Offline with Jon Favreau - What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from an 84 Year Study on Happiness

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

Dr. Robert Waldinger, Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, joins Offline to talk about his new book “The Good Life: Lessons From the Longest Study on Happiness.” Bob and Jon discuss how close relationships are the secret to a fulfilling life, why technology can make us lonelier, and what 84 years of data teach us about coming together and growing apart. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

when I gave that TED Talk that you talked about in the introduction, I thought, I'm saying the most obvious thing in the world. The audience is going to sit there and go, duh, right? But it went viral. It went totally viral. And I think it's because we all know it, that relationships are so important, but it's kind of like on the periphery of our consciousness. And that what this work does is it takes it from the periphery and it brings it front and center and says, look, look at this. And what you noticed with your friend is just that, that when you took a look at it, you said, wait a minute, this is obvious. We know this, but we don't see each other. And I think that's what our hope is for this work, that we bring

this front and center and ask people to check in with themselves. Okay, how connected do I feel to the world? Do I have the connections I want? And if not, what can I do about that? I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and co-author of the new incredible book, The Good Life, Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness. What makes for a good life? It's maybe the most ancient and often asked question in all of human history. One that we all wrestle with in the decisions we make every day, even if we're not always conscious of doing so. We may know what makes us happy at any given moment, but how many of us have figured out

how to live a truly meaningful life? Our guest today can help you find that answer. Dr. Robert Waldinger is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted. For over 80 years, the study has followed a group of men from Boston, and later their descendants, to discover what leads to thriving, fulfilling lives.

Dr. Waldinger and his associate director, Mark Schultz, recently published many of the study's findings in The Good Life, a beautiful new book that weaves together the lessons they learned and the stories of the people they studied to illuminate how many of the things we overlook in life are often the most important. I'm going to let Dr. Waldinger speak to the study's findings himself in a moment, but let me just say I'm so excited to share this conversation with you. We've talked a lot on this show about the ways our relationship with the internet and our devices is making us all unhappy. And while we've talked a lot about what we can do to reclaim our time from our screens, we've never really gotten into what we should do with all that extra time to make ourselves happier. We start that conversation here. Many of Dr. Waldinger's lessons feel like things we always should have known, and yet somehow it's still not always easy to follow them. But I hope, like me, you take them to heart.

As always, if you have any comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please take a moment to rate the show, or better yet, share this episode with a friend. Here's Dr. Robert Waldinger. Dr. Robert Waldinger, welcome to Offline. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I loved your book. I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop talking about it. I'm not alone. Your TED Talk on the subject is one of the 10 most viewed of all time. You and your co-author, Mark Schultz,

are directors of the longest study that's ever been done on human happiness, which began in my hometown of Boston in 1938. So let's start there. Who started the study? Why did they do it? And who were the first participants? It was started as two studies that didn't even know about each other. They were both started in 1938. One was at the Harvard Student Health Service. It was with Harvard undergraduates, sophomores, 19 years old, who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding young men. And it was meant to be a study of normal adolescent to young adult development. So of course, if you want to study normal development, you study all white men from Harvard, right? It's the most politically

incorrect sample now you could ever have. And then the other study was started at Harvard Law School, Sheldon Gluck, a law professor, and Eleanor Gluck, his wife, was a social worker. And they were interested in how some children from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and from the most troubled families were able to stay on good developmental paths, stay out of trouble. And so both studies were about how do people thrive? What predicts who's going to thrive? But they were with a very privileged group and a very underprivileged group.

And then since then, we brought in the spouses and we brought in the children, more than half of whom are female. So we've got a gender balance now. And I know you collect in-depth questionnaires from participants every two years. What other data points have you collected? And can you talk about also why it's important to study people over time, which is known as a longitudinal study? Yeah, yeah. Well, let me start with that. Because longitudinal studies are rare because they

take so much time and they require so much dedication, and you have to get the same people to keep coming back, you know, again and again. The best way to explain why it's so useful is that most research on human life is done in snapshots. Like we'll take a snapshot today of 40-year-olds and whether they're lonely or what their blood pressure is like, anything like that, 60-year-olds. Following people over time allows you to make sure you don't make assumptions that are false about what happens to people throughout their lives. And I'll give you an example. The best explanation is a joke. Claude Pepper was a senator from the state of Florida. And in Florida, there are lots of retired people. And there were at that time, lots of young Cuban immigrants.

