Good Life Project - The Surprising Science About Relationships & Happiness | Robert Waldinger

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

What if the key to living a good life is actually a lot closer than we all realize? Whether you're a long-time listener of the podcast or this is your first time tuning in, I bet some part of you is searching for the answers to living a good, meaningful life. You've probably wondered what the keys to happiness or good health, or fortune are. In our last episode, I shared a simple model for a really good life that I call the Good Life Buckets. If you haven’t listened, be sure to tee that up next. Today, we’re diving even deeper into the role that relationships and people play in our ability to feel human, to feel alive, and to flourish in all parts of life with a very special guest, someone passionate about uncovering and sharing the keys to living a good life, Dr. Robert Waldinger. He's a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the longest-running study on human flourishing ever conducted, now spanning over 80 years. The insights that have come out of it are profound, and also, for many, surprising, especially in the context of the importance of relationships on our ability to be happy, no matter what else comes our way.Bob is also the co-author of the book The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study on Happiness, and I'm excited to dive deeper today into some of the insights shared in his book. In this conversation, Dr. Waldinger reveals some myths about happiness and living a good life that some of us cling to, what the data says actually matters and what doesn’t, and how to invest more effectively in the pursuit of happiness. You can find Robert at: Website| LinkedIn | TED TalkIf you LOVED this episode: you’ll also love last week’s episode about a simple model for a really good life.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED: Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

perfectly good, warm relationships will wither away and die of neglect. If we don't connect, if we don't reach out, if we don't see each other, if we don't call each other, right? And so suddenly people will turn around in their 30s or 40s and say, I don't have any friends. I've fallen out of touch with my college friends, with my school friends, whatever. And so what we find is that the people who are better at maintaining these connections and making new ones are the people who really thrive. So what if the key to living a good life is actually closer than we all realize? I mean, whether you're a longtime listener of the podcast, or this is your first time tuning in,

I bet some part of you is searching for the answers to living a good life, a meaningful life. You probably wonder what the keys to happiness or good health or fortune are. And in our last episode, I shared a simple model for a really good life that I call the good life buckets. If you haven't listened, by the way, be sure to tee that up right after this. Now, one of the three good life buckets that I spoke about is what I call the connection bucket. It's all about the depth and quality of our relationships and the effect they have on our ability to live good lives.

And today we're diving even deeper into the role that relationships and people play in our ability to feel human, to feel alive and to flourish in all parts of life with a very special guest, someone who is passionate about uncovering and sharing the keys to living a good life, Dr. Robert Waldinger. He is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, co-founder of the Lifespan Research Foundation, a practicing psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and director of the psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. And he's also a longtime practitioner and teacher of Zen, teaches all over New England and in fact around the world. But he's also the director of something called the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is often

shorthanded as the Grant study. This is, from my knowledge, the longest running study on human flourishing ever conducted, now spanning something like over 80 years. The insights that have come out of it are profound and also, for many, really surprising, especially in the context of the importance of relationships on our ability to be happy, no matter what else comes our way from health to good or bad fortune to money or lack thereof. So Bob is also the co-author of a fantastic new book, The Good Life, lessons from the world's longest scientific study on happiness. And I'm just super excited to dive deeper today into some of the insights shared in the book. In this conversation, we talk about some myths about happiness and living a good life that so many of us cling to, what the data actually says matters and what doesn't, and how

to invest more effectively in the pursuit of happiness and the best life possible. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Deeply fascinating. I mean, obviously the name of this podcast is Good Life Project. So I have been fascinated with this question of what does it mean to live a good life for really my entire adult life? And looking at a lot of the academic insights that have sort of been derived from this, looking at a lot of spiritual traditions of which I know you have backgrounds in both, which I'm really curious about. It's interesting when I saw the world of, you know, when Marty Seligman stands in front of the APA a couple of decades ago now and

says, you know, we have a cake that's half baked and sort of introduces the notion of positive psychology. Now you see all of this research out there and having a bit of background in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy and tradition, I kind of giggle because what I see happening is the world of science coming around to say like, we are officially anointing thousands of years old wisdom as real. Yes, exactly. I wonder with your background, because you had this dual background, what's your take on all this? So I used to think that my Zen background and my spiritual practice now was separate from my research and separate still from my clinical practice as a psychiatrist. I do psychotherapy.

And I used to think they were in silos and I needed to keep them in silos. And of course, they're not siloed at all. And if I were a decent Zen practitioner, I would have known that from the beginning. But the idea that, you know, these are all experiences of the same human condition, the same human life, right? Whether we come at it through spiritual traditions, or empirical research, or, you know, psychiatry and psychotherapy. It's all looking at the human experience. And I've gotten more and more convinced of that as I delve more deeply into each of these areas of my life. Yeah, it is fascinating. I mean,

it's almost like the deeper you go down any one vein, it just all starts to bleed into a single unified channel. Yeah. Yes. I always thought that there is value in being able to speak the language of whoever you're in conversation with to share, like, you know, there's some central tenant and to be able to sort of like convey it in a way to someone where you have, you have like your finger on the pulse of how it might actually land as real and valuable with them. To be able to speak the dialect of academic science, clinical practice, spiritual practice, that's got to feel like a bit of a power tool for you.

