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

by Robert Waldinger

In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.

One way to find some answers to this question might be to simply ask people what would make them happy, and then find commonalities. But, as we’ll show, one hard truth that we would all do well to accept is that people are terrible at knowing what is good for them. We’ll get into that later.

More than two thousand years ago Aristotle used a term that is still in wide use in psychology today: eudaimonia. It refers to a state of deep well-being in which a person feels that their life has meaning and purpose. It is often contrasted with hedonia (the origin of the word hedonism), which refers to the fleeting happiness of various pleasures.

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.

This is a feature of our decision making in general: we pay a lot of attention to potential costs and downplay or dismiss potential benefits.

This, too, is a function of our ancient brains: we focus on what is most visible, and most immediate. The value of relationships is ephemeral and hard to quantify,

When we obsess over things that fall outside of our control, Epictetus said, we make ourselves miserable. So an important project of life is distinguishing which is which.

Across all of these studies, the mortality rate of individuals with the fewest ties was between 2.3 (men) and 2.8 (women) times higher than that of individuals with the most ties. These are very large associations, comparable to the effect of smoking on getting cancer. And smoking, in the United States, is considered the leading cause of preventable death.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

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.

These shared human experiences and repeating patterns of life remind us that regardless of how solitary our own struggles and challenges feel in the moment, there are others who have gone through similar things in the past, and others going through them at this very moment.

These two ideas—life as a sequence of challenges, and variation in the cultural importance of events and their timing—go a long way toward explaining how we feel about ourselves, and how we engage with the world at different points in our lives.

Relationships are a central player in this growth process. Other people challenge and enrich us. With new relationships come new expectations, new troubles, new hills to climb, and often we’re not “ready.” Very few people, for example, are ever perfectly ready to become a parent. But becoming a parent, and being responsible for a tiny human being, has a way of making most of us ready. It pushes us. Somehow we live up to what we have to do, relationship by relationship, stage by stage, and in the process, we change. We grow.

What do you wish you’d done more of?” our Study participants, male and female, often referenced their middle years, and regretted having spent so much time worrying and so little time acting in a way that made them feel alive: “I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time.” “I wish I hadn’t procrastinated so much.” “I wish I hadn’t worried so much.” “I wish I’d spent more time with my family.”

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.

Despite the perception that old people are grumpy and cantankerous, research has shown that human beings are never so happy as in the late years of their lives.

Chance encounters and unforeseen events are a big reason why an individual’s life can never be completely understood by any “system” of life stages.

Life is chaotic, and cultivating good relationships increases the positivity of that chaos and makes the chances of beneficial encounters more likely

We can’t outrun the chaos of life. But the more we nurture positive relationships, the better our chances of surviving and even thriving on this bumpy ride.

And as the old Turkish proverb says, No road is long with good company.

Our bodies do not take care of themselves in this environment—they need maintenance. If those of us in sedentary or repetitive jobs want to maintain our physical fitness, we have to make a conscious effort to move. We have to set time aside to walk, garden, do yoga, run, or go to the gym. We have to overcome the currents of modern life. The same is true for social fitness. It’s not easy to take care of our relationships today, and in fact, we tend to think that once we establish friendships and intimate relationships, they will take care of themselves. But like muscles, neglected relationships atrophy. Our social life is a living system. And it needs exercise.

Recent research has shown that for older people loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity, and chronic loneliness increases a person’s odds of death in any given year by 26 percent.

We might be sitting on a goldmine of vitality that we are not paying attention to—because this source of vitality is eclipsed by the shiny allure of smartphones and TV or pushed to the side by work demands.

Some of us are out of practice and have forgotten how this kind of curiosity can feel, so we have to be more deliberate. We have to take an almost radical approach to cultivating the often subtle seeds of our natural interest in people, and take a bold step beyond our usual conversation habits. We need to make a point to ask ourselves: Who is this person, really, and what’s their deal? Then it’s as simple as asking a question, listening to the reply, and seeing where it takes us.

