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

by Robert Waldinger

A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

The results were startling. The wounds of the noncaregivers took about forty days to fully heal, but the wounds of the caregivers took nine days longer to heal. The psychological stress of caring for a loved one, which emerged from the slow erasure of important relationships in their lives, was preventing their bodies from healing.

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.

Looking in the mirror and thinking honestly about where your life stands is a first step in trying to live a good life. Noticing where you are can help put into relief where you would like to be.

When you’re lonely, it hurts.

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.

In a study conducted online that sampled 55,000 respondents from across the world, one out of every three people of all ages reported that they often feel lonely. Among these, the loneliest group were 16–24-year-olds, 40 percent of whom reported feeling lonely “often or very often” (more on this phenomenon soon).

In the U.K., the economic cost of this loneliness—because lonely people are less productive and more prone to employment turnover—is estimated at more than £2.5 billion (about $3.4 billion) annually and helped lead to the establishment of a U.K. Ministry of Loneliness.

Lonliness market size

In the United States, a 2018 study suggested that three out of four adults felt moderate to high levels of loneliness. As of this writing, the long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which separated us from each other on a massive scale and left many feeling more isolated than ever, are still being studied. In 2020 it was estimated that 162,000 deaths could be attributed to causes stemming from social isolation.

Fifty thousand years ago, being alone was dangerous. If the Homo sapiens we mentioned earlier was left at her tribe’s river settlement by herself, her body and brain would have gone into temporary survival mode.

If for some reason she found herself alone for say, a month, rather than a night, these physical processes would continue, morphing into a droning, constant sense of unease, and they would begin to take a toll on her mental and physical health. She would be, as we say, stressed out. She would be lonely.

There is now a vast body of research revealing the associations between health and social connection, associations that trace back to the origins of the species, when things were much simpler.

Try this calculation with your own cherished relationship, or just consider these round numbers: If you’re 40, and you see this person once a week for a coffee hour, that’s about eighty-seven days before you turn 80. If you see them once a month, it’s about twenty days. Once a year, about two days.

Are you spending time with the people you most care about? Is there a relationship in your life that would benefit both of you if you could spend more time together? These untapped resources are often already in our life, waiting. A few adjustments to our most treasured relationships can have real effects on how we feel, and on how we feel about our lives.

The simple measure of time spent with others proved quite important, because on a day-to-day basis this measurement was clearly linked with happiness.

Their happy marriages protected their moods even on the days when they had more pain.

the frequency and the quality of our contact with other people are two major predictors of happiness.

It’s good to start simple. First, ask: Who is in my life?

Even making a basic list of the ten people who populate the center of your social universe can be illuminating.

Your boss or a particular coworker, for example. Even relationships that seem insignificant could make the list. We’ll talk much more about this in a later chapter, but acquaintances and casual relationships built around activities like knitting, playing soccer, or meeting with a book club could be more important to you than you think.

What do we mean by energizing and depleting?

Sometimes we don’t really know how we feel about a relationship until we stop to think about it.

In general, an energizing relationship enlivens and invigorates you, and it gives you a sense of connection and belonging that remains after the two of you part ways.

A depleting relationship induces tension, frustration, or anxiety, and makes you feel worried, or even demoralized. In some ways, it makes you feel lesser or more disco...

When you spend time with this person, how do you feel?

What does it mean, in our adult lives, to have a friend? What does it mean to be a friend? How important are friendships in our lives, really? When we’re kids, friendships are often central, in part because they have such an intense quality to them. The strength of connection between two friends in childhood (or even in young adulthood) is rivaled only by the intensity of the hurt if the friendship goes wrong. If we feel loved, our hearts soar with a sense of belonging, and if we feel wronged or if we’re bullied, those wounds cut deep.

Wht does it mean to have friends?

Sure, it’s fun to go out and have a good time with friends, we might think as we’re deciding where our time should go, but I just have more important things to do. Or we might think, My friendships will always be there—I can pick them up again when the kids are older… when work slows down… when I have some extra time.

sometimes nothing is as beneficial to our health as a good time.

Friendships may not require our care, but they can’t care for themselves.

It also showed Marc that their friendship wasn’t just about statistics and research and some good times during a few dinner dates. Bob was there for him and Joan when it really mattered. And he knew that when the time came, he would be there for Bob, too.

The power of friendship isn’t just the stuff of anecdotes or philosophical observation; science has clearly shown this effect. Friends diminish our perception of hardship—making us perceive adverse events as less stressful than we might otherwise see them—and even when we do experience extreme stress, friends can diminish its impact and duration.

large longitudinal study in Australia found that people over 70 with the strongest network of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period (ten years) than those with the weakest network of friends

When we increase our connection to friends, it has a measurable effect on our bodies because our bodies need what friendships provide. The human need for friends and the cooperation that comes with them is an important evolutionary piece of what has made human beings a successful species.

“Many men like me regret not having had more close friends,” one participant told the Study. “I’ve never had a really close friend. My wife has more friends than me.”

But for men there is often an extra set of powerful cultural forces at work. In many cultures around the world, boys are encouraged to display their independence and masculinity as they age, and they begin to worry that emotional closeness to male friends will make them appear less masculine. Over time, certain intimacies between friends are lost.

The men were asked, How satisfied are you with the number of and your closeness to friends (besides your wife)? Thirty percent said that they were not satisfied and would like much more. When their wives were asked a similar question, only 6 percent said that they were not satisfied.

Women had more face-to-face friendships, men had more side-by-side friendships.

“A true friend is someone you can always count on for companionship or for help if you need it.” This is the kind of friendship that social scientists would call a “strong tie.” These are the people we know will be there for us when things go wrong, who lift us up when we’re down, and who we are prepared to support in their times of trouble. When most of us think of “important friends,” these are the relationships that come to mind.

repeated casual contact has been shown to foster the formation of closer friendships. And sometimes even the most casual contact can open us up to whole new realms of experience.

People we know only peripherally, Granovetter has argued, create important bridges to new social networks. These bridges allow for the flow of different and often surprising ideas, the flow of otherwise unavailable information, and the flow of opportunities.

Look at your “social universe” chart from Chapter Four.

New parents thirst for firsthand information about childrearing and look for people who know what they’re going through, who they can turn to for both emotional and practical support (Marc and Joan, by the way, continued to rely on Bob and Jennifer for this support, including for some babysitting so they could enjoy their first date night after Joan recovered).

Now conversations revolve around babies and diapers, and the friends without children can feel left behind. It may not be so much about feelings of jealousy as about loss of a connection that seemed as though it might be there, in the same way, forever.

As we discussed in Chapter Nine, for some of us work is the foundation of our social universe. When it’s removed, our social fitness can suffer.

keeping up with old friends is a lot of work and many people find it difficult or don’t bother. But he and his wife were both predisposed to doing so and particularly enjoyed large gatherings. We’re not all that way. Not all of us (or even very many of us) are going to get excited to host twenty people at our house a few times a month.

Friendships can suffer from some of the same things that family relationships suffer from: chronic conflict, boredom, absence of curiosity, failure to pay attention. Learn to listen to your friends. As Brenda Ueland suggests, listening does as much for the listener as for the person being listened to.

Friendships can cause us hurt that we harbor for a long time. But rifts between friends don’t have to be permanent. Sometimes all it takes is a simple mea culpa, or an olive branch—a kind text message, an offer to buy lunch, a quick birthday call—to repair a wound from the past. Sometimes