Well, it is a bit of a power tool in that what I can do, for example, some of the things that I know to be true from my spiritual practice, from Zen, when there's science behind it, I can talk to scientists and say, we've got data about this. This is not just my opinion. This is not just the Buddha's idea. There's real hard science here. And similarly, I can talk with my spiritual friends, and I can talk the language of Zen, the language that isn't limited by the sort of narrow cognitive empirical track that my research is on. I actually love being able to move with some freedom between these worlds. Yeah. It's almost like there's a code switching capacity, which lets you just not only function, but actually be persuasive and compelling and share things that you might feel are important

and worthy of being shared. While at the same time, you're doing the translation internally, but you're eliminating that step for others. And so maybe it'll land a little bit more readily. Hopefully. I mean, it's interesting. The reason, you know, I gave a TED talk seven years ago that went viral and I was really scared to give that talk because at that point, you know, academics really didn't do that. And I thought my colleagues would think I was, scared to give that talk because at that point, you know, academics really didn't do that. I thought my colleagues would think I was, you know, not serious. And I also thought I was stating something obvious, which was the centrality of human connection in our wellbeing.

And then when it went viral, it was sort of a confirmation that this is what I need to do. I need to start bringing this out to the world. And so a lot of, you know, the reason why we wrote the book and the reason why I get to talk to you now is because I need to cross these bridges. I need to wed these different domains and I need to bring this stuff that we know out to people who don't read academic journals and shouldn't read academic journals. Yes. My dad was actually a researcher for his entire career. Really? Yeah. He taught psychology, but he wasn't in the classroom a lot. He actually ran his own lab on human cognition for, I don't know, 45, 50 years. It was always interesting because we would have conversations over time. How many people, and, you know, he published, you know, like a ton and spoke a ton. But the number of people that would read any particular

publication was always like, you could like count sometimes you're like with on your fingers. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you know, and we work so hard on these papers that we publish, and we're so proud of them. And I realized that, particularly the research I've done, we have spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money from NIH. And really, thank goodness they funded us because it's the only study like it. But if we don't bring that out to the world, what are we doing? And lots of, as you know, lots of science is left hiding in academic journals. And so my passion right now is to see if I can be part of an effort to bring what we know into a public sphere where people can really make use of it.

And I love that. So I had been exposed to this massive longitudinal study for a while. Let's sort of lay down a little bit of like, when you talk about this study that you've been involved in, and this has been a study that has gone on since I guess the late thirties and been kind of handed off and handed off and handed off. Take me into the origin of this, how it came to be, what was the intention in the beginning, and who was in it when this kicks off at 38? Initially, it was two studies and they didn't know about each other. One study was started at the Harvard University Student Health Service with Harvard undergrads. So it was 19-year-olds, sophomores chosen by their deans as fine, upstanding young men. And it was a study funded by Mr. W.T. Grant, who owned the chain of department stores.

And he wanted to find out which young men would make good department store managers. So he funded a study of healthy development. So of course, if you want to study healthy development, you study all white men from Harvard, right? It's like so politically incorrect to do now. But at that time, they wanted to study, as they said, what goes right with human growth and development, not what goes wrong, because most of what we do is study what goes wrong. So that was one study. And then the other study was at Harvard Law School by a law school professor, Sheldon Gluck, and his wife, Eleanor

Gluck, who was a social worker. they were interested in how some children from really, not just disadvantaged background, but troubled families, how those kids stayed on good developmental paths, and didn't get into trouble. Like, how is that possible? And so they wanted to find the factors that allowed some kids to do all right, even though they were born with two strikes against them. And so eventually those studies got combined by my predecessor in the 1970s. So we had this really privileged group and this really underprivileged group. And when I came on 20 years ago, we brought in women, the wives first, and then we reached out to the kids who are mostly baby boomers,

more than half of whom are women. So that's how we put together this big, unwieldy 85-year project of ours. So it starts out as these two different studies, blends into one. And then over the years, it sounds like every generation or so, you're basically folding in new generations and also expanding beyond the original sort of like, you know, like male identifying only. Yeah. And that's what, you know, what we haven't been able to do is bring in more diverse populations. So our diversity was first socioeconomic and also about half of the families of the inner city

people were immigrants. So diversity there, but everybody was white. Because in 1938, the city of Boston was 97.4% white. do is bring in more diverse samples to look more like America right now. The reason we don't is that we have this treasure trove of data about each person's life across the years, and we can't find new people and have those data, right? So our hope is that, well, we know other researchers are starting studies to follow people over time, studies with people of color, people of very different ethnic backgrounds, because that needs to happen. Yeah, absolutely. And it'll be fascinating, right? And now, if those are all starting somewhere around now, plus or minus five years, right?

We're talking about another 80 years before we have equivalent data. Yeah, yeah. You know, so on the one hand, I'm thinking it'll be fascinating to see the contrast and to see the similarities and the differences. On the other hand, it's going to be a while. Well, yeah, I know. What I will say is that what we've done, for example, in the book, we only have reported findings that other studies also report. So they're not 80-year studies.

But what we do is we look at other studies of different, more diverse populations. And if every study is pointing in the same direction, then we can have confidence that what we found isn't by chance, right? Because no single study can prove anything, particularly when we talk about adult development. So we need to be fairly universal across all the different people, all the different populations. And that lets you have a higher level of confidence saying, we feel pretty good saying that this probably applies to a wide range of people. Exactly. Exactly.

Tell me what was measured and how this was measured because I've heard different stories and I've read, but the volume and the way that the measurement took place just seems like it's almost beyond comprehension. Well, it is a little beyond comprehension. So when they started out interviewing all these young men, so they'd have an interview with a medical doctor and then a medical exam and an interview with a psychiatrist. And then they'd go to their homes and talk to their parents and take elaborate notes about what was being served for dinner and the parents disciplinary stuff. So all that stuff. and measure. I know. Like, why would you do that? Well, they did that. I don't know why. They did elaborate measurements of their body habitus and their skulls because in the 1930s, they believed that the shape of your body and the shape of your skull had something to do with your intelligence and your personality. This was a time that was an unhappy time in our history when these ideas about eugenics were kind of at play.

