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Is there a secret to living a better and happier life?
In The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, Robert Waldinger, M.D., and Marc Schultz, Ph.D., co-directors of the Harvard Adult Development study, write, “Positive relationships are essential to human well-being.” This finding, drawn from the Harvard Adult Development Study, which began in the late 1930s, echoes something we humans have known for millennials. The authors quote Lao Tzu, who wrote 2400 years ago, “The more you give to others, the greater your abundance.”
Building Relationships
Relationships, according to Waldinger, are not merely external. “If you think about it, you carry around many people you care about inside you all day long. You can call up a warm image of a friend or a loved one. And so in that sense, we carry them around. You carry around a warm image of somebody who may have passed away a long time ago. So it’s often useful to think about how we carry people with us as we go through the world.”
Fostering good relations with others can depend upon what the authors call "the power of generosity.”
In our recent interview, Waldinger said, “Research tells us that when we are generous, we feel better and happier. We feel like our lives are more meaningful. So when we help people, we take care of ourselves… We know that being generous makes us feel like our lives are better.”