How to Talk to People - How To Build a Happy Life: A New Formula for Happiness

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

We often follow a misguided formula for happiness—pushing us toward material wealth and other worldly successes. But when our expectations set us down the wrong path, it may be time to reorient ourselves around something new: universal happiness principles we can practice at any age.  In our finale episode of this season, a conversation with psychiatrist Robert Waldinger provides a scientific insight into key elements for happy living, whatever your age.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), and Gregory David (“Under the Tide”). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose

if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. Arthur, was there some point in your life where you realized that you weren't where you wanted to be? Well, yeah, of course, many times, like all of us, maybe every day. I'm not sure. But in my 20s, I remember when I realized that my childhood dream wasn't going to lead me where I thought it was. Since I was a little kid, all I cared about was classical music.

I wanted to be a professional French horn player. I had left college. at 19 to do exactly that. I mean, it wasn't like that was entirely my decision, I have to say, you know, dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs. But I was all the way through my 20s. I went pro and I was playing and it was great. And I had this big dream that I was going to get better and better and better and better because that's what the world tells you, you're going to get better and better. And I didn't. But I realized that I wasn't getting better. I was actually getting worse. And I was going to have to find something else because they didn't want to stay. stuck for the rest of my life.

And so I figured out that I needed to make some big life changes, but that was, that was tricky. That was hard. That was, boy, that was, that was misery, actually. I didn't talk about it for 20 years afterward. Wow. I just threw in the towel and went and got a PhD and became a college professor. And every night for a long time and still today, I still dream I'm up on stage, playing a concert and it's better than ever and the orchestra's cranking it up and we're doing

great and I'm doing my best work and then I wake up and find out nope no you're not wow this is how to build a happy life I'm arthur brooks Harvard professor and contributing writer at the atlantic and i'm rebecca rashid a producer at the atlantic my guess is that most people who are listening to a podcast called how to build a happy life they're looking for a formula for a happy life, just going out of a limb here. And the reason that it's elusive is because they're following a bogus formula, which I was for many years. It's a very simple seductive formula that your brain gives you, that Mother Nature gives you, that the marketing colossus and entertainment industry give you, that culture gives you,

that says love things, which is a way to measure your own success. Use people because they're instrumental in your success. and worship yourself because everything revolves around you. And that is almost the perfect formula for misery. And, you know, that's one of the main reasons that I couldn't get my mind around being anything other than the world's greatest French horn player, as absurd as that sounds. Bob Waldinger, how old are you? I'm 71.

And just out of curiosity to be even more impolite, how old are you? I am 27 years old. We're disclosing our age for a reason here, basically. Yeah, and since it was my impoliteness, let me disclose mine, I am 58 years old. Arthur and I sat down with Robert Waldinger, the head of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest running studies of human happiness on record. The data from Waldinger's study, which began all the way back in 1938, have transformed our knowledge of human happiness.

In our season finale episode, we hope to parse out the key happiness lessons at every stage of life. and explore how to adjust our expectations and our actions accordingly. It started with people in their teenage years and has studied them all the way into old age, and now we're studying their children. And to study the same lives for that length of time is virtually unheard of in the history of science. Okay, let's talk about the big picture of what you're finding in this study. Well, actually, there are two big takeaways. The first one from our study is you need to take care of your body like you're going to need it for a hundred years.

And if you do that, you end up much more likely to be happy as well as well. And that means exercise. It means eating well. It means when you can getting regular health care, getting enough sleep, all those things that your grandmother told you. But the second thing is a little more surprising, at least it was. to us. And that's that the people who end up, not just the happiest, but the healthiest, are the people who have more social connections and warmer social connections, connections of all kinds, not just intimate partners, but friends and work colleagues and

casual relationships. All of that adds up to a happier and healthier life as you get older. What do you tell someone in young adulthood who is sort of trained away from relationships and told that that's something to focus on at a later time in the future? Yeah. Becca, what you're pointing out is really important, which is there are always conflicting polls on us, always. And getting ahead is real, needing to make a living, wanting to have meaningful work, of all of those things that we're told we should. want, but also intrinsically, we do want many of us. And so there are always going to be these competing pulls. I think what we see often is that when we're young, we get the message that if you just work really hard now, you can defer some of those other things until later. You can defer the emphasis on relationships. And what our data say to us is, no, you can't. And that can mean