The crucial point is that being curious helps us connect to others, and this connection makes us more engaged with life. Genuine curiosity invites people to share more of themselves with us, and this in turn helps us understand them. This process enlivens everyone involved.

One of our greatest joys (and this is not confined to therapy) comes in moments when we sense that we’ve understood the experience of another person and then communicated that understanding in a way that feels true to them. It’s life-affirming to suddenly find oneself in sync with the experience of someone else.

Suddenly someone is seeing us as we are, and that experience momentarily breaches the barrier that we feel between us and the world. To be seen is an amazing thing.

Language—and perhaps English in particular—is so saturated with economic jargon that these words seem natural, they seem to make sense, but our time and attention are much, much more precious than these words suggest. 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.

To put it simply, understanding another person is great, but just trying to understand goes a long way in building connection. Some people do this automatically, but efforts to understand others can also be deliberate, intentional behaviors. It needn’t come naturally to you at first, but the more you try, the easier it will get. The next time you have the opportunity, try asking yourself:

Noticing someone is a way of respecting them, paying tribute to the person they are in that exact moment. And noticing yourself, checking in about how you move through the world, about where you are now and where you would like to be, can help you identify which people and pursuits most need your attention. Attention is your most precious asset, and deciding how to invest it is one of the most important decisions you can make.

We found that a tendency to avoid thinking and talking about difficulties in middle age was associated with negative consequences more than thirty years later. Those people whose typical responses were to avoid or ignore difficulties had poorer memory and were less satisfied with their lives in late life than those who tended to face difficulties directly.

Just asking the question—What is it I’m assuming here?—can bring what looks like a mountain closer into line with its molehill reality. Assumptions are the source of an incredible amount of misunderstanding. As the old saying goes, Never assume, because when you assume, you make an ass of u and me. But it’s also possible to err in the opposite direction and make true mountains into molehills,

The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki taught that it is a positive thing to approach some situations in life as if you’ve never lived them before. “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.

holding a loved one’s hand during a medical procedure had the same effect as a mild anesthetic.

This is consistent with many other studies showing that emotions between partners are a critical indicator of whether intimate relationships thrive or fail.

These heirlooms are tokens of a larger kind of inheritance. Not just of objects, but of perspectives, habits, philosophies, and experiences. We can hold on to psychological heirlooms just as surely as we hold on to something like an ice scream scoop.

Even one person who is concerned, available, and emotionally invested in a child’s well-being can positively affect that child’s development and future relationships.

As adults, the Harvard Study participants who were able to acknowledge challenges and talk about them more openly seemed to have a similar ability to elicit support from others. Being open and clear about one’s experiences offers an opportunity for another person to be helpful. This ability to acknowledge and deal with rather than try to ignore challenges may play an important role in eliciting support both in childhood and later.

We’ve been advocating a strategy of facing toward problems, rather than avoiding them, but facing a problem is not always the same as fixing it.

One thing we can be sure of—nobody we encounter in life can ever be fully known. There is always more to discover.

One simple thing we can all do is to notice when we find ourselves wanting someone to be different than they are. We can ask ourselves, What if I just let this person be themselves without passing judgment? How would this moment be different? Recognizing another person for who they are and meeting them where they are can go a long way toward deepening a connection.

By the time the average individual in the U.K. reaches 80 years of age, he or she will have spent about 8,800 hours socializing with friends, about 9,500 hours in activities with an intimate partner, and more than 112,000 hours (13 years!) at work.

loneliness increases our risk of death as much as smoking or obesity.

Without friends, no one would choose to live. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Women, Rubin found, were more likely than men to keep up contact with their friends. The nature of their relationships was also different—men were more likely to organize friendships around activities, women were more likely to be emotionally close, and to share intimate thoughts and feelings with each other. Women had more face-to-face friendships, men had more side-by-side friendships.

How do you move further along on your own path toward a good life? First, by recognizing that the good life is not a destination. It is the path itself, and the people who are walking it with you. As you walk, second by second you can decide to whom and to what you give your attention. Week by week you can prioritize your relationships and choose to be with the people who matter. Year by year you can find purpose and meaning through the lives that you enrich and the relationships that you cultivate.