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September 17 - October 3, 2022
Education. More education leads to a more active mind later on,
Stable, long-term relationships.
According to George Vaillant, the single most important trait of Happy-Well elders is healthy relationships. As he puts it, “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
“The lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this . . . study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” Further, “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty.”
“Solitude expresses the glory of being alone, whereas loneliness expresses the pain of feeling alone.”[9] Loneliness is the experience of emotional and social isolation.
Research has established that the stress it creates leads to lowered immunity to disease, insomnia, cognitive sluggishness, and higher blood pressure.[11] Lonely people tend toward high-calorie, high-fat diets and lead more sedentary lives than non-lonely people.
The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration has declared a “loneliness epidemic,” specifically citing the increasing phenomena of “no participation in social groups, fewer friends, and strained relationships” as the culprits.
Cigna has devoted significant resources to understanding why social isolation is increasing, finding that in 2018, 46 percent of Americans felt alone, and 43 percent of Americans felt that their relationships were not meaningful.
While gender and age aren’t good predictors, marital status matters: married people are less lonely than those who are divorced, widowed, and never married. However, loneliest of all are those who are married but with an “absent spouse.”
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.
The top two loneliest professions, according to the Harvard Business Review, are lawyers and doctors.[17] Both of these are high-skill, high-pay, high-prestige professions
Wrapped up in their fear of falling behind, success-addicted workaholics—like all people controlled by their addictive behavior—leave little room in their lives for friends or family.
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 top three activities for producing negative feelings were working, childcare, and commuting (sorry, kids).
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.
Later research found that leaders often purposely distance themselves from employees so they can appraise their performance fairly.
The relationships that best mitigate loneliness—the aspens closest to us that we need to cultivate—are romantic partnerships and close friendships.
But staying together is not what really counts. Analysis of the Harvard Study data shows that 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.
Romance often hijacks our brains in a way that can cause the highs of elation or the depths of despair.[33] You might accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an
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.
Being rooted in friendship is the reason that companionate love creates true happiness.[35] Passionate love, which relies on attraction, does not typically last beyond the novelty stage of the relationship. Companionate love relies on its very familiarity.
“The well-being benefits of marriage are much greater for those who also regard their spouse as their best friend.”
You can be single and happy if you have other close, fulfilling family links and friendships. But, equally important, your marriage cannot be your only true friendship.
Marriage bonds are more emotionally important to men as they age than they are to older women, because for many men, work has crowded out friendships, and those they have are more focused on, say, golf than feelings.[41] Their wives have invested elsewhere for emotional support, which frankly is prudent and wise.
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.”
name two or three real friends. If you are married, take out your spouse. Now, be honest: When was the last time you talked to each of these “real friends” in depth? Would you be comfortable calling them if you were in trouble? If you struggled to name two or three, there’s a problem. And if you haven’t talked to them in a few months, or wouldn’t call them in a crisis, you are most likely mixing up real friends with deal friends.
Numerous studies have shown that one of the great markers for happiness among people at midlife and beyond is people who can rattle off the names of a few authentic, close friends.
“I just don’t have time.” Love and friendships are enormously time-consuming, it’s true. They crowd out all kinds of other things, like . . . well, let’s be honest: for many readers of this book, they mostly crowd out work. If that’s the case for you, and it’s what is holding back the proper development of romance, parenting, and real friendships, you have your priorities unbalanced.
The cognitive error that feeds them is the idea that our time is limitless, so the marginal decision—what to do with the next hour—is not very important in the broad scheme of things. We come face-to-face with this error when time is up and it’s too late.
Christensen died a few months after I arrived at Harvard, but his legacy looms large at HBS, in no small part because of his famous book, How Will You Measure Your Life?
Love relationships are not hierarchical, but reciprocal. They require giving what people want and need, not that which is most convenient to the giver.
The second finding is the really profound one, though: people with intrinsic goals had happier lives after a year. Meanwhile, the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear.
An intimate friendship, whether it be from the companionate love of your spouse or an Aristotelian “perfect friend,” is better than any professional success. It will salve the wounds of professional decline like nothing else.
The reason Bach died a happy man was not because of his success as a composer, which had decreased greatly over the last decades of his life. It was because of the relationships he had cultivated, which became the animating force behind his own professional change from compositional innovator to master teacher.
In truth, English is an impoverished language when it comes to love. In Greek, for example, there are several distinct words for love: philia (the love between friends), eros (romantic love), storge (the love by parents of children), philautia (self-love), and xenia (hospitality, or love of the stranger).
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.
A common question I get is whether this higher focus must be religious or spiritual. Can it be, say, an interest in philosophy? To this, the answer is yes. A perfect example is the growing interest today among young people in ancient Greek thinking—specifically, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy.
Fulfillment cannot come when the present moment is little more than a struggle to bear in order to attain the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of a new present, and the glorious end state never arrives.
Each present moment, in turn, provides small satisfactions we miss when the focus is only on bigger and better.
Many have written about the so-called “gratitude walk,” the practice of focusing on the positive events in your life while walking, helping you to savor happiness by amplifying gratitude.
When we think of our identities as fixed and unchanging—I am this kind of person; I am not that kind of person—we’re shutting ourselves off from many of life’s possibilities.
To see weakness as purely negative is a mistake. Weakness befalls us all, and in many ways. It has its discomforts to be sure and entails loss. But it is also an opportunity—to connect more deeply with others;
the transition from fluid to crystallized intelligence. This is an intensely productive and fertile period.
Psychologists have a special word for uncomfortable life transitions: “liminality.”[3] It means the time between work roles, organizations, career paths, and relationship stages.
nothing is more predictable than change.
The Buddha spoke very frequently about the impermanence (in Sanskrit, anitya) of everything. “Impermanent truly are conditioned things, having the nature of arising and passing away,” he taught.
He taught that to be at peace, we must accept the impermanence of life and existence.
Impermanence is simply the state of nature.
psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that when you find meaning, life seems more stable.
a career reset does not have to result in a midlife crisis.