And so we have some measurements that we don't know what to do with. We have all these body habitus measurements that we don't know what to do with that. But then we started audiotaping people and then videotaping people and and then videotaping people, and then measuring their cardiovascular reactions. We'd stress them out and measure how quickly they calmed down after a stressor. We drew blood for DNA. I mean, this was in the early 2000s. In 1938, people hadn't even dreamed of DNA. And so what we've become is kind of a history of adult developmental research by incorporating new measures. We put people into MRI scanners and show them happy images and sad images and see where their brains light up. I mean, all these things that now we do that were

never conceived of when the study began. Which is, I mean, just the data, I can't even imagine. You've got quantitative data and qualitative data because part of it is actual lab work. Part of it is like observations and interviews, which also means that you've got the interpretation, the perception, potential bias of all of these observers built into it over time as different people would rotate in also. So it's not just data about the individuals. To a certain extent, it's also data about the observers and the mode of observation. Absolutely. And we're very aware, first of all, by reading some of the quaint notes about the families and some of the biases that are just so such clear biases, but then also thinking about our own quaintness,

our own biases, our own, you know, and so one of the things we do is we make our data available to other researchers. We have collaborated with many, many different researchers. The idea being that other people are going to ask questions of our data that we wouldn't think to ask. And other people, hopefully, will be free of some of our biases and look at things differently. And we're going to archive these data so that, you know, 20, 50 years from now, people will be able to use these data when they have different lenses on. Yeah. Is the intention now, because this has now gone on far longer than Mr. Grant originally looked at and funded, so now you're multi-generations into this study. It's gotten government funding. Is there an end date to this or is the intention now to just keep it going? There may be an end date to this because we're thinking about how do we reach out to the third generation if the third generation includes people who are now toddlers and people who are now in their late 50s. How do you call that a generation?

And so we're thinking there may be a time when we should make these data available clearly for future researchers, but we should hand the baton. And so that's what we're working on now. We're trying to think this through. Yeah, no, it's gotta be such a fascinating moment in this grand multi-generational experiment. Whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th... Tell me how to fly this thing. let's zoom the lens out a little bit you know so original intention was, can we identify people who would potentially be good for management for commercial purposes? Now it's much broader, really understanding human development, human flourishing, what makes us happy,

what allows us to live good lives fundamentally at the end of the day. Before we get to some of the things that you really tease out, talk to me about some of the mythology about what people have thought in Disha of a life well-lived that are largely turning out to be mythology. Yeah. Well, and there's still myths that we cling to. So the idea that being rich is going to make us happy, is going to make us feel like life is meaningful, turns out not to be true. And we study it and we have good data, not just in our study, many studies, right? That making more money does not make you happier once you get your basic material needs met. So I actually, a study recently said about $75,000 a year, annual household income is what you need. And that that beyond that you don't

get much of a bump in happiness as you make more money people are amazed at that you know young people starting out still say i gotta be rich similarly famous i mean think about all the people who are famous for being famous all the emphasis on fame and glitz and presentation, it turns out that doesn't make you happier. And in fact, fame sometimes makes you less happy, as it turns out, because you lose some of the freedoms you have when you're an anonymous person walking down the street. So as much as we think, oh, it's going to be great to be famous, turns out not to be true. And then a third myth is, gee, if I work really hard and get all these awards, and if I eventually win the Nobel Prize, that's going to do it for me. Turns out that's not the case either. So yes, accomplishing things that are important to you, that matters. And that can lead to a sense of fulfillment.

But the accolades, the awards, they don't really do it for most people. And the reason why it's important is that we keep getting these messages that this is what will do it for us. And so, part of why we wrote this book and part of work these last 10, 15 years has been to say, look, we do know what makes people happy. We know what makes people thrive. It's just not all those things in your Instagram feed. Yeah, it's far more basic. And I was going to say less sexy, but actually, depending how you interpret, that's not entirely true. But the notion of fame, I'm fascinated by because that has become such a through line of pop culture, especially I think Gen Z, millennials to a certain extent to. I remember it was a couple of years ago. I'm sure you saw this. It came out. There was a survey that asked, I think it was college age students, would you rather be president of Harbor University

or J-Lo's personal assistant? And there were a whole bunch of other people that were listed who you'd rather be. So J-Lo's personal assistant came out number one. Number two behind that, by the way, it wasn't the Harvard president. It was Jesus. So people chose to be fame adjacent instead of being the Messiah, depending on what your beliefs are. And you're just looking at that and you're like, what is up with us? Yeah. Yeah. There's something about the idea that fame will rub off on us, that my Zen background has gotten me to look into this. Because I used to want to be famous. When I was a kid, I definitely want to be famous. Like when I was a kid, I definitely wanted to be famous. Then I realized, you know, nobody's going to care 50 years from now. Nobody's going to remember almost any of us a hundred years from now, right? It's just not

going to happen. So why am I preoccupied with this? Why are, why is everybody I know preoccupied? And in the Buddhist world, there's a line of thinking that says, look, you know, this self that I call Bob, there's really no kind of self we can find if we look for it. It's kind of ever changing and it's kind of connected to everything else, right? But that's scary. And one theory is that we try to be famous or we try to make a lot of money or achieve a lot as a way to kind of make ourselves feel more real. Like we really do exist and we really do matter and we're going to live on after we die. And that's what came to me as you're describing that. Part of it, I'm sure it makes sense that maybe it's a quest to feel more real in the moment, but also

you got to imagine part of it as a quest for immortality to a certain extent as well. Yeah. You know, if I'm famous enough, I will be remembered for time immortal. Yeah. And good luck with that. Right. You know, because almost nobody is remembered. I can't name all the US presidents.