trying to create opportunities for connections even in the midst of working hard at a workplace. So it doesn't have to be either or. We interviewed on the show Omri Gilaf, and he was very clear, don't put off love. Do not postpone love. It's an iron law of happiness as far as he's concerned. Are you on the same plane? Yes. And in fact, one of the things my predecessor, George Valiant, said, is that

maturity involves learning not to push love away. Either through neglect or through actively pushing love away. But aren't most people in young adulthood struggling with immaturity? How do you sort of channel that wisdom into action at such an early age? Well, immaturity is relative, right? I mean, I'm struggling with immaturity. Honestly and truly, I still have to take myself. in hand and say, do the wise thing, Bob, because sometimes my instincts pull me in a direction I know

is not going to go well. I've heard one marriage guru talk about the idea that some of us grow up with our partners and some of us grow up and then find our partners. And there's something to be said for that, that other people really need that time to say, boy, I'm learning more and more about myself. And if I had chosen somebody at age 23 or 24, I would have chosen someone so different than I'm going to choose when I'm 28 or 32, right? So these are different developmental paths. There are also so many changes in the romantic landscape. Young people today who've come up with so many creative ways to build a robust social world because, you know, partnership either is not sort of in their family tradition. They weren't raised religious, whatever it may be. A lot of people are

polyamorous, non-monogamous. There are all sorts of ways that people choose to conduct their intimate lives. So for people that don't see marriage or long-term monogamous partnership in their future, will they be missing out on this sort of core fundamental relationship that you need to have a sense of well-being? you're getting at this basic question of what is the essence of what people need to be well and to feel well and you're right that it's certainly not about a marriage license and it's not about cohabitation what we think it is about is an attachment to another person and a sense that another person is there for you particularly when you need them. We think of relationships as safety nets, as stress regulators.

So I'll give you an example. Let's say you have something really upsetting happen during the day and it stays with you and it's really on your mind and you can feel yourself all upset about it when you go home and let's say there's somebody at home or on the phone or you meet up for a drink and that person is a really good listener. And you can tell them what happened. And maybe they offer some reflection. Maybe they just listen.

But often you can literally feel your body calm down. Stress induces what we call the fight or flight response where the body revs up literally to flee because there's danger or to meet a challenge because there's danger. And one of the things we think is that when we are stressed, if there is no way to come back to equilibrium by talking to a trusted friend, for example, that the body stays in mild fight or flight mode. And that then they're circulating stress hormones that stay elevated, blood pressure stales, mildly elevated.

And that's how unregulated. stress can slowly wear down multiple body systems. The joints, the cardiovascular system, the pancreas, all of these systems. That's why the diseases of aging may come sooner for people who are chronically stressed, chronically isolated in the midst of unhappy relationships much of their lives. How do you know if you've got that person, Bob? It takes a little time, usually. And that's one of the reasons why we hold our breath when someone comes to us and says, we met last week and we just got married. It's like, okay, because they haven't had time to find that out yet. They will find that out, and if they're lucky, it may work out, right? But if you can take the time to see, what's it like

when the honeymoon wears off, the glow wears off, and we have our first argument. What do we do during our first argument and how do we end up feeling when it's over? That's the thing that seems worth checking out if you can. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.

Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen now. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. You have patients of all different ages, and so let's go forward a little bit and talk about what the Harvard study says about, I don't know, we were talking about a 27-year-old. Now let's talk about a 42-year-old and not necessarily in the rearview mirror, Arthur, in the windshield, Becca, a person who has kind of an average life, married a kid or two, a job, a mortgage, a lot of tensions, a lot of

of pressures, but not the same tensions and pressures that come with mid-20s. What should our 42-year-old listener be thinking about right now to make the best happiness hygiene decisions? 42, we literally know from the science, is starting that period of time when the awareness of mortality becomes more vivid, gradually, that when we get into our 40s, death is no longer as much of an abstraction. Actually, when we are in our 40s, we begin to see, okay, I may be done with the first half of my life. Is this how I want to keep going? Do I want to make changes?

