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

by Robert Waldinger

We tend to take things for granted. This

you will have gotten used to that situation, too, and your brain will move on to the next challenge, the next desire. Not even lottery winners

the way we feel in life is determined only in part by what happens around us, and to a great extent by what happens inside of us.

to a great extent by what happens inside of us.

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,

you learn more from failure than you do from success,

Relationships

ends in themselves.

“Love by its very nature,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “is unworldly.”

Relationships are the foundation of our lives, intrinsic to everything we do and everything we are.

rich possibilities to improve emotional wellbeing are available at every stage and in every situation of life.

before you can get where you’re going, you first have to know where you are.

Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.

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.

ever-changing nature of our lives,

so gradual that we can’t see them.

We are forever changing from what we are into what we will be.

How we see the world depends on our vantage point.

devoting a few moments to reflect on how he felt and what his life was like helped him to appreciate what he already had, and to see what he wanted.

self-reflection.

Find a photograph of yourself when you were about half as old as you are now.

try to place yourself back in the moment when the picture was taken.

Shakespeare

“seven ages of man” in his famous “all the world’s a stage” soliloquy

in As You L...

who began to see adulthood as a period of important flux and opportunity.

“plasticity”

positive changes also unfold throughout the lifespan.

no matter where you are in your life, you are changing,

positive change is ...

series of key challenges that we all face as we grow older.

“development clock,”

“social clock”

either “on-time” or “off-time,”

whether we think we’re meeting society’s expectations.

her theory, “on-time” events help us feel that our lives are on track,

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.

it is our relationships that most often reflect back to us who we really are, and how far we’ve come on our life path.

A good life requires growth and change.

What we experience, what we endure, and what we do all affect the ...

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 you see depends on where you are in the life cycle.

First, don’t be fooled by signals of teenage bravado and claims about self-sufficiency. Teens need you.

This is the most important and enlivening task of midlife: to expand one’s focus to the world beyond the self.

“What can I do for the world beyond me?”

Relationships are the vehicle that will allow us both to improve our lives and to build things that will outlive us.

the amount of time we think we have left on earth shapes our priorities.

research has shown that human beings are never so happy as in the late years of their lives.

We get better at maximizing highs and minimizing lows. We feel less hassled by the little things that go wrong, and we are better at knowing when something is important and when it’s not.

our relationships are the key to maximizing the joys of late life.