Lord knows I can't name the British monarchs. Lord knows I can't name the British monarchs. Yeah, I can't come close to any of those. So money is interesting also, because for so long, that was held up as the ultimate indicator of, quote, success. That is what we aspire to. The good life is the moneyed life. And I've often wondered, well, what does money represent? That it would actually make us believe that because money is money. It's paper, it's metal.

It's empty. Right. What is that a proxy for that makes us feel that? So in my mind, I'm curious what your take is. We're talking about things like security and status. And I can see it's got to be so deeply ingrained in us as human beings to want both of those things. Going back to your Zen background, security, if there was an illusion, that's the ultimate. Exactly. I mean, if we ever thought we could be finally secure. Just think about COVID coming along and whacking us all upside the head, right? Like, you know, these things are coming along all the time that we can't control and often can't anticipate. But there is this longing for safety and security. And I think also status

and I do wonder, you know, to what extent were we programmed evolutionarily to want status because status meant we'd survive and pass on our genes? I don't know. I'm making this up now. But why do we care so much about status? But we do. And it comes up in me too. You know, Mr. Zen practitioner, I still feel that way and have to kind of see it for what it is. Yeah. I still feel that way and have to kind of see it for what it is.

Yeah. I mean, it comes, there's all this research around, you know, comparison, you know, the research that you were talking about money and, you know, where, you know, people were asked, you know, would you rather make a hundred thousand dollars, but be surrounded by a community of people where all of your friends were making 150,000 or make 75, but know that everybody around you is making 50. And most people chose to make less money, but know that they were making more than everybody around them. And one of the things we know from research is that when we compare ourselves to other people more frequently during a given day, we're less happy. And so that comparison, which social media just begs us to do, right? That comparison leaves us less happy.

And if that is one of the fundamentals through lines of social media, it's not hard to make that leap. It's just sort of like the general state of humanity from an affect standpoint these days. Yeah. So these things that we've held up for so long as like, these are the measures of success. They're not it. The study does, however, not just leave you hanging. Right. It points you pretty fiercely in one very specific direction.

Yeah. Take me there. So in the 1980s, we began to find, and many other studies began to find, this crazy thing, which is that when we wanted to predict who was going to stay healthy, not just happy, but who was going to stay healthy as they went through life, it was the people who had warmer connections with other people. And at first we didn't believe it. Like, you know, okay, we know the mind and body are connected, but how could the quality of your relationships actually get inside your body and make it less likely that you'll get

coronary heart disease or less likely that you'll get arthritis, or make you live longer? How could that possibly be? So we've been now studying the mechanisms by which this happens. But initially, we didn't believe it until many other research groups began to find the same thing. And now we know that in fact, being socially isolated is really bad for our health and happiness, that being lonely, and one in three people will tell you on any given day that they feel lonely, being lonely is dangerous to our health. So what we find in our study is that relationships confer this amazing health benefit and happiness benefit both. And that the people who were the most connected stayed sharper, their brains stayed sharper, and they were the healthiest

as they went through life. It's funny. It brings you back to what we were all told when we were three years old. It's like all the fundamental messages, like the cutie little toddler posters that were in a room. But everybody's looking for, give me the technology, give me the pill, give me the app, give me the breakthrough modality that is going to make me 10 times healthier, 10 times happier, 10 times more. We're constantly looking at things like this and saying, that's too easy. I know. Yeah. Except it's not. What you just mentioned were fixes. They were quick fixes. Give me the pill. Give me the hack, right? What we're talking about are practices, are lifelong practices. Actually, one of the reasons why we called it social fitness in the book is we wanted

it to be analogous with physical fitness. So if you think about it, you go for a run or you go to the gym, you come home, you don't say to yourself, I'm done. I never have to do that again. Everybody knows we need to take care of our bodies. It's an ongoing practice. And what we find is that investing in our relationships, taking care of our relationships, building them, making them stronger, it's a practice. And that it involves little decisions you can make every day, every week, and that you want to keep making as you go through life. That's not easy. It's simple, but not easy. A lot like my meditation practice, simple, but not easy. I'm with you there. But it also, it requires a buy-in to a certain value set, because those things that we were talking about before, like money, those other things that we work towards. So how many folks step into adulthood, they say yes to a job because we feel like, okay, that's going to give us the security and the status and the money. And maybe they're in an early relationship, then maybe they be there. Whether it's with a romantic partner or your old friends or your chosen or family of origin. I feel like we take for granted the fact that these people in relationships will just be there when we need them and that they won't take

a hit. They don't need anything. And that the more important thing is to go for the golden ring, which is money and status. And we don't realize, like you're saying, there's no sideways in relationships. Yeah. And what you're saying about, we assume that our friends will always be there, turns out not to be true. Then perfectly good, warm relationships will wither away and die of neglect. If we don't connect, if we don't reach out, if we don't see

each other, if we don't call each other, right? And so suddenly people will turn around, you know, in their 30s or 40s and say, I don't have any friends. I've fallen out of touch with my college friends, with my school friends, whatever. And so what we find is that the people who are better at maintaining these connections and making new ones are the people who really thrive. And this can happen at work as well. They've done some pretty good research now on whether you have a friend at work, right? You know this, and like one in three people will say they have a friend at work, meaning somebody you could talk to about your life, your personal life. Those people are so much more engaged in their jobs.

They're better performers. They're happier. They're less likely to leave their jobs because they have something to look forward to every day in the personal realm when they go to work. And circling back to the notion of a value shift, you've got to buy into the value that relationships are equally, if not more important than these other things I thought really matter because it takes effort. If you have a finite amount of emotional and cognitive and energetic bandwidth on any given day, and I think most of us are already feeling like we don't have enough as it is.