It's why we sometimes talk about midlife crisis, but midlife crisis is really a misnomer. It's not clear that midlife, the 40s, the 50s, that any particular time has to be. a time of crisis. But it's often that time of re-evaluation. Okay, this is what I've devoted my time to so far. This is who I've become. Do I want to keep going with this? And so some people abruptly or gradually make changes. Some people stay the course because this is working for them. This is what they want. And I know a lot of people in their 40s are like, life passed me by. And so I'm just, you know, I'm just going to work until I die. Is there something around success? addiction, work addiction that you often see for people in their 40s,

that really compromises their ability to become happy later? I will say that when we asked people in our study, when they were in their 80s, to look back and we said, what are your biggest regrets? Many of the men, and remember in that generation, it was primarily the men who worked outside the home. Many of them said, I wish I hadn't devoted so much time to work and achieve.

I wish I had spent more time with the people I care about. And many of the women in that generation who were primarily at home, now that also meant community activists and volunteers and many other things, but many of them said, I wish that I hadn't worried so much about what other people thought of me. And I had done more of what I felt was true to me. Interesting. And so I think those are two of the big regrets that emerge from our study. There was a developmental theorist, Bernice Newgarten, who had a theory about being on time or off time.

Her sense was that developmentally, we care a lot about what our community around us considers normal for the age that we are at. and that it affects us if we feel we are off time, if we're not doing the things right now that other people our age are supposed to be doing. And that is a social influence that's inevitable. And so to pull back from that and to try to listen to yourself, I think is essential because it is your life. Nobody else is going to live your life.

And so the world can tell you, You ought to be doing this at this point in your life, but you cannot let that be the thing that is your soul driver. There's a quote from Joseph Campbell that I love. He said, if the path before you is clear, you're probably on somebody else's path. And it's really important to remember that just because everybody else says, you should be doing this at this time in your life, you have got to do that internal looking that you're doing. And I keep saying it too because people ask me things like, well, wait, are you crazy? Why aren't you retired now?

You're 71 years old. But my internal sense is I want to be engaged in these things still, even though many people are saying you're wasting these good years when you could be playing golf. Well, that's not going to work for me right now. Well, we've got one group of people left that we really want to talk about, and that's people who are just getting set to retire. That's people who are a little bit older than me. Talk to your friends who are 65 to 70 right now, and they're my old, I don't know if I'm old. I don't know.

And is it too late? I know you're not going to say it's too late. So give a little bit of advice to those folks for making sure that by the time they do get to 91, or however many years they get, that they are as happy as they're locked. can give them. So the basic advice is stay engaged in the world. That what we know is that when people stay engaged physically, intellectually, socially, they stay more fit, they stay happier, their brains stay sharper. It could mean stay engaged gardening. It could mean stay engaged volunteering for a political campaign. It doesn't matter how,

but stay engaged with other people and stay engaged physically so that you're physically active. Learn a language, playing an instrument. It could be singing in a chorus. It doesn't have to be, if you are not academically inclined, doesn't have to be academic.

Amazingly, you know, the data are very clear that there are certain things that are easier to learn when you're older, you know, after 65 and 70 years old. And all this has to do with the fact that we have this crystallized intelligence, this big library inside our heads. And so our working memories and it's not as good and our innovative capacity is not as good and our ability to focus is not as good. But, man, we've got the whole New York library in there, man. And so if you do something that's going to bring that to bear, these are good things for older people to keep doing because you're going

to get better and that's going to be fun, right? And that's a great point, Arthur, to find what you do well. And that may be different from what you used to do well. Maybe you were the great innovator and maybe you had a steel trap memory for names and recent places, but maybe that's not you now. But maybe this crystallized intelligence, this data bank of life experience and information that you have, you can use in new ways that help you feel successful and help the world. And so I would say, don't dwell on the things that you're not doing as well at now. That's normal. Find the things that you're doing well and maybe doing better than you used to do.

Tell me the big mistake that people make in love when they're retiring. Tell me the big mistake that you actually see that bedevils people that holds them back from the happiness that they should get. I suppose the hardest thing is managing loss because as we get, age 65 and beyond, losses happen more frequently, including the loss of people we have relied on. So dear friends, partners, the most important thing is to work on dealing with loss, get help dealing with loss, grieve.