And so Claude Pepper said, when I look at South Florida, I would have to believe that you are born Cuban and you die Jewish. And the issue there is that you can falsely assume that what you're seeing in snapshots at any one time is how life progresses. So that's my long way of saying longitudinal work is really important when we want to understand what happens to people as they go through their entire lives. And what are some of the data points that you collected? And maybe you could talk about some of the questions that you continue to ask these people over the course of their lives. Sure. So we started out with interviews. So psychiatrists did psychological interviews. Doctors did medical exams. Then we went to their

homes and interviewed their parents, talked about discipline style and what was served for dinner. I mean, there were these wonderful notes. So then there were questionnaires and medical exams. But as technology changed, research changed. So then we began to audio tape them. Then we began to videotape them, videotaping them with their spouses, talking about their biggest worries. We began to draw blood for DNA, which I think is so cool because in 1938, DNA wasn't even imagined. And here we were measuring it and DNA methylation.

And then we began to bring them into our lab and stress them out and see how quickly they calmed down from stress, doing measures like heart rate variability that weren't even conceived of when the study began. So we're kind of a history of science in a way as we bring new methods online. So I imagine that from this study, you must have had so many data points about these participants. You could have focused on so many different areas of their lives. Why study happiness? Well, we studied well-being. We actually didn't study happiness per se, and I'll get into that more. We studied well-being, like what allows people to thrive, both physically and psychologically, at work, in their personal lives. So it was all this huge

inquiry into human thriving. But when we talk about happiness, we talk about kind of two big flavors of happiness, at least from the research, that there's the, am I happy right now happiness, it's called hedonic well-being from hedonism. You know, so I'm talking to you right now, I'm having a good time, I'm happy. But an hour from now, something really annoying may happen, and I won't be happy, right? So happiness, that kind of happiness comes and goes often all day long. Then there's a kind of happiness called eudaimonic well-being. And it comes from a Greek word and it really is that sense of my life has meaning. My life is good and has purpose. It's that long-term sense of life being basically okay. And what we know is that all of us want some of both types of happiness, but some of us

prioritize the party animal well-being kind of happiness, and some of us prioritize the long-term meaningful life well-being. So let's talk about what the study found. If you had to take all 84 years of data and boil it down to a single principle for living a healthy, happy life, particularly the kind of happiness that's sort of the meaningful contentment that's long-term, what would it be? Could I boil it down to two instead of one? Okay. The first one will not surprise anybody. It is that if we take care of our health, it really makes a difference in our longevity, in our comfort, and certainly in our happiness. And that means,

so exercise, eating right, not becoming obese, not abusing alcohol or drugs, not smoking, all of that truly matters. And of course, our study is just one of many, many studies that keeps finding that out again and again. So I want to say that because it's so powerful a factor. But then the surprising discovery in our study was that the people who stayed healthiest and happiest and lived longest were the people who had the warmest connections with other people. That the people who were happiest in their relationships had the happiest lives. We didn't believe it. We believed that you'd be happier if you had good relationships. But how could relationships get into your body

and predict that you'd be less likely to get coronary artery disease or type two diabetes? Like how could that be a thing, right? And then other studies began to find the same thing. And one of the things we know is that no study proves anything in our kind of research, that you want many studies to point in the same direction so that you can feel confident in the truth of your findings. So many studies began to find this. And now we've spent the last 10 years in our lab trying to figure out how does this work? How do relationships get into our bodies and change them? And so you mentioned all these other studies, because I'm sure some people might look at this and say, okay, well, how does this study about white dudes in Boston apply to my

life experience? But this finding that close, healthy relationships actually contribute to our physical, not just mental well-being, but physical well-being has now been found in not only the two studies that have become one out of the Harvard study, but all across the world, all across the country, everywhere. Yep, exactly. And that's why we now know that this is a fact. It's come up with so many different populations, not just white people, certainly not just men, not just people in the United States, not just well-to-do people, but people of all demographics and all communities. So before we get into why this is true, I do want to run through some other factors

with you that are often associated with health and well-being. Your zip code, your education, your income, your job. Where do all those factors stack up compared to your relationships? Okay. Let me take on zip code and education because those are important. We know that where you live determines what kind of healthcare you get, what kind of education you can get, and certainly your level of income and your level of economic security, those matter. We found, for example, that the people in our inner city study died 10 years earlier than the people in the Harvard study. And we think that is because of their level of education, that they

did not get the information in the 70s and 80s about the dangers of smoking and substance abuse and obesity that the more educated groups got. So we think that matters a lot. And we know that having your basic economic needs taken care of, that matters a lot. But then once you get up beyond, you know, one estimate is $75,000 a year. Once you get up above that kind of basic level of food, shelter, education, healthcare, you could make $75 million a year and it wouldn't increase your happiness very much. So that's-