And then you've got to make a conscious decision that says, I am choosing to effectively invest less of that bandwidth in the pursuit of security and status and more of it in the deepening of relationships and the sustaining of these relationships, that's a tough call for a lot of people, I think. It is a tough call. You know, there's an analogy that I heard once that just came to mind as you were saying that, which is that if you think of life as like, you know, a beaker or this big container and that you've got some boulders to put in and you've got some smaller rocks and

then you've got pebbles and then you've got sand and the boulders are the things that you can't live your life without. And the sand is the trivia, right? How do we make relationships? One of those boulders that has to fit in first, because what it means is that then everything else fits in around it, the smaller rocks, the sand, right? How do we do that with relationships? When our guys were in their 80s, we asked them, look back on your life and tell us what you're proudest of and tell us what are your biggest regrets? The biggest regret that most people named was I didn't spend enough time with the people I cared about.

And I spent too much time at work. And the thing they were proudest of was to do with relationships. I raised good kids. I was a good friend. I was a good mentor. Right? So this big boulder that we want, what we want to recognize as a centerpiece of our life needs to be these connections. And we're trying to say yes to those in the context of that comparisonitis that we talked

about. Because if you say yes to that, you may end up having fantastic relationships that are deeply nourishing. And then watching the people that graduated college with you or law school or grad school or whatever it may be, making a different choice, accumulating fabulous wealth. You don't know what's happening inside of their household or in their relationship. So you make the assumption that not only are they really successful and wealthy, they have equally good relationships to me. So I'm not making the right call here. Right, right. There's that saying, you probably heard it. We're always comparing our insides to other people's outsides. So we look at other people and say, oh, they've got it all

figured out. They're rich, they're famous, they've achieved a lot, but we don't know what's going on inside exactly as you say. You know, I think that what we do know is that the people in our studies, we have many life stories in the book. The names are disguised to protect the innocent, to protect privacy, but we have these stories of lives. And what you see is that the people who really were connected and prioritized those connections were just so much happier than many accomplished people who were miserable. Yeah. And I think that's one of the huge value propositions for this body of work is it's a body of proof. It's a body of evidence for anybody to look at and challenge their

assumptions. Some of these people were amongst the most privileged people in the world and successful and accomplished when you read their stories. And yet that wasn't it. And you can look at this and say, huh, clearly the mythology just, it doesn't track with what generally is really allowing people to flourish. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. You mentioned this phrase, social fitness, which you share in the book. And it really does, it introduces the idea of building social connections as a practice, as an ongoing thing. Take me a bit deeper into what this practice looks like. Probably it starts with taking stock of what's in your life already in your relationships and what you'd like some more of. So relationships provide us with all kinds of different things that we need. Some relationships are fun and we play together. Some relationships, you know, somebody comes over and loans us a tool to fix something. And some relationships are, you know, as we asked our men at one point, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared?

Some relationships are the people who have your back and always will. And so the first step is to kind of take stock of who you have in your life and what they offer and what you give to them, hopefully. And then what might you want more of? And then think about, well, where might I be able to build those kinds of relationships or shift a current relationship so that I get some more, some more fun or some more ability to confide in this person, whatever it might be, but really first taking stock and then really being active in reaching out, in changing the mix. So a friend you've always done one set of things with, see if that friend will do some different things with you. See if that romantic partner will go on a date and do something completely different with you than you've ever done before, you know, change it up. So it's, it's activity, as we were saying, it's, it's activity in the service of having more of what nourishes you in these relationships.

It doesn't have to be in one relationship. One of the myths that we sometimes have is that our romantic partner is supposed to give us everything. So not true. And many people don't have romantic partners. You don't need a romantic partner to get these benefits. You need some people in your life who are there for you. They don't have to be people you live with. You don't have to have a marriage certificate,

none of that. Yeah. I think that's such an important point also, right? Because talk about one of the other sort of mythological aspirations for a good life. You check the box of finding that perfect person. know this is your romantic intimate person you're like you you it's love at first sight and then you stay together for life and you never need anything else because that person provides it all right that legendary phrase like you complete me and i get like p on rare rare really rare right like the research is pretty clear like what you said like we people, like different types of people to play different roles in different contexts in different ways.

And the mythology is really limiting. So I'm glad you sort of like, you talked about that because it also, it's permission giving. It says like, there are so many different ways to solve for this. Absolutely. It doesn't mean that you have to have this one person or this one person. Everyone has a unique circumstance. And that gives a lot of freedom and agency. There's another myth that's probably worth naming here, which is the myth that you've got to be an extrovert to get these benefits. So all of us are somewhere between really shy introverts and party animal extroverts.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle. And, you know, many of us have both shyness and extroversion as part of us. And so there's nothing wrong with being an introvert. Absolutely. Introverts are just people who need more alone time for refueling. And those people may just need one or two solid relationships in their lives. And that being with more people could be exhausting and stressful. On the other hand, extroverts really derive a lot of energy from being with

more people. So I think it's worth naming that you can have good, solid relationships and be an introvert, be a shy person, not a problem. Yeah. And it's not necessarily a volume game. And you talk about this as, you know, there's the frequency and the quality that, and these are these two sort of like features that you talk about when you're thinking about like the people that you might bring into the mix that would really make for a nourishing life, volume wasn't a part of that equation. Right. Exactly. It isn't part of that equation. That each person has to find what the right

number is for themselves. And of course, there's no absolute right number for anyone, but what's the mix right now in your life that seems to work for you in terms of numbers of people in your life? You have an interesting exercise around this also. I think you call it the social universe experiment. Well, it's a set of circles, concentric circles. And we ask people to make a little dot and write the name by it of a person who's, where are they in your universe? So many people choose to put their nearest and dearest in the inner circles. And then some people put their more casual relationships in their outer circles. And it can really be helpful just to see, well, how many people are your nearest and dearest? And how many people do you have in those outer circles

who are more casual? And by the way, casual relationships are great for us and they matter. You know, the cashier at the grocery store who you say hi to and exchange some pleasant words with every week, that's a little hit of wellbeing that you can give each other. The person who, you know, makes your coffee for you at Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, all that.

