What Makes a Good Life?

On the afternoon that I called Robert Waldinger about the secret to a happy, healthy life, he was packing for a trip to Japan. That Waldinger — a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Zen master, and Harvard researcher — had agreed to chat on a Sunday less than 24 hours before a 12-day international trek reveals much about his core kindness and life-changing message: Relationships are vital for us humans. They are vital for good health, for happiness, for a long and fulfilling life. And so Waldinger values his relationships not only with his spouse, his two sons, his coworkers, his friends, and his neighbors, but even with a stranger like me who’s preventing him from packing.

Waldinger’s insights are powered by one of the world’s most unique datasets. He is director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, believed to be the longest study of adult life in human history. The study began in 1938 by following the lives of 268 male Harvard sophomores and 456 boys from some of ­Boston’s most troubled families and poorest neighborhoods. Decade by decade, year after year, researchers asked about their jobs, their families, their health, and their satisfaction with life. They conducted interviews in their homes, tracked their successes and setbacks, obtained medical records from their doctors. They drew their blood and scanned their brains. In 2005, it was broadened to include their wives, and researchers are now tracking the lives of nearly 2,000 of the participants’ children.

The biggest takeaway from the decades of data is surprisingly simple. “Good relationships,” Waldinger says, “keep us happier and healthier — period.” And yet many Americans, particularly men, are struggling to maintain those close relationships. The percentage of men with at least six close friends plummeted from 55 percent in 1990 to 27 percent in 2021, according to an American Enterprise Institute survey. Fifteen percent had no close friends at all.

This need for deep relationships has helped fuel interest in the Harvard study. In 2015, Waldinger gave a 12-minute TED Talk on the findings at an elementary school auditorium in suburban Boston. The resulting video has received an astonishing 475.75 million views on TED.com. A 2023 book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, cowritten by Waldinger and his colleague Marc Schulz, was a New York Times bestseller and topped the bestseller list on Amazon.com. The book has been translated into over 30 languages; soon the number will surpass 40. That’s why Waldinger was crossing the Pacific. The Good Life was recently published in Japan.

“I thought it was kind of obvious that relationships are important,” Waldinger says of the TED video. “I thought people would think to themselves, ‘Well, duh.’” But the video went viral, he believes, because it “took something that people basically knew deep down and moved it from their guts to their heads. We mostly take friendships for granted. And we’re telling people, ‘This is so much more important than you may think.’”

Other studies have found similar results, but the Harvard study carries the heft of time: the 86 years of observing lives as they were lived. And we’re all the beneficiaries. Here’s what we can learn.

 

John Marsden’s life seemed more charmed than Leo DeMarco’s. Both joined the study as teenagers, both graduated from Harvard, both served in World War II (Marsden was stateside, DeMarco was with the Navy in the South Pacific). But after the war, their lives shifted. Marsden fulfilled a dream to attend law school, graduated near the top of his class, and joined a law firm. DeMarco wanted to become a writer, but his father died while he was overseas, and after he returned home, his mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He moved near her to help provide care. Soon he was a husband and a father. For the next 40 years, he taught at a local high school. The writing dream vanished.

In 1975, Marsden earned $52,000 a year. DeMarco’s annual salary was $18,000. That year, they both received a Harvard study questionnaire, which included 180 true/false questions. The differences in their responses were startling. One question stated:

Life has more pain than pleasure.

Marsden wrote true. DeMarco wrote false.

Another said:

I often feel starved for attention.

Marsden wrote true. DeMarco wrote false.

An additional question asked the men to complete the following sentence:

A man feels good when…

Marsden wrote, “… he is able to respond to his inner drives.”

DeMarco wrote, “… he senses that his family loves him despite everything.”

Marsden was one of the more professionally successful members of the study, yet also one of the least happy. He divorced his first wife and described his second marriage as “loveless.” He alienated his kids and “was preoccupied at every stage of his life with himself” and his ambitions, Waldinger and Schulz wrote. DeMarco, meanwhile, “thought of himself primarily in relation to others.” He was adored by his wife and four daughters — and was one of the study’s happiest subjects.

The two men exemplify a pattern in the Harvard study. Our relationships — not our career achievements, not our possessions, not our bank accounts — provide satisfaction in life.

“The inner city guys were no less happy on average than the Harvard guys as they went through their lives,” Waldinger says of the study.

Money affects happiness when you’re impoverished, studies show. But once you can meet your basic needs, its emotional influence diminishes. “If you don’t have a place to live, you don’t have food security, if you’re constantly agonizing about bills, that makes you unhappy,” Waldinger says. “But you don’t get a lot happier when you move from $75,000 a year to $75 million, the research shows.”

And yet, culturally, we still equate money with fulfillment. Waldinger shares a survey that asked millennials to name their most important life goals. More than 80 percent wanted to get rich. Another 50 percent wanted to be famous. But in the Harvard survey, when researchers asked people in their 80s to reveal their greatest source of pride, and their biggest regrets, none of them mentioned money.

“The pride was always about people: I was a good friend, I was a good mentor, I was a good parent,” Waldinger says. “It was never, ‘I won this prize’ or ‘I made huge amounts of money.’” The biggest regret was equally consistent. “They would say, I didn’t spend enough time with people I really cared about. I spent too much time working.”

 

Five days after I interviewed Waldinger, my appendix burst at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. I had met a friend for lunch and finished a Caesar salad when I was struck by pain so intense that I struggled to breathe. An ambulance rushed me to a local hospital, where I spent nine days after an emergency appendectomy and slow-to-heal complications.

