The Good Life

**Author:** Robert Waldinger

**Estimated Reading Time:** 42 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- Why relationships are the single most important factor in lifelong happiness and health - How the Harvard Study of Adult Development followed thousands of people across eight decades - What "social fitness" means and how to practice it - Why attention is the most basic form of love - How to apply these insights to family, friendship, work, and intimate partnerships

**Who This Book Is For:**

Anyone who has ever wondered what truly matters in life. Anyone who has chased success, wealth, or achievement and still felt something missing. Anyone who wants to understand what decades of scientific research reveals about human flourishing. And anyone who suspects that the answer might be simpler than we think, but wants to know how to actually live it.

For most of human history, people have asked a version of the same question: What makes a good life? The ancient Greeks debated it. Philosophers have written entire libraries attempting to answer it. Religions have built moral systems around it. And yet, for all this attention, the question has remained remarkably resistant to a clear answer. We have opinions, intuitions, and inherited wisdom, but we have rarely had evidence. That changed in 1938, when researchers at Harvard University began a study that would eventually become one of the longest-running investigations of human development ever conducted. The Harvard Study of Adult Development started with two groups of young men: 268 Harvard sophomores and 456 boys from some of Boston's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The researchers wanted to know what factors, measured in youth, would predict health, happiness, and success decades later. They could not have known that the study would still be running more than eighty years later. They could not have known that it would expand to include the wives and children of the original participants. And they could not have known that it would produce a finding so clear, so consistent, and so profound that it would reshape our understanding of human flourishing. The finding is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. This may sound obvious. It may even sound trivial. But the depth and consistency of the evidence behind this claim is anything but trivial. The Harvard Study found that the warmth of a person's relationships at age fifty was a better predictor of their health and happiness at age eighty than their cholesterol levels. People who were most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty. Loneliness was as damaging to health as smoking or alcoholism. The problem is not that we lack the answer. The problem is that we keep forgetting it.…