Read the full transcript of Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger’s interview on The Big Think Interview on “What 85 Years of Research Says Is The Real Key To Happiness”, July 25, 2025.
Chapter 1: The 85 Year Quest to Understand Happiness
ROBERT WALDINGER: I’m Robert Waldinger. I am a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. I direct the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital.
I became interested in psychiatry unexpectedly. I had never known a psychiatrist growing up, but when I was in medical school, I found that the way people’s minds worked was the most fascinating thing I could possibly study. So I eventually found that there was really nothing else for me in medicine but doing psychiatry.
I started out as an intern in pediatrics and I would see one ear infection after another and the kids were adorable. But one ear infection is pretty much the same as every other. Whereas when you talk to people about their lives, it’s never the same. And I knew that that would keep me interested for my whole career, which it has.
I am the fourth director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and it is the longest study of adult life that’s ever been done. We’re in our 85th year. It started in 1938 as two studies that weren’t even aware of each other.
One study started at Harvard Student health service with 19 year old sophomores who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding young men. And the other study was a study of juvenile delinquency. And it selected boys middle school age from Boston’s poorest families, but also the most troubled families, families beset by problems like domestic violence and parental mental illness and physical illness.
This study set out to understand what makes people thrive as they grow and develop. And that was unusual because most research that’s been done is done on what goes wrong in human development so that we can help people. But this was a study of what goes right. So it was how do kids from disadvantaged families stay on good paths and develop well? And then of course, the very privileged Harvard group was meant to be a study of normal young adult development.
We now know that if you want to study normal young adult development, you don’t just study white men from Harvard, but at that time that’s what they did. We study well being as people go through life. And our big question is if you could make one choice today to make it likely that you would stay happy and stay healthy throughout your life, what single choice would you make?
And most of us think it’s something to do with getting rich or achieving a lot. And some people even think they need to become famous to have a healthy, happy, healthy life. But our study and many other studies show that the single choice we can make that’s most likely to keep us on a good path of well being is to invest in our relationships with other people.
The people in our study who had the happiest, warmest relationships were the people who stayed healthy longest and who lived the longest.
The Harvard study started in 1938 and it has followed the same people throughout their entire lives, from the time they were teenagers all the way into old age. The study began with 724 young men, and then we brought in most of their wives and eventually most of their children. So that now there are over 2,000 people in these 724 families who we have followed through their entire adult lives.
We started collecting information by giving these young men elaborate psychological examinations, also medical examinations. Then we went to their homes, we talked to their parents, and sometimes even their grandparents. And the workers made elaborate notes about what was being served for dinner and what the discipline style was in the family and even what the curtains looked like.
And then eventually, as new methods of studying human life came on board, we adopted those methods. So audiotaping, videotaping, we now draw blood for DNA. And DNA wasn’t even imagined in 1938 when the study began. We’ve put many of our people into an MRI scanner and watched how their brains light up as we show them different visuals, images.
We bring them into our laboratory and we deliberately stress them out. And then we watch how they recover from stress as one more way of understanding well being. One of the things that is more common now, but was unusual when we started, it was combining biological measures and psychological measures and seeing how our biology is influenced by our mental states and vice versa. So it’s this combining of mind and body measurement that was relatively new in the last 20 years.
The question comes up how much of our happiness is under our control? And they’ve actually done some scientific analyses of this. A psychologist named Sonia Lyubomirsky did an analysis in which she estimates that about 50% of our happiness is a kind of biological set point probably determined by our genes that has to do with inborn temperament.
We all know people who are kind of naturally gloomy and other people who are naturally chipper no matter what’s going on. So about half of our happiness is that inborn temperament. Then about 10%, she finds, is based on our current life circumstances. And then the last 40% is under our control. We can move the needle. We can make ourselves more likely to be happy by building a life that includes the conditions that make for happiness.
Chapter 2: The Relationship Advantage
ROBERT WALDINGER: The questions that we might ask ourselves about our relationships are kind of simple. One is, do I have enough connection in my life? Or do I even have too much connection? If I’m a shyer person and don’t need as many people in my life, so do I have what I need?
Then the question is, do I have relationships that are warm and supportive? And there again, each of us needs to ask that question. Do I have people who have my back, who I feel I could call and would be there in an emergency because hard times are always coming our way?
And then the question is also, what am I getting from relationships? Do I have enough people to have fun with? Do I have enough people who will loan me their tools when I need to fix something in my house? Or who will drive me to the doctor when I need a ride? Do I have those kinds of friends?
One of the things we know about life is that we all have worries. We all have concerns that come along. Worries about children, worries about health, worries about finances. And one of the best teachings I got in my training as a psychiatrist was from one of my mentors who said, “never worry alone.”