Turns out the research shows that those casual ties, as they're called, matter and they're good for us. So not to be discounted. I love that, by the way. I literally recently, last week, came back from grabbing lunch at this place where I've been frequently going to pick up a salad. I had this big smile on my face, my wife's like, what's up? And I said, she knew my name. I walk in and she's like, oh, Jonathan, here's your salad. I'm like, it's the dopiest little thing, but it made me feel really good.

Exactly. Exactly. It does. And you can feel it. You can feel it viscerally in your body, right? And so what it does say is that we're often happier talking to people who are kind of peripheral in our lives. So you might think about talking to the person who delivers your mail, you know, or, you know, just, just see what it's like to, to, to learn their name, you know, to, and what a pleasure when somebody learns your name as you pick up your salad. What a great thing. I was surprised how sort of like, um,

delighted I was by that passing moment. Part of what you're talking about here also is you're also kind of recognizing moments to reflect, moments to take stock. And it doesn't have to be this big, heavy, like sit down, deep, intense conversation or analytical thing. And this, I would imagine also, this was reflected in the work from the study over so long from my understanding is every couple of years, participants would also get, I guess it was a questionnaire. Yes. That would basically, but that was pretty in depth. And I wonder if there's data on not just what you got from those questionnaires, but the value of that questionnaire as a mechanism for reflection to the people who got it.

Yes. We asked them, we literally asked the question on one of our questionnaires, what's it been like for you being part of this study? Has it affected your life? Some people said, no, it hasn't affected me. And some people said, your questions are annoying. And, you know, it's been a bother mostly. But most people said, this has been really important because it gets me to take stock

of where I am in my life. And otherwise, I wouldn't do that. It turns out that these, as you say, moments of reflection matter a lot in terms of getting us to stop and say, huh, here's where I am right now. Where would I like to go next? And that's what our people did and continue to do. We're actually collecting data right now as we speak on the next generation. Yeah. I'm curious also, while there's probably a lot of value in that for people, because I don't think many of us create on our own periodic recurring mechanisms to check in and just kind of say, how am I doing? So on the one hand, it's probably really interesting and valuable to a lot of people.

But I wonder if also it's a bit of a gut check. It's sort of like, huh, I've been heads down cruising along, like doing the same kind of thinking. I'm doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing, feeling the way I'm supposed to be feeling. This is life. And now like doing, like actually sitting here and being present and reflecting in a detailed way, it's bringing up a reality that I'm actually not happy about.

Yes. Yes. I mean, think about what's happened during COVID. COVID was this weird virus, right? We'd never heard of. And suddenly it made us all think about our lives, right? We were locked down. So many things changed.

And many of us started saying, where am I in my life? And what really matters? There can be these unlikely times when brought up short and made to reflect on where we are. But we can also do that. I mean, I can't send everybody a questionnaire and nobody would want me to, but there are ways we can do that for ourselves. And actually part of what we do in the book is put these exercises in hoping that people will use these as ways of reflecting on their lives and that they can come back to those same exercises over time. Would you share one or two of those if they come to mind? So we have a set of questions about where am I in my, what am I like in relationships? Do I feel I can be myself? I can be authentic. Do I feel like I

can be reciprocal? Can I, that I can give to other people in the way that they give to me sort of those kinds of reflective questions. So it's a, And the question is structured such that we ask you, how are you now in relationships? So for example, can I be authentic? And then how would you like to be? What do you aspire to? And so what we do is we get them to rate, we get people to rate how I am now and what I want for myself. And then you can look at the gaps if there are gaps and you can look at places where you're just where you want to be. And it's those kinds of reflections that might lead you to do some things differently in your life. I love that because I don't think we're given many tools for that sort of inquiry. So I love the fact that there are all these exercises

kind of built into your process and the book that we can kind of step into. Years back, I had a conversation actually with a friend out here who shared that after his first marriage didn't last, when he got remarried and really wanted it to stay alive and vibrant and connected, he and his wife created these mechanisms they called life dinner. So once a month, they would go to a nice restaurant, they'd get a bottle of wine, they'd order a nice dinner, they would exchange gifts. It didn't have to be anything big, just like something that said, I was thinking about you. And they would close the place down talking about like, how are we? How's life? Like, how are you?

How am I? Like, how is our life together? Like, what's going off the rails? What's okay? And that monthly check-in was like so powerful, yet so few of us create mechanisms like that. And again, I wonder if it's in part because we feel already so pressed and maybe we don't value, we just assume the relationships, it's kind of on coast. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think, you know, what you're saying, we feel so pressed. And so we think to ourselves, please let just let that thing be okay and take care of itself. And so we say, please let, let my relationship be all right. And so we, we hope it will be because so many other things want to drag us away and take our attention. And so I think what this is trying to do, what my work right now is trying to do is to say to people, no, really do this, you know, have the monthly dinner, have the weekly date night, just go for a walk once a week with your partner, just to make sure that you check in because these relationships don't just take care of themselves. They really need light and air and nurturing. Yeah, no, that resonates so deeply.