So the old cliche is true. Yeah, it really is true. And when we follow thousands of lives, it turns out to be true that money doesn't make you less happy. It's just different from determining your happiness. Same with fame, same with achievement. Achievement's an interesting one because, you know, fame and money, you can see why those are sort of fleeting pleasures that don't lend themselves to that sort of long-term contentment you talked about. I do wonder if like individual achievement, right, through your job or something that you're passionate about, it's surprising that that wouldn't lead to as much contentment as really solid, strong relationship. Yeah.

Well, that's a great distinction you're making. And that's right. You should be surprised because in actually accomplishing things that are meaningful to us, that does matter in terms of our well-being. That makes us feel like we're having a better life, a more purposeful life. So that's a good thing. What I'm talking about is the badges of achievement that we often go after. I want to be a CEO. I want to win the Nobel Prize. That's all well and good, but there are people who win the Nobel Prize and then become deeply depressed because they pick their heads up and say, oh, well, that didn't make my life perfect.

Now, if you've made a great scientific discovery that helped the world, if you wrote wonderful novels, that's different because that brings about a sense of contentment that's real and lasting and sustaining. But the prizes themselves are not so sustaining. So I'd love to get into the science of this. What is it about close relationships that provide all these physical and mental health benefits. Yeah, yeah. Well, the best hypothesis for which there are now a bunch of data,

the best hypothesis has to do with stress, that relationships help us manage and regulate stress. So, you know, of course, stress is a part of everyday life. It's just inevitable that stressors come along and challenges. And that's natural. And when, for example, when something stressful happens to me, I can feel my body start to rev up, heart rate revs up, blood pressure. That's normal. The body goes into what we call fight or flight mode, and we want that to happen

so that the body's ready. That's most days for me. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. The thing is that that's normal. We want the body to do that. But then when the stressor is removed, we want the body to return to equilibrium, to go out of fight or flight mode. And if I have something upsetting happen and I come home at the end of the day and I can talk to my partner or I can call a friend on the phone and they're a good listener, I can literally feel my body calm down. What we think happens is that people who don't have anyone in their lives with whom they can do that, that those people stay in a chronic fight or flight mode. And what that involves is higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol,

higher levels of inflammation. And we know that those things gradually wear away many body systems. So that's how we think through the inability to manage stress that multiple body systems can break down, that it could affect your joints and affect your coronary arteries and your pancreas. Wow. Wow. Have you thought about why humans evolved in such a way that make relationships so important to our overall health and well-being? I have thought about it, and people smarter than me have thought about it. And yes, it's all speculation, because we really only speculate when we talk about evolution. But there's a plausible theory here, which is that if the goal of evolution is to pass our genes on, to survive long enough, then being in groups is safer, that we were much better able, probably still are,

to ward off threats if we're together in groups and we pool our resources. So what we think happened was that the people who were more inclined to form little tribes, that those people were more likely to pass their genes on. So that the people who were more inclined to be in groups were the people whose genes survived through the ages. And so we think, therefore, that now, you know, we know social isolation is a stressor because we were naturally selected to be herd animals. And can you talk about the hallmarks of a healthy relationship that would contribute to physical well-being? Are we talking about close relationships, intimate relationships, casual relationships?

What are we talking about? We're talking about all of it. So you don't have to have a marriage license. You don't have to live with anybody. All relationships can provide us with this sense of well-being, a sense of belonging, a sense of being seen. The person who gets you your coffee in the morning in the coffee shop may do that for you. The mail carrier who you have a friendly exchange with. So it can happen all kinds of different places. What we think is that everybody needs at least one or two relationships that are closer. The relationships that you feel you will have if you're in trouble. So we asked our original participants,

we asked them at one point, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? List everybody. And most people could list a number of people, but some couldn't list anybody. And a few of those people were married and they couldn't list anybody. So a few of those people were married and they couldn't list anybody.

