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Started reading
March 16, 2023
The good life is joyful… and challenging. Full of love, but also pain. And it never strictly happens; instead, the good life unfolds, through time. It is a process. It includes turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls. And of course, the good life always ends in death.
Life, even when it’s good, is not easy. There is simply no way to make life perfect, and if there were, then it wouldn’t be good.
Because a rich life—a good life—is forged from precisely the things that make it hard.
But one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: Good relationships.
Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.
Instead, it is the quality of your relationships that matters. Simply put, living in the midst of warm relationships is protective of both mind and body.
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.
The foundation of a good life is money.
Aristotle, for example, outlined the problem two thousand years ago. “The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion,” he wrote, “and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”
In America, income inequality has been increasing for decades and is connected to all kinds of other inequalities, from discrepancies in access to health care to the fact that rich people have shorter commutes to work. The overall effect of money is so significant that people with high incomes can expect to live ten to fifteen years longer than people with low incomes. The men in the Harvard Study are no different; on average, the college men had significantly higher incomes than the Boston inner-city men, and lived 9.1 years longer.
“More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain.”
people who were more socially connected had less risk of dying at any age.
Relationships are not just essential as stepping-stones to other things, and they are not simply a functional route to health and happiness. They are ends in themselves.
“Where you stand depends on where you sit,”
Islamic teachings also mention seven stages of existence. Buddhist teachings illustrate the ten stages along the path to enlightenment using the metaphor of ox herding. Hinduism identifies four stages of life, or Ashramas, and these echo many modern psychological life stage theories: the student, who learns about the world, the householder, who develops a calling and takes care of his or her family, the retiree, who retreats from family life, and
the ascetic, who commits to the pursuit of greater spirituality.
Hold but don’t baby; admire but don’t embarrass; guide but don’t control; release but don’t abandon.
What kind of person am I becoming? Who do I want to be like, and who do I not want to be like? What should I do with my life? Am I proud of who I am and who I am becoming? How much should I try to be like somebody I respect? Will I be able to make my own way in the world? Or will I always depend on the support of others? How do I know if my friends really like me? Can I count on them to have my back? I’m having intense sexual and romantic feelings and they are blowing my mind. How can I manage this new intensity of intimacy and attraction?
“Who am I?”
How can I best support them, even as they seem to want to be independent?
Who am I? Am I capable of doing what I want with my life? Am I on the right path? What do I stand for? Will I ever find the right person to love? Will anyone love me?
If we think we have a lot of time, we think more about the future. If we think we have less time, we try to appreciate the present.
No road is long with good company.
Become genuinely interested in other people.”
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
“Attention,” he wrote, “is the most basic form of love.”
a wandering mind is connected to unhappiness.
What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.
“Attention is the most basic form of love.”
engage with others.
One influential study showed that those who use Facebook passively, just reading and scrolling, feel worse than those who engage actively by contacting others and commenting on posts.
we now know that those who compare themselves to others more frequently are less happy.
One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”
“You can’t stop the waves,” Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, “but you can learn to surf.”
“A happy heart is good medicine and a cheerful mind works healing,” the Bible says, “but a broken spirit dries up the bones” (Proverbs 17:22).
“Men are disturbed not by events, but by the views they take of them.”
“The world we live in is the world we create.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” he wrote, “but in the expert’s mind there are few.” We all feel like experts when it comes to our own lives, and the challenge is to stay open to the possibility that there is more we can learn about ourselves—to allow ourselves to be beginners.
“ ‘Love,’ ” Plato says, “is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
“The only form of persuasion that works is to empathize,”
Empathy and affection.
if a couple can cultivate a bedrock of affection and empathy (meaning curiosity and the willingness to listen), their bond will be more stable and enduring.
In the end, what matters most are not the challenges we face in relationships, but how we manage them.
even the best relationships are susceptible to decay. Just as trees need water, intimate relationships are living things, and as the seasons of life pass they can’t be left to fend for themselves. They need attention, and nourishment.
affection, curiosity, empathy, and a willingness to face toward challenging emotions and problems, rather than avoid them.
couples who are able to face stresses together reap benefits in health, well-being, and relationship satisfaction.
There is no remedy for love but to love more. Henry David Thoreau
family matters.
One of the major sources of protection was the consistent presence of at least one caring adult.
a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process emotions.