You're using the word friend a lot. And you also referenced some of the questions and the exercise that you shared, which really spoke to this notion of being known beyond the superficial. Yeah. And you shared that these loose relationships actually do add value. They quote, count. But in the context of having friends, I think a lot of us would probably say we have friends. But if you really said, do they really know you? A lot of us would probably say, not really. And I wonder whether there's a way to tease out the distinction between

where you feel truly seen and known. Is that a different friend than the friend who we may just hang out with casually and then you're sure we know each other, we kick around, we mountain bike, whatever it is. Is there a difference there? There is a difference. And both are important. Like your mountain biking buddy is really important, right? But many of us, I think, you know, most of us want to be seen, want to feel like somebody in the world gets us. And if we're lucky, we have somebody who does maybe more than one and maybe people who get us in different ways. You know, maybe somebody gets me as a worker in a different way than my wife gets me as her husband, you know, but but I, I feel seen by a few people. And what a blessing when I have that.

I remember I didn't have that for a long time growing up. And then actually it was getting into a good psychotherapy where I had a therapist who I thought, oh my gosh, this person gets me. And it was like, this experience of being seen was just so liberating. And you don't have to be in a psychotherapy to have that. There are these places and these people in our lives who can do that.

But it's worth the search for people who can get you in that way. But I mean, at that moment, and by the way, people can't see it, but you were just smiling a lot when you said that. There was something embodied there. I wonder if in that moment, there was something in you that also said, I'm gettable. Yes. Often when we don't feel seen, we also feel like, oh, I'm kind of an aberration. Like nobody's quite like me. I'm kind of odd in these ways and no one's really gonna get me. And then to, to have somebody get you for me has just there, you can just feel this outpouring of gratitude. I mean, that's why you, you, you saw me smiling there. Cause I was remembering what it was like. So I think that

it's one of those wonderful, special experiences that we can have in relationships if we're lucky. And if we keep working at it, part of it also involves being vulnerable. I mean, you gotta, you gotta take the risk to share stuff and including sharing stuff. You're not always proud of it. You have to find people you can trust and people who won't be hurtful in any way, as you do let yourself be vulnerable and hopefully people who can be vulnerable hurtful in any way as you do let yourself be vulnerable and hopefully people who can be vulnerable to you in return. Yeah. I mean, it's that whole notion, you can't be known unless and until you allow yourself to be known, which can be really scary. It's one of the reasons I love Arthur Aaron's work, which popularizes the 36 questions around

sort of like developing intimacy, where it's these three sets of questions that start on a fairly superficial level. And then just the idea is progressive mutual revelation, which requires each person to answer a set of questions, starting as strangers. And first, fun, topical. And then by the end, it like questions like you're like have you ever had a premonition about how you're gonna die yeah you're like this kind of deep scary really deep scary yeah and it's mute it's like what you're describing it's not one-sided you've

got to step into a place of being like this might land weird with this other person who i don't know but i'm gonna go there and you know his lab found that these people, strangers running on students, 45 minutes after this intervention, often reported feeling closer to this former stranger than they were to people they had known for years. So the notion of being able to create experiences like that, I love the idea of taking a modified version of that, inviting eight friends over to dinners, you know them all, but they don't know each other. And then have some sort of version of something like that so we can create mechanisms to bring this into people's lives. Someone did this for me. I was in a group of people. We didn't really know each other

at a dinner party. And they had this little deck of cards that the name of it was no small talk and you could volunteer to pick a card and you would be the first person to answer this question and then everyone would go around and do it so i i jumped in i volunteered and the card was how would your parents describe you and so immediately right so immediately with all these people I didn't know, I said, well, you know, yeah, they described me this way. And that part was really hard because they didn't get this other aspect. You know, I immediately started talking about things that were not superficial. It was a wonderful dinner.

I remember it's much more vividly than most of the dinners I have socially. So I highly recommend this. I actually have that deck sitting on my bookshelf. They gave us the deck, but I highly recommend some exercise like that. Yeah. No, I love that. And I think that centers the idea of taking a risk with being known, being seen, being vulnerable. The other thing that really comes into, and this is something that you're talking right about, is the notion of attention and awareness and presence, which I think are sort of like, is there such thing as a three-sided coin? It's one thing to be in a room with somebody physically there. So maybe you can be like, well, of course, I'm committed to this relationship. Of course, I'm home for dinner every single day,

or I answer the phone every time you call. But if you're physically there, but attentively, completely checked out, I almost wonder if that's more harmful than not being physically there at all. It is really hurtful to most people to get what we call continuous partial attention. And our screens do this a lot. I mean, sometimes my wife and I will go down for breakfast and she'll be on her email and I'll be on my phone and one of us will say something to the other and we're both half present, right? And then what I've learned is I have to stop. I have to turn toward her. I have to make eye contact, get her to make eye contact with me. And then we can connect, right? And so, one of my Zen teachers is quoted as saying, attention is the most basic

form of love. And I think that's a really powerful statement because it's true that probably the greatest gift we have to give to another human being is our full undivided attention. And it's increasingly rare that we do that. Which is a bit tragic. Yeah. But the flip side to me is I completely agree with everything. The flip side to me is, I completely agree with everything. The flip side to me is that if you get intentional about regularly checking in, getting present and directing your attention at another being, even just for a moment of

acknowledgement, my sense, and I'm curious what your take is on this. My sense is that for all the reasons you just described, it has become so rare that when you do it, different than it would have landed a generation ago, it lands as something even more precious, as something even more treasured and valuable. Yeah, it does. It does. Because I think that it opens the way to feeling seen by somebody else and for them to see you, for you to see them.

And that that is harder to get these days. It was always a problem. We were always distractible creatures. But I think that the digital revolution has exacerbated it. Yeah. I think it's one of these, it's given and it's allowed families or people who are spread across the world to be more regularly connected, especially with this technology over the pandemic has actually gotten so much better to allow us to be visually and see all the nonverbal cues and stuff like this. So on the one hand, it's given something to us.

