The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

by Robert Waldinger

If we accept the wisdom—and more recently the scientific evidence—that our relationships really are among our most valuable tools for sustaining health and happiness, then choosing to invest time and energy in them becomes vitally important. And an investment in our social fitness isn’t only an investment in our lives as they are now. It is an investment that will affect everything about how we live in the future.

“If only death is certain, and the time of death is uncertain, then what should I do?”

The flow of days has a way of whisking us away, so that we feel life is merely happening to us, that we are subjected to it, instead of actively shaping it.

Time and attention are not something we can replenish. They are what our life is. When we offer our time and attention, we are not merely spending and paying. We are giving our lives.

As the philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“Attention,” he wrote, “is the most basic form of love.”

When we give our attention, we are giving life, but we are also feeling more alive in the process.

Time and attention are the essential materials of happiness. They are the reservoir from which our lives flow.

a wandering mind is connected to unhappiness. “The ability to think about what is not happening,” they wrote, “is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busy—not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.

“Attention is the most basic form of love.”

Human touch and physical proximity have emotional, psychological, and even biological effects.

“skin hunger,” a longing driven by the deprivation of human touch. In the face of intense isolation, social media was at least something.

First, engage with others.

take your temperature when using social media.

check in with how your social media use is seen by people who are important to you.

take tech holidays.

The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.

He called the course “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction,” or MBSR, and its therapeutic success led to the word “mindfulness” becoming the almost ubiquitous term it is today. A great deal of research now supports its effectiveness, and a large number of medical schools now offer mindfulness training.

“the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally

Being alert is the feeling of actually living.

If our intention is to connect with other people, being present is what makes that possible.

Or you can try asking yourself this lovely question, which is useful in any situation, at any time:

What’s here that I’ve never noticed before?

As the Gilbert and Killingsworth study showed, more often than not, most people’s minds are already full of thought—about ourselves, the future, and the past. This kind of thinking pulls our minds into a narrow tunnel made of thought and worry, cut off from immediate experience. It can be dark and claustrophobic there.

The present moment is large and spacious, if we allow it to be. Even when it contains sad or scary experiences, this moment includes so much more than the content of our minds. The sense of being truly alive comes with giving our attention only to what is happening right in front of us, to grab hold of sensations—the

As the spiritualist Ram Dass simply put it, the idea is to “be here now.”

That same question—What’s here that I’m not noticing?—can be extraordinarily powerful when we apply it to people: What about this person have I not noticed before? Or: What is this person feeling that I’ve been missing? This is part of that radical curiosity we talked about in Chapter Four.

How right we are about what another person is experiencing, or how curious we are about their experience in the first place?

Is it more important to be accurate in our understanding of our partner’s feelings, or is it more important that our partners see that we are making an effort to understand?

How is this person feeling? What is this person thinking? Am I missing something here? How might I feel if I were in this person’s shoes?

Closeness didn’t just happen on its own. Life is busy. So many things get in the way, and it’s easy to become passive and just go with the flow.

We’ve already asked you to consider the relationships in your life that could use some more time. Now we’re going to ask you to consider a deeper question: Of the people in your life who are already receiving your time, who among them is receiving your full attention?

Life is always at risk of slipping by unnoticed.

Giving something your undivided attention is a way of bringing it to life and assuring that you don’t float through time on automatic pilot.

Attention is your most precious asset, and deciding how to invest it is one of the most important decisions you can make.

we’ve been emphasizing that relationships are the key not only to navigating difficulties, big and small, but to flourishing in the face of them.

“There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the [Harvard Study].… One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”

It is within our relationships—and especially our close relationships—that we find the in...

that the people who make us feel the most alive and who know us best are also the people able to hurt us most.

As we travel on our own unique paths, we can hurt each other without intending to.

“the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows.”

Our habitual responses—patterns of both thinking and behaving—that arise when stressful events occur are what psychologists call coping styles.

the inability or refusal to face challenges directly and to engage your support network can have enormous consequences.

But in truth, our emotions are much more affected by our thinking than we realize.

“Men are disturbed not by events, but by the views they take of them.”

“we who look at the whole and not just the part, know that we too are systems of interdependence, of feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness all interconnected.”

The model that follows provides a way for you to slow your reactions and put them under a microscope.

Don’t just do something, sit there.

One of the major pitfalls is thinking that a situation is all about us; it rarely is.