I mean, think about those people who've known you since you were a kid. Can't make those friends again. people who can't be replaced, but bring new love into your life, bring new warmth into your life. Everybody needs to feel like they matter. And one of the challenges of being older is you can begin to feel like you don't matter anymore

because our society is constructed now in such a way that many people in this culture, as they get older, don't find a role for themselves. So one is feeling like you matter, finding ways to feel like you matter, But then another is to feel like there are still some kindred spirits around. And that means finding age mates, finding people who share some of those experiences, including the experience of losing so many people.

Because younger folks don't understand that. Fortunately, they don't understand that. Right. Let's say you're receiving this wisdom too late or what feels like too late. How can people with a lot of accumulated, relationship regrets sort of make peace at the end of life with the relationships they maybe didn't keep up with in the way that they wanted or they weren't able to show love in the way that they wanted. Is there something that they can do to reconcile that with the other person and perhaps

with themselves as well? To go back to someone and say, I've missed you and I'd love to spend a little more time or I'm sorry I haven't been around much. You know, there are ways to to do that, to make amends, if you will, when we think about being really hard on ourselves, looking back on our lives with a lot of regret, to remember that none of us gets up in the morning and says, I'm going to do a bad job on my life today. That's my aspiration.

We're all doing what we can in the moment. And sometimes it's not as we wish we would have done, but to look back with what Eric, and calls a sense of integrity, that I've done what I could. And each of us, if you think about it from a karmic point of view, each of us has done what we could. Each of us is affected by infinite causes and conditions to lead the lives we've led. But there's a way in which looking back and coming to terms with that is a kind of internal work that can lead to more peace of mind as we get older. Because we all do have regrets as we look back.

And then at the end, we'll do some reflections on the series and how you get around it and how you stay motivated and all of that. Right. Great. Okay. This is, I'm sorry. In three, two, one. Many of the concepts we've covered in this series create kind of a tension in our lives. There's lots of things that we're supposed to be doing, but they're not always compatible with each other, right?

I mean, sometimes work, which is great, it's a great way to express yourself. It's an enormous source of satisfaction if you do it right, but it can get into a way of your relationships. We all know that we have limited time. And then sometimes that means loneliness or isolation and loneliness and our need for relationships can create addictions, some optimal behavior, dangerous behavior sometimes even. Sometimes our need to be productive in every waking moment because we want to feel responsible. we want to feel like our life has meaning, that takes us away from the simple joys of living,

the simple joys of maybe even doing nothing. In other words, balance is hard. But that's really what it's all about. Your happiness 401K plan, I guess, is made up of four big things. That's your philosophy or faith or spiritual life journey, something that is bigger than you. Your family life, the relationships that you didn't change. shoes, the ties that bind that don't break, and God knows you wouldn't have chosen, but the people who will take your 2 a.m. phone call and distress, the real friends, not the deal friends, these are the

people that you chose and can also count on, the people that give you satisfaction through your shared loves, without whom you simply can't find true happiness. Now, of course, the convergence of the family people and the happiness people, these are your romantic partners. Ideally, your romantic, partner who lifelong is a companion at love, one of your closest friends, if not your closest friend, and the family member, the only family member that you ultimately choose. And last but not least, number four is your work, but not the work that defines you as an object, not the work that simply brings you money, power, the admiration of others. Those are nothing more than instrumental goods. This is the work that helps you to earn your success, to feel like your accomplishments or

recognize that your good works are rewarded, and even more importantly, where you can truly serve other people. If we can figure out how to get that balance, a happy life won't be elusive. Now, one quick parenthetical to this, which is I'm making it sound like we can find the perfect balance and find ultimate happiness. Don't be fooled by that. Happiness is not really a destination. It's a journey of balancing and rebalancing and making progress and feeling pain and resolving that pain and being fully alive. So this is something that I want everybody to remember. You may not be the happiest person in the world, but you can be a happier person. Really, we should call this series how to build a happier life,

because that's really what the struggle is all about. Find your path, invest properly. There's the right formula. Love people. Use things. Worship the divine. Figure out how to do it. And a happier life will be yours.

That's what I wish for you. That's all for this season of How to Build a Happy Life. This series was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Bade. Fact-check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.

And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country, and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.