It's given us a capacity to connect more deeply with people who are not easily present physically with us. But yeah, but then it also, a different part of the technology takes the people who we can be physically present with and almost makes us distant from them. Yes. And that's what I'm coming, I, what I'm coming to these days is that screens aren't going away, but that what we need is to be really intentional about how we use those screens. You know, like you, you and I would never have met. We're using screens to meet and you're very intentional about how you're structuring our conversation, which I'm grateful for because it's fun and it

feels very connected, right? So that to me is a really good use of this technology. On the other hand, if I'm looking at somebody else's Instagram feed and comparing myself and coming away after 10 minutes feeling drained and feeling sadder, that's a use of technology that my hope is we can all start steering ourselves away from. Right. And then coming back after that 10 minutes, maybe having been sitting across from somebody you actually claim to love for that entire 10 minutes, and then coming back in a much worse state to then be present with them when

you're all grumbling and annoyed and bothered and feeling less than. It's, yeah, we are weird beasts the way we are. We are weird beasts. One other thing I want to ask you about also is this notion, I think we've talked a lot about just the role and the importance and certainly the size of the data set that you have that shows how much this matters is big. Is the role of, in the earlier on our conversation, you were talking about the fact

that we can now actually connect, you know, relationship, social connection to physiological causes and symptomology, illness, life-threatening, life-ending illness, and or the lack thereof, you know, which literally changes our physical and mental wellbeing. There's also the notion of the role of social connection in when life gets hard and that being one of the central reasons that it's so important.

And you have this incredible longitudinal data set where 80 years with all these different people, there are going to be like, I have to imagine thousands of moments across that data set where life got really, really hard, where there were challenges. And, you know, so the friendships play like, or family, they play a really important role in those moments. They absolutely do. So our original people grew up during the Great Depression, one of the hardest times in this country, maybe in the world. Then the Harvard guys were of the age to go off to World War II. Many of them served in combat, saw their friends killed, all kinds of traumatic things happened. And when they were asked by the study, when they came home, what got you through these hard times, everybody to a person talked about their relationships. It was the people back home

who wrote me letters who I knew cared about me. It was my fellow soldiers. It was my commanding officer. And so everybody cited other humans as what got them through. And I think this is still the case. If we think about what gave us some measure of comfort and resilience through this pandemic, through some of the scariest times, for most of us, it had to do with our connections with other people. So I'm going to float a question to you that I have been, for some reason, recently deeply curious about. When we think about emotions or experiences that connect us deeply with other people,

especially with people who are previously strangers, or we may even felt like there was an othering between us, often we talk about compassion as sort of like the linchpin. This is a thing, if we can cultivate that between us. We talk about love. We talk about shared aspirations, beliefs we can cultivate that between us. We talk about love, we talk about shared aspirations, beliefs, visions, hopes, desires. There's something in my head that's become really curious about the experience of commiseration as a deeply emotional often experience, which generally revolves around shared suffering and the power of that experience to connect us to other people

more deeply than almost anything that I have looked at. I have no idea if there's any data on this, but I'm curious just on what your take is on that. Well, commiseration, I think is part of that whole realm of whether someone else gets me., if I've lost a loved one to cancer, and I go to a bereavement group where other people can talk about, yeah, this is what it's like. When I feel like a lot of people are just saying nice things, but they don't really get what it feels like, that commiseration can be so bonding and can make me feel seen, right? And so in that sense, it can be really good. There are also people who can exploit this in our culture and can exploit our sense of

victimhood and we're not going to take this anymore, all that. But used in the best way, commiseration and compassion can really be quite bonding. Compassion meaning to feel with, you know, I get it. I know what you're feeling. It doesn't mean I can fix it. It just means I'm there with you and I know how much this hurts. Yeah. That feeling of I'm not alone. Yeah. And imagine if you could also have that feeling of I'm not alone and it's being generated to a certain extent in relation with somebody who, before you realize you shared that experience, you viewed as somebody you would never want to be in relationship with. Exactly. You may have seen, they do these experiments. Sometimes they'll show them on

video where they pair people and they have them do a project together, something hard. And then they share their personal stories after, and they realize they're people who would have hated each other. But they've bonded over this, over accomplishing this shared task and being proud of it. And that changes everything. Yeah. So fascinating. You and I, I think could go on a lot of different dangers. We could. With respect for our time. And I think we've sort of like made the point of, you know, like massive data set, like

decades and generations in the making and clear as day, like people matter, you know, and all the distractions and the taunts of all the other things that we think matter and the way that we're wired to engage with technology and sometimes I'm very hopeful when, especially when I see the energy that younger people bring and the willingness to just hang in there and, and forge ahead. And, you know, I think the other thing that, that studying these lives has helped with is the realization that I just don't know how things are going to come out. So in my despairing moments, I can think the world is terrible. Everything is going to be ruined. Everything's going to be destroyed. It's all going to end badly. But I don't know that.

And many people who thought, oh, my life is going nowhere. My relationships will never be good. Many of those people found happiness, found good relationships in their 60s, in their 70s when they never dreamed it was going to be possible. So that's a long way of saying not knowing how life is going to turn out is one of the things that allows me to be hopeful. Love that. Good place for us to come full circle as well. So I always wrap these conversations with

the same question half or a decade now and i'm particularly curious what your answer is and i have a sense i'm going to know what it is um release a piece of it and the question is simply if i offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes up being engaged in things that you care about with people who you care about. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the last episode that we have just aired, where I share a simple model for a really good life. You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes.

Good Life Project is a part of the ACAST Creator Network. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those, you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better. So we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen,

then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

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