So what we think is that everybody needs at least one person like that in the world. And that then the benefits come from even what we call casual ties, the most superficial relationships that we have. And so it really isn't just the number of close relationships that you have, because if you just have that one person that you can call in the middle of the night, that provides sort of some of the benefits that you're talking about. Yes. And that's important because there is no set number. People sometimes ask, well, is there a right number of friends I should have? No, there isn't. Partly because we're all so different. Some of us are introverts, very shy.

Some of us are extroverts, and many of us are somewhere in between. And so for each of us, the number of connections that feels right is going to be unique to us. And so each of us has to check in with ourselves and say, what works for me? Maybe it's just one or two close people. Maybe it's a whole lot of people all day, every day. And the full range of that is completely normal and healthy. So I was talking about the study at dinner with some friends, and my closest friend from childhood was there. And he said, I read about that study. Isn't it kind of obvious that good relationships make you happy?

But in the same conversation, we talked about how even though we both live in Los Angeles now, we don't see each other nearly enough. Can you talk about some of the reasons it's difficult to not only develop but maintain close relationships? Yes, yes. And first of all, I's difficult to not only develop but maintain close relationships? But it went viral. It went totally viral. And I think it's because we all know it, that relationships are so important, but it's kind of like on the periphery of our consciousness. And that what this work does is it takes it from the periphery and it brings it front and center and says, look, look at this. And what you noticed with your friend is just that, that when you took a look at it, you said, wait a minute, this is obvious. We know this, but we don't see each other.

And I think that's what our hope is for this work, that we bring this front and center and ask people to check in with themselves. Okay, how connected do I feel to the world? Do I have the connections I want? And if not, what can I do about that? I mean, you wrote at one point, one hard truth that we would all do well to accept is that people are terrible at knowing what is good for them. And you write about that in the context

of sort of building strong relationships. But it is interesting because I think there's this, at least I face this sort of conundrum where I know, at least I'm especially more aware recently of how important relationships are in my life. But then at the same time, when you think to yourself, I should reach out to that person, I should text that person, I should make a plan with that person that I haven't seen in a while. There's sometimes this like barrier to doing so, right? Where you're like, oh, but I don't know if I'm going to bug them or I don't know if we're going to have everything to talk about or we're going to catch up or maybe this relationship has drifted.

And I'm sort of wondering where like intellectually, you know, it's important to keep those relationships, but there's something that's getting in the way of us reaching out to each other. It does that, I think, for most of us. That for just the reasons you said, your mind delivers to you all these excuses, all these reasons why, oh, no, no, they're not going to like that, or I haven't talked to them in a long time, and now it's going to feel awkward. So many ways, right? What we know is that there is this reluctance that arises a lot of the time in all of us. Think about when someone says to you, come on, let's go to a party tonight.

It'll be fun. And you say, no, I just want to stay home and watch Netflix. That there's this kind of moment of resistance and there's inertia to get over, I think it's in part because relationships are not predictable. So, when you think to reach out to somebody, you think, well, what if I'm bothering them, as you said? Or what if they're mad at me about something that happened long ago? Or that we can't- What if we don't have a great conversation? What if we're both awkward? Exactly. Or what if that person keeps me on the phone and I want to go, right?

Right, yeah. And I think that what we find is that relationships are unpredictable because we are always changing. You know, my mood is changing. Some moments I'm really happy to hear from people, other moments I'm hassled and it's harder to think, okay, what am I going to hear from people. Other moments, I'm hassled and it's harder to think, okay, what am I going to do with this text now? But I think that what we find is that if you can let yourself get over the inertia and do it, if you think to text somebody or email somebody, unless it's three in the morning, but if you think to do it, get yourself to do it. You won't get back a warm response every time,

but probably nine times out of 10, people are going to be thrilled that you reached out. And so, you know, think of it more like stepping up to bat at a baseball game. You don't expect to hit the ball every time, but you're going to get a positive response a lot more often than you're going to hit a baseball when you're at bat, right?

