Reviewing works about motivation and fulfillment around the new year and it was easy to come across videos featuring Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been going on for 87 years now.
As you might imagine, just like with studies that aren’t conducted over multiple generations, this study does have some insights to share. You may recall some of them yourself if you saw his TED Talk from 2015. It’s been viewed over 50 million times.
He’s still being interviewed and giving talks though. Perhaps because he’s put some of the findings into a book, The Good Life, that came out in 2024, he can be found talking about what the study has found out, for example in this hour-long conversation for the Big Think.
I first came across him from a 2023 interview where the Pandemic was still not too distant in the rearview mirror. It includes several nuances that I didn’t see in some of the other videos. Check out the nine minute mark for the two things you should do for a happy life or the 48-minute mark for the “hedonic treadmill” and how powerful an individuals baseline can be. He also talks about the notion of “social fitness,” and maintaining relationships.
Which segues into the main takeaway Dr. Waldinger mentions in many of these videos and presumably in The Good Life: relationships are key. And by “key,” I mean this is what you should definitely be investing time and energy into. When I think of some of my posts in the past couple weeks, from the idea of making art (and therefore making connections), to knowing relationships are finite and attending to them is important, to being more present and grateful in one’s life (among other things).
Oh, and if you’re thinking, “What’s the other one of the two mentioned above?” The other is taking care of your health: diet, sleep, and exercise are all as good for you — as you doubtless suspected.
Hopefully that satisfies some of you TL;DR folks, but the book is on my 2026 reading list.