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

by Robert Waldinger

We are always comparing our insides to other people’s outsides.

Because a rich life—a good life—is forged from precisely the things that make it hard. This book is built on a bedrock

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.

if you relied only on cross-sectional surveys, you’d have to conclude that there are people in Miami who are born Cuban and die Jewish.

In this case, we actually know whose version of the socks/stockings story is more correct, because we asked Henry the same question about meeting Rosa the year they got married. “I was wearing different color socks, and she noticed,” he said in 1954. “She wouldn’t let that happen today.”

Every two years we send lengthy questionnaires that include room for open-ended and personalized responses, every five years we collect complete health records from their doctors, and every fifteen years or so we meet them face-to-face on, say, a porch in Florida, or in a coffee shop in northern Wisconsin. We take notes on how they look and behave, their level of eye contact, their clothes, and their living conditions.

one hard truth that we would all do well to accept is that people are terrible at knowing what is good for them.

There are many, but chief among these myths is the idea that happiness is something you achieve. As if it were an award you could frame and hang on the wall. Or as if it were a destination, and after overcoming all of the obstacles in your way, you will finally arrive there,

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. To put it another way, if hedonic happiness is what you mean when you say you’re having a good time, then eudaimonic happiness is what we mean when we say life is good.

Is it too late for me? is a definitive NO.

Big free will belivers eh

we know that high-conflict marriages with little affection can be worse for health than getting divorced.

But when we really think about the consistent signal that comes through after eighty-four years of study and hundreds of research papers, it is that one simple message: Positive relationships are essential to human well-being.

Imagine you’re on a train. Strangers are seated all around you. You’d like to have the most pleasant possible train ride, and you have a choice: talk to a stranger or keep to yourself. Which do you choose? We know what most of us do: we keep to ourselves. Who wants to deal with a random stranger? They’ll probably talk our ear off. Also, we want to get some work done or just enjoy some music or a podcast. This kind of prediction about what will make us happy is known in psychology as “affective forecasting.” We are constantly making predictions about how all kinds of things in our lives, large and small, will make us feel.

There is a lot of research like this suggesting that human beings are bad at affective forecasting.

This messiness is some of what prompts many of us to prefer being alone. It’s not just that we are seeking solitude; it’s that we want to avoid the potential mess of connecting with others.

let’s take a closer look at one emblematic keystone, a persistent cultural assumption, shared among many cultures all over the world, that is not only old but ancient and shows no signs of going anywhere: The foundation of a good life is money.

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle. Some things are within your control. And some things are not. Epictetus, Discourses

I have sooooo many gret things going on wow a job and people i love and two greatg kids some things i cnt control thouse and thr city my neighbors The economh home muxh someone wants to pah me

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.

social connection increased the likelihood of surviving in any given year by more than 50 percent.

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.

In an analysis that would have made Epictetus proud, she examined the degree to which our level of happiness is changeable.

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

“Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake,” Seneca wrote. “What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile.”