Like a lot's going to come back to you that's good. I mean, I've noticed in my own life, it's become more difficult to maintain these relationships as I've become older. I'm 41 now. You focus on your job, your marriage, your kids. It's certainly something I'm experiencing now with a two-year-old. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. now with a two-year-old. Did you notice that participants had stronger or weaker relationships

based on their age or their stage in life? Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things we find is that it's really hard to maintain friendships and even family relationships in midlife because of just what you're talking about. You know, there you are with a toddler. I mean, oh my gosh, that is just the most exhausting thing. And you and your partner are probably a tag team. You know, you make dinner and I'll do the bath. And right, you know, like you're just, and then you find that you don't have time to talk to your friends, to reach out or to family.

And that you're just ready to, if you go to an office, you're ready to get out of there and get home because you're needed at home so you don't linger to have a conversation. So what we find is that many people in midlife, particularly when they're raising kids, find that it's harder to have the energy to keep up connections. The other thing that happens in midlife often is that we're taking care of aging parents. And so sometimes we think of midlife as what we call the sandwich generation, sandwiched between kids who need a lot of care

and older relatives who need a lot of care. So all of that is to say that it's harder in midlife, but it's not impossible. And many people figure out how you do the workout that you want to do anyway. If you commute in the car, maybe calling somebody most days on the phone and just catching up so that even if you don't have time to hang out with your buddies because you've got to be home doing childcare, maybe you could make it a practice to have those phone conversations that we're not used to doing, particularly many of us who are men and are not inclined to talk on the phone. But these are things we could engineer for ourselves. It takes intention because the path of least resistance in midlife, but also at many other times, the path of least resistance is increasing social isolation.

Yeah. Well, speaking of that, I mean, you write about the tide of loneliness in modern society. This is something we've talked about a lot on the show. What do you think accounts for this? And have the people that you've been following in the study talked about loneliness more in recent years? Yes, they have. In part, they've talked about loneliness more because we ask about it. Nobody used to ask about loneliness. And then when we began to ask, we found that one in three people on the planet will say that they are often lonely when you ask them. That's enormous. That's a pandemic, right? And so partly people didn't

talk about loneliness because we didn't ask. Now that we ask, we're seeing that loneliness is on the rise, that social isolation is increasing. So a lot of governments are quite worried about this, including our own government. Britain has appointed a minister of loneliness. Yeah, we've had Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on the show, and he talks about it all the time. Exactly. And thankfully, he is doing that, because it's a radical thing for a surgeon general to take on something that's not smoking or obesity. That's loneliness. That's emotional well-being. So I really applaud what he's trying to do.

So, I mean, I think some of that has to do with, look, we all went through a pandemic where we were isolated for a couple of years. And during the pandemic, I started this show because I felt that our screen addictions have been negatively affecting the quality of our relationships, which is somewhat ironic because the Internet was supposed to bring us closer together. Yeah. What have you learned about how your participants' social media habits have affected their relationships or their happiness? We're collecting data on that even as we speak. We're talking to the children, the baby boomer children about their social media habits, especially during COVID. But there is some research now that suggests that there are different ways to use social media. And depending on how we use it, our well-being goes up or it goes down. So the idea is that if we use social media to actively connect with each other, we get happier. So I'll give you an example. During the pandemic, a friend of mine

connected with friends from elementary school who he hadn't seen in, you know, 40 years. And he got them all together in this little group. And now they have coffee on Zoom every Sunday morning. And they are having a wonderful time, right? So his use of social media definitely increased his well-being. What we know is that if we passively use social media to scroll through other people's Instagram feeds or Facebook pages, these are curated lives, right? So I don't post my pictures when I wake up in the morning feeling horrible, feeling like

I don't know what I'm doing with my life or feeling hungover. I don't do that, right? So I post my happy pictures and that's all well and good, except that when we watch each other's carefully curated lives, you can get that feeling of everybody else is having a great life and I'm the person who doesn't have it figured out. We know that teenagers are especially susceptible to this. And so when we passively consume social media, our well-being tends to go down. So the difference is between active connection or passive doom scrolling, if you will. It does seem like, you know, focusing so much on crafting an image of yourself to project to others is focusing more on yourself than that connection to the other people on the other side of the screen. So it makes sense that that would be a little lonelier.

Yeah, it's right. It's lonely for the person who crafts the image too. I mean, these people who we think about as being famous for being famous, many of them I suspect are quite lonely. To your point about the elementary school friends who meet for coffee over Zoom now, do you think the quality of our relationships is the same when they happen over text or FaceTime or Zoom as opposed to in person? That is a vital question. I don't think we know yet. I mean, we know that things get filtered out when we are together virtually, right? You know, qualities of emotion expression get filtered out.