One morning at 3 a.m., unable to sleep, a tube ­stretching down my nose to my stomach, I thought of something Waldinger had shared from the Harvard study. Researchers asked subjects who they could call in the middle of the night if they were sick or scared. I made a mental list of my peeps. I thought of nine people, both family members and friends, that I could call in the night. I found that soooo gratifying. Knowing these people were in my life brought comfort at an uncomfortable time.

In the Harvard study, many participants reported a similar support system. But not all.

“Most could list several people, but some people couldn’t list anyone,” Waldinger says. Even more surprising, some of those who couldn’t list anyone were married.

“We find that people can be really lonely in marriages,” Waldinger says. “If you are lonely in a relationship, and you can’t make it better, it’s probably better to move on and find new possibilities.” Put another way, high-­conflict marriages, marriages with little affection, or marriages where you feel lonely are perhaps worse for our health than divorce.

“Loneliness kills. It’s toxic,” Waldinger says. When people are isolated, they are less happy, they sleep less soundly, their health and brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than those who aren’t lonely, he adds. Social isolation and loneliness may ­increase the risk of suffering — or dying from — a heart attack or stroke, a 2022 report from the American Heart Association found.

And yet many of us are lonely. Thirty percent of adults said they feel lonely at least once a week in an American Psychiatric Association survey released in January 2024. Ten percent feel lonely every day. And that creates another problem: Stress. Relationships are stress regulators, Waldinger says, and without them, our stress levels can soar.

“If something annoying happens, or something worrying, and there’s somebody you can talk to, you can feel your body come from a state of agitation back to equilibrium,” he says. People who are isolated or trapped in acrimonious relationships are likely in a chronic state of fight or flight. “That chronic stress gives you higher levels of circulating stress hormones, like cortisol, and they give you poorer immune function. There are easily demonstrable physiologic changes.”

The opposite is also true. As participants in the Harvard study reached their 80s, researchers wanted to find predictors of who would be happy, healthy octogenarians. They reviewed subjects’ mid-life data. The predictor of healthy aging wasn’t their cholesterol levels; it was the quality of their relationships. On days when they had more physical pain, the most happily partnered men and women said that their mood remained happy. Those in unhappy relationships said their mood worsened with physical pain — and the emotional pain added to their discomfort.

“The people who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50,” Waldinger says, “were the healthiest at age 80.”

 

We know relationships are good for us. But how do we strengthen them? How we do create new friendships? It’s never too late. “In the study, people unexpectedly found new, deep friendships in their 60s, 70s, even 80s,” Waldinger says. Some ideas for making connections:

• Use the internet the right way. Scrolling through “fake, curated lives” on social media can reduce self-esteem and increase depression and anxiety, especially among young people. “They look at it and say, ‘My God, everybody’s having a great life except me,’” Waldinger notes. But connecting with people online can increase well­being. He mentions a patient who has reconnected with old elementary school friends on Facebook. They now have coffee online every Sunday morning.

• Follow your passions. “One of the easiest ways to make new friends is to do something you care about,” Waldinger says. Whether you’re volunteering or joining a club, focus on your interests. Don’t join a bowling league to meet people; join it because you love bowling. “If you rub elbows with the same people again and again, you’re more likely to strike up a conversation,” he says. “And if you’re doing something you care about, you have an immediate subject in common to talk about.”

• Reconnect with old friends. When Waldinger gives talks, he often asks the audience to text or email a friend they haven’t contacted in a while. “During the question-and-answer period, I’ll say, ‘Did anybody hear back?’ And usually, all these hands shoot up,” he says. “People will say, ‘This person was so glad to hear from me’ or ‘we’ve already made a date for dinner next week.’”

• Repair damaged relationships. Estrangement from a friend or loved one is stressful. “When I’ve been really angry at somebody, and I’ve been holding a grudge, it occupies so much energy,” Waldinger says. “When people can resolve the feuds and put away the acrimony — even if you’re not going to remain friends — it calms us down and takes away that source of agitation.”

• Connect with strangers. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to benefits of friendships, but not every relationship needs to be intimate. Simply talking with a stranger on the subway can provide emotional benefits, research shows. “It gives us a sense that we belong and that makes us feel better,” Waldinger says. How powerful are these small interactions? In a study published in 2024 in the journal Psychological Science, participants felt a social connection even when talking with strangers who disagreed with them on contentious political issues.

• Cultivate relationships. When I asked Waldinger how his work has affected him personally, he said he invests more time now in his relationships. “I would usually leave our social life to my wife,” he says. “But I realized that I wasn’t maintaining any individual relationships with my friends, especially once my kids were grown. I thought, I’m not going to end up with friends of my own if this continues. And so I make plans with my guy friends to go out for dinner. I’m trying to be more active in asking people, how do we get together more? How do we stay current with each other’s lives?”

Waldinger is living the advice that he and Schulz share in the book. “If you’re going to make that one choice, that single decision that could best ensure your own health and happiness, science tells us that your choice should be to cultivate warm relationships. Of all kinds.”

Of all kinds. That’s important. After talking with Waldinger just once, I feel like he’s a friend. And it feels good.

 

Ken Budd writes the magazine’s “Everyday Heroes” column. His bylines include The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, and many more. He is the author of the award-winning memoir The Voluntourist.

This article is featured in the September/October 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.