What an 85-Year-Long Harvard Study Says Is the Real Key to Happiness

We’ve long used the French word milieu in Eng­lish, but not with quite the same range of mean­ings it has back in France. For exam­ple, French soci­ety (and espe­cial­ly the mem­bers of its old­er gen­er­a­tions) explic­it­ly rec­og­nizes the val­ue of a milieu in the sense of the col­lect­ed friends, acquain­tances, and rela­tions with whom one has reg­u­lar and fre­quent con­tact. Keep­ing a good milieu is a key task for liv­ing a good life. Robert Waldinger does­n’t use the word in the new hour-long Big Think video above, but then, he comes from a dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al back­ground: he’s Amer­i­can, for one, a Har­vard psy­chi­a­trist, and he also hap­pens to be a Zen Bud­dhist priest. But he would sure­ly agree whole­heart­ed­ly about the impor­tance of the milieu to human hap­pi­ness.

As the fourth direc­tor of the long-term Har­vard Study of Adult Devel­op­ment, which has been keep­ing an eye on the well-being of its sub­jects for more than 85 years now, Waldinger knows some­thing about hap­pi­ness. Ear­ly in the video, he cites find­ings that half of it is “a kind of bio­log­i­cal set point,” 10 per­cent is “based on our cur­rent life cir­cum­stances,” and the remain­ing 40 per­cent is under our con­trol. The sin­gle most impor­tant fac­tor in the vari­abil­i­ty of our hap­pi­ness, he explains, is our rela­tion­ships. To take the mea­sure of that aspect of our own lives, we should ask our­selves these ques­tions: “Do I have enough con­nec­tion in my life?” “Do I have rela­tion­ships that are warm and sup­port­ive?” “What am I get­ting from rela­tion­ships?”

There are, of course, good rela­tion­ships and bad rela­tion­ships, those that fill you with ener­gy and those that drain you of ener­gy. To a great extent, Waldinger says, good rela­tion­ships can be cul­ti­vat­ed, and even bad rela­tion­ships can be mod­i­fied or approached in an advan­ta­geous way. What makes learn­ing to do so impor­tant is that a lack of rela­tion­ships — that is, lone­li­ness — can take as much of a phys­i­cal toll as obe­si­ty or heavy smok­ing. Alas, since tele­vi­sion made its way into the home after the Sec­ond World War, we’ve lived with a rapid­ly and cease­less­ly mul­ti­ply­ing array of forces that make it dif­fi­cult to form and main­tain rela­tion­ships; at this point, we’re so “con­stant­ly dis­tract­ed by our won­der­ful screens” that we have trou­ble pay­ing atten­tion to even the peo­ple we think we love. This is where Zen comes in.

Atten­tion, as one of Waldinger’s own teach­ers in that tra­di­tion put it, is “the most basic form of love,” and med­i­ta­tion has always been a reli­able way to cul­ti­vate it. Such a prac­tice reveals our own minds to be “messy and chaot­ic,” and from that real­iza­tion, it’s not far to the under­stand­ing that “every­body’s minds are messy and chaot­ic.” Attain­ing a clear view of our own ques­tion­able impuls­es and irri­tat­ing defi­cien­cies helps us to accept those same qual­i­ties in oth­ers. “We can some­times imag­ine that oth­er peo­ple have it all fig­ured out, and we’re the only one who has ups and downs in our life,” says Waldinger, but the truth is that “every­body has ups and downs. We nev­er fig­ure it out, ulti­mate­ly.” The fleet­ing nature of sat­is­fac­tion con­sti­tutes just one facet of the imper­ma­nence Zen requires us to accept. Noth­ing lasts for­ev­er: cer­tain­ly not our lives, nor those of the mem­bers of our milieu, so if we want to enjoy them, we’d bet­ter start pay­ing atten­tion to them while we still can.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

How to Be Hap­pi­er in 5 Research-Proven Steps, Accord­ing to Pop­u­lar Yale Pro­fes­sor Lau­rie San­tos

A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Bud­dhism, Pre­sent­ed by Psy­chi­a­trist-Zen Mas­ter Robert Waldinger

All You Need is Love: The Keys to Hap­pi­ness Revealed by a 75-Year Har­vard Study

How Much Mon­ey Do You Need to Be Hap­py? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Fig­ures

How Lone­li­ness Is Killing Us: A Primer from Har­vard Psy­chi­a­trist & Zen Priest Robert Waldinger

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.