We know for sure. But we're still trying to understand that. Research is still going on to try to understand what do we lose from digital connection that we get in in-person connection. So we still don't know. But that said, you know, I do psychotherapy. I'm a psychiatrist. My clinical work every day, like this afternoon, I'll see two people in psychotherapy after you and I are done

with our conversation. Much of it now is on Zoom. If you had told me three years ago that I would be doing clinical talk therapy on Zoom, I would have said, you're out of your mind. That can't work. And now the mental health profession is finding it really does work and we can reach a lot more people and help a lot more people than we thought was possible. That's just my way of saying that there's more possible because of our virtual connections than we imagined there would be. You talk about the war for our attention being waged by these social media companies, which is also something we've covered a lot here. And you argue that one advantage we have is that the war is being fought on our home turf, quite literally in our minds,

and it can be won there. How do we do that? How do we win it? Yeah, easier said than done. Well, a lot has to do with intention, right? That these screens, the software is designed to capture our attention and hold it because that's how companies make money. They're not evil. They're just trying to make money. But what that means is that we are being held by these screens unless we are intentional in taking ourselves away.

So what that means is we need to plan this out. We need to create structures in our own lives for making sure we are not online all the time, that we are in real life and we're with other people in real life. Otherwise, we will simply be carried away in the tide of the digital revolution into social isolation. Yeah. So, I mean, what you're talking about is that people have real agency here. And I do think like one of the most important and hopeful lessons from the study that I took away is that we do have agency when it comes to building the relationships that make us happy. Even, you know, as you said, if we're shy or introverted, even if we're a bit older, how much agency do you think we have? How much control over our own happiness and our own relationships do we have?

Well, there's an estimate. There's a scientific estimate of this. It's not mine, but there's a psychologist, Sonia Lubomirsky, who took a lot of data and said, okay, how much of our happiness is in our control? She estimates from a lot of research that about 50% of our happiness is inborn. It's genetic. It's temperamental, right? Because we're all born, you know, some of us are born, you know, as kind of bouncy tiggers. And some of us are born as Eeyores. And that's just kind of the way we are, right? And she estimates about half of our happiness is inborn. She thinks about 10% is based on our current life circumstance. So if I'm having a really hard time right now, probably about 10%. But about 40%, she believes is under our control.

That means we can move the needle by doing various things. You know, so in my work, we find that building strong relationships is one of those things that contributes to that 40%. And there are other things like taking care of your health, exercise, meditative, contemplative practices, a lot of things can do it. So the short answer is the estimate is about 40%. And that may sound like a lot or a little depending on who you are. I think it sounds pretty substantial. It's a lot. I think it's pretty hopeful. It's a lot. Especially because you think the fact that I mean, 50% genetics is interesting. The fact that only 10% is like your station in life, your circumstance. I feel like if you read the news or the conversation that happens on social media, people would put a much greater weight on people's life experience

and circumstance as opposed to their own agency that they have. Well, certainly life experience matters, but there's something called a hedonic treadmill. You may know about this. The theory is that we all have a kind of general happiness level, as I said before, and that what studies find is that we keep going back to that level no matter what happens to us. So they did a study of people who won the lottery, people who were like big lottery winners, right? So happy event, and people who had terrible accidents and became paralyzed. Terrible event, right? They looked at both groups before the event and after the event so that they could tell,

what were these people like before the happy event happened or the terrible event happened? And what they found was that happiness either went up or down depending on the kind of event. But that then a year later, the lottery winners were not much happier than they had been before they won the lottery. And the people who had been paralyzed were not much less happy than before the accident. This is astonishing, I know, to hear this, but it suggests that we all do go back to a kind of baseline. Huh, that's fascinating. You write about social fitness, which I love. Can you talk about what social fitness is and how we can become more socially fit?

Yeah, yeah. So we coined that phrase and we did it just to make it analogous to physical fitness. So if we go work out today, we exercise, right? We don't come home and say, I'm done. I never have to do that again in my life. We don't do that because we know that physical fitness is a practice. It's something that's ongoing. What we find is that our social world needs that kind of maintenance, that kind of exercise, right? That it's a living, breathing thing that we need to attend to. So what we saw following these hundreds, thousands of lives is that perfectly good relationships would just wither away from neglect,

just like muscles atrophy from neglect. So our idea is that people need to actively maintain the connections that they want to keep. And so what we say is be active, reach out, take active steps. They can be tiny steps, as we talked about. But take those little steps over and over again to keep your connections vibrant. Also, if you don't have enough connections, and that's something each of us can ask ourselves, do I want more? Think about what kind of connections you want.

