
She herself wrote that as she entered middle age, “some intruder shook me by the psyche and shouted: Take stock! Half your life has been spent.”
In your next phase of life . . . What activities will you keep? What activities will you evolve and do differently? What activities will you let go of? What new activities will you learn? And to start . . . What will you commit to doing in the next week to evolve into the new you? What will you commit to doing in the next month? What will you commit to doing within six months? In a year, what will be the first fruits to appear as a result of your commitments?
This is just an example of the age-old debate over two kinds of happiness that scholars refer to as hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both. Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry. In the quest for the professional marshmallow, I think we should seek work that is a balance of enjoyable and meaningful. At the nexus of enjoyable
Our worldly urges for money, power, pleasure, and prestige come from our ancient limbic brains. We also instinctively want to be happy and satisfied. We then make an erroneous connection: “Since I have these urges, following them must make me happy.” But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not hers. And matters are hardly helped by Mother Nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.”
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Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.
The problem is not the noun things, but the verb to love. Things are to use, not to love. If you remember only one lesson from this book, it should be that love is at the epicenter of our happiness. Around the year 400, the great Saint Augustine summarized this lesson as the secret to a good life: “Love and do what you will.”[1] But love is reserved for people, not things; to misplace your love is to invite frustration and futility—to get on the hedonic treadmill and set it to ultra-fast.
my columns in The Washington Post in 2019 and 2020, and later in my “How to Build a Life” column at The Atlantic. I am grateful to my Washington Post editors Mark Lasswell and Fred Hiatt, and at The Atlantic, Rachel Gutman, Jeff Goldberg, Julie Beck, and Ena Alvarado-Esteller.
Bowerman, Mary. (2017). “These Are the Top 10 Bucket List Items on Singles’ Lists.” USA Today, May 18, 2017.
