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Healthy body weight. Avoid obesity. Without being fanatical, maintain a body weight in the normal range, eating in a moderate, healthy way without yo-yo dieting or crazy restrictions you can’t maintain over the long run. 4. Exercise. Stay physically active, even with a sedentary job. Arguably the single best, time-tested way to do this is walking every day. (More on that later.) 5. Adaptive coping style. That means confronting problems directly, appraising them honestly, and dealing with them directly without excessive rumination, unhealthy emotional reactions, or avoidance behavior.
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As he puts it, “Happiness is love. Full stop.”[7] He elaborates a little: “There are two pillars of happiness. . . . One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”[8] And just for good measure, he quotes Virgil: “Omnia vincit amor”: Love conquers all.
“The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty.”
“Interaction with family members is often dictated by obligation, whereas interaction with friends is primarily motivated by pleasure.”[43]
You need strong human connections to help you get on the second curve and flourish. • No matter how introverted you are, you cannot expect to thrive into old age without healthy, intimate relationships. • For married people, a loving, companionate spousal relationship is key to thriving. • Marriage and family are not an adequate substitute for close friendships, which should not be left up to chance. • Friendship is a skill that requires practice, time, and commitment. • Work friendships are not a substitute for real friendships, although they can also be satisfying, if designed purposively.
Love and friendships are enormously time-consuming, it’s true.
Remember, a classic sign of addictive behavior is when something not human starts to supplant human relationships.
Acknowledging this truth requires facing what the workaholic is avoiding with the extra hour of work. If it is dysfunctional relationships themselves—possibly brought on by years of neglect—it will only get worse by indulging the addiction.
yourself. Often, change is just an idea in our heads until we say it out loud.
I regularly write out a list of the people with whom I need a stronger relationship. Then I list next to each of them what they need from me that only I can provide. For example, there are things that only I can do for my wife. There are some things only I can do for my adult children. When those things are neglected, relationships starve.
The scholars followed up a year later to find out how the participants were doing. To begin with, people generally achieved their goals: those who wanted great relationships had them, while those who wanted money and power were on track to get those things. This is a pretty important finding: you are probably going to get what you wish for in life.
people with intrinsic goals had happier lives after a year.
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, power, pleasure, and honor—that lead to self-objectification, but that never satisfy. To break the attachment to these idols requires movement to a new stage of life, with a new set of skills—spiritual skills.
And that new stage? It is called vanaprastha, which comes from two Sanskrit words meaning “retiring” and “into the forest.”[1]
This is the stage at which we purposively begin to pull back from our old personal and professional duties, becoming more and more devoted to spirituality and deep wisdom, crystallized intelligence, teaching, and faith.
That would be sannyasa, the last spiritual stage that comes in old age. This is the stage totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment. In times past, some Hindu men
“Know yourself,” he finally said. “That is all. Nothing else. Nothing else can release.” “How?” I asked. “By going within,” he replied. “When your mind is quieter, you will find that treasure waiting for you within.”
When you spend serious time and effort focused on transcendental things, it puts your little world into proper context and takes the focus off yourself.
When spiritual urges arise, the appropriate course of action for adults is not to cross-reference them to naïve ideas we had as children—we wouldn’t do that in any other area of life. Rather, it is to look to greater minds than our own.
If you admit your view of your childhood religion was naïve, you can allow yourself to search for transcendental truths not as you first learned them, but rather from a mature, critical perspective. This requires that you emancipate yourself from the cartoon versions in your mind—leave them behind—and expose yourself with an openness to the thinking and writing of scholars and worthy practitioners.
The solution here is to stop seeing your spiritual development as a side interest but rather to put it front and center. If I told you that you had a serious health problem requiring that you exercise half an hour a day and take some medicine, you would do it.
As I walk, I envision myself as one of seven billion people existing briefly on a timeline lasting millions of years from the past into the future. I consider the insignificance not of my life, but of the worldly details with which I usually distract myself from metaphysical truths.
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.
It seems counterintuitive, to say the least, that Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear his own—and others’—music. But maybe it isn’t so surprising. As his hearing deteriorated, he was less influenced by the prevailing compositional fashions and more by the music forming inside his own head. His early work is pleasantly reminiscent of his instructor Joseph Haydn’s music. Beethoven’s later work became so original that he was, and is, regarded as the father of music’s Romantic period. “He opened up a new world in music,” said
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It would be naïve to think that Beethoven fully appreciated the artistic freedom his deafness granted him.
There is a falling tide to life, the transition from fluid to crystallized intelligence. This is an intensely productive and fertile period. It is when you jump from one curve to the other; when you face your success addiction; when you chip away the inessential parts of life; when you ponder your death; when you build your relationships; when you start your vanaprastha.
Unfortunately, the falling tide of your life is also incredibly scary and difficult—it may even feel like some sort of midlife crisis. It might feel like everything you’ve worked for is rushing away. Seeing it as tragedy can be easier than seeing it as opportunity.
The bottom line is that no one is doomed to turn into John DeLorean because of some temporary insanity at midlife. One thing we do know, however, is that people naturally tend to experience a big transition in the middle of adult life. We sense the decline in our fluid intelligence and that we need a change. If we know there’s a crystallized intelligence curve behind it and are making a reset, we enter liminality.
In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”[24]
primary goal was finding meaning in their work.[25]
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 and meaningful is interesting.
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.” Unless you share existential goals with protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
The writer David Foster Wallace once said, astutely, “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”[2]