Do I need a person to have fun with? Do I need a person to give me rides to the doctor? What kind of help do I need? What kind of input? And then put yourself in situations where you will see the same people over and over again, ideally around a shared interest because we know that relationships often form

when we're in places where we see the same people and where we share something in common. Could be anything, you know, could be a religious group, it could be a political movement, anything. What about the relationships that you currently have that are close relationships? Do you have any advice on how to keep those healthy and strong? Because there could be, whether it's your partner, whether it's your family, whether it's your closest friends that you've known for years and years and years, but you want to maintain that relationship and keep it strong.

Yeah. Well, I would say two big things. One is radical curiosity and one is continuing to learn new dance steps. And I'll explain each one. So the radical curiosity. So I've been married for 37 years. My wife and I have had dinner almost every night for 37 years. Like, you know, it's hard to find new stuff, right? Yeah. Well, one of my meditation teachers gave me this instruction for meditation, but it works for long-time relationships too, friendships, romantic relationships.

His instruction was, notice what's here that you have never noticed before. Find something that you've never noticed before. Find something that you've never noticed before. So it's an active process, right? Where you really ask yourself, okay, what's different? What's new? You know, so what's she talking about that I haven't really heard in quite the same way before? And it will make you more curious. That's the radical curiosity, right? Who is this person in front of me right now? This person I think I know like the back of my hand, okay? And then there's the new dance steps. So, you know, we change. When you follow people's lives from the time they're teenagers all the way into old age, you see how much change happens in every

life, right? So we're changing all the time. That means that my friend and I are each changing. That means that we are always a couple of moving targets together every time we come together. So the question is, can we learn new dance steps with each other? I'll give you an example. My wife started studying music really seriously. She didn't do that when we got married. So I didn't stop and say, well, you can't do that because that wasn't part of the initial contract we made, right? I've learned to support her. I started practicing Zen. She's not into that at all, but she is very supportive of my Zen practice because she's pretty sure it makes me a better listener. But what we find is that if we support each other in the changes that we make, that the relationship gets stronger. If we try to hold each other back

from making those changes, the relationship suffers terribly and often breaks apart. Wow. Well, so the last question I have is about children, because I know that since my son Charlie was born, Emily and I, my wife, talk a lot about, you know, how to parent, right? This is our first child. And I think, you know, we've both said like, hope he's successful, hope he's smart, all that kind of stuff. But like, really more than anything else, just like all parents, we just want him to be happy. Are there things you learned from the study about what children need more than anything else to go on to develop healthy, close relationships in their own lives? Yes. And actually, the developmental scientist Michael Rudder, he's a British researcher,

and he said this, and I love it. He said, every child needs at least one stable adult who's just crazy about them. And that if you are a stable, caring couple who adore your kid, that goes a long way, right? Because what we want children to have is a sense that the world is basically safe and that people are basically reliable and will care about you and will help you when you need help. That if you can supply that, that goes an enormous distance.

Then the other thing I'll say is that when our people got to be 80 years old, we said, when you look back on your life, what do you regret the most? And one of the biggest regrets was, I wish I hadn't spent so much time worrying about what other people thought. And so the message for a two-year-old growing up is, if he can learn to just be authentic, be who he is, find out who he is, find out what he loves, find out what he doesn't love, you know, and that that's okay with his world, with his family, that's the best thing you can do for him. Wow. I mean, I'm 41 and I still haven't learned that lesson.

Well, it's hard. So, I guess there's hope for all of us. It's really hard. You know, I spent a long time working it out in my own life as well, and I'm still working. Yeah. Dr. Waldinger, thank you so much for joining. Thank you for continuing the study and for writing the book. Everyone should go check it out.

I've been telling everyone in my life to go check it out because it's meant a lot to me and it's made me think quite a bit. So I really appreciate you joining us and it's made me think quite a bit. So I really appreciate you joining us and thanks for all the work you're doing. This was such a good conversation. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer.

Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.