And this teacher meant that about being worried about a patient who I was treating. But what I’ve come to understand, that it’s really good advice for just about everything in life. That if I’m really worried about something and I share it with somebody I trust, it makes all the difference in how much better I feel and how much less alone I feel with my worry.
There are so many different things we get from relationships. And so each of us can check in with ourselves about what we have and what we would like a little more of.
So we’ve learned several big lessons about relationships, about good relationships. And one of them is that childhood experience really does matter. What happens to us in childhood sets the stage for what we come to expect from the world. And that’s often a good thing if we’re raised by people who are warm and caring and reliable.
Some people don’t have that luck and are raised in environments where they feel like the people who are supposed to take care of them aren’t trustworthy, can’t be relied upon. And so many of those people come into adulthood with the expectation that the world is not a safe place and that people can’t be relied on.
The other thing we’ve learned is that adult experience can correct for some of those unfortunate lessons that people learn in childhood. Becoming connected with a good partner, with good friends, who you can count on can go a long way to change those gloomy expectations about the world and about relationships and allow us to realize that, yes, we can find people who are good, reliable partners in our relational world.
So another lesson that we learn is that all relationships that are important have some disagreements or some difficulties, and that actually facing those difficulties goes a long way to strengthen relationships much of the time. So that if we can work on relationships, that turns out to have great payoff in terms of keeping our connections stronger.
What that means is that it’s normal to have disagreements, it’s normal to have difficulties, and that the more skill we can develop in working through difficulties, the better our social worlds are.
One of the biggest lessons we learned from our study is that our connections with other people help us weather the hard times of life. And hard times are there in every life. So our original participants were born during the Great Depression. And many of the Harvard undergraduates were of an age to go and serve in World War II.
And when we asked them, how did you get through these really difficult times? All of them, to a person, talked about their relationships. “Our neighbors shared what little we had during the Depression. My fellow soldiers in the trenches were the people who kept me going. The letters that came to me from back home while I was overseas in the war were what sustained me.”
And so what we find is that these connections turn out to be the best protection against the difficult times that are always coming our way.
We are pretty sure that we human beings evolved to be social animals. That in fact, staying together in groups made it more likely that we would survive the dangers that are out there in the world and pass on our genes, which is the goal of evolution. So we evolved to find being together secure and safe and to find being alone a stressor.
And what we find is that that is still the case, that people who are more isolated than they want to be are stressed. Loneliness is a big stressor. And we think that that is biologically based as well as emotionally based.
The best hypothesis about how relationships get into our bodies and affect our physical health is through stress. That we’re having stressful experiences, often all day long, and that’s normal. And that when we’re stressed, the body is meant to go into what we call fight or flight mode, where essentially heart rate goes up, might start to sweat. A variety of changes happen. But then when the stressor is removed, the body is meant to return to equilibrium.
What we think happens is that if I have something stressful happen during the day and I can go home and talk to a friend or call someone. I can literally feel my body calm down if I don’t have anyone I can talk to about something that happens in my life that’s stressful.
We believe what happens is we stay in a kind of low level, chronic fight or flight mode. And what that means is that we have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol. We have higher levels of inflammation going on in the body all the time, and that these changes gradually wear away different body systems, which is how stress and loneliness could make it more likely that we would get coronary artery disease and more likely that we would get type 2 diabetes or arthritis could affect multiple body systems through this common denominator of chronic stress.
Our understanding is that good relationships actually are emotion regulators. That what happens is that good relationships involve the exchange of positive emotion that helps our bodies stay in equilibrium. So in fact, they’ve put people in MRI scanners and watched what happens to them when they go through a stressful medical procedure.
And they find that if they’re holding someone’s hand, even a stranger, but certainly someone they know, their bodies stay much closer to equilibrium than if they’re alone undergoing the same medical procedure. And so what it shows us is that being connected to another person makes us feel safer and keeps our bodies at a kind of physiologic equilibrium that promotes health.
A toxic relationship is one where we can’t get beyond difficulties, unhappiness, anger. We can’t ever come out the other side to a place where we’re okay again with each other. And so a toxic relationship involves unhappiness, even if you’re quiet about it. Chronic resentment, often withdrawal, and then active arguing.
On the other hand, couples argue all the time without having these detrimental effects. What we’ve found from our research is that couples can argue often and quite vocally. But if there is a bedrock of affection and respect, those relationships continue to be positive and stable.
Research shows us that loneliness is certainly a stressor and that we have increased levels of stress hormones, increased levels of chronic inflammation. But research also shows us that ongoing acrimony in a relationship, constant arguing and unhappiness, is also hazardous to our health for just the same reasons.
So there was, in fact, a study that suggested that staying in a really toxic intimate relationship may be worse than splitting up for that reason. Because a really difficult acrimonious relationship is that source of chronic stress that keeps us in fight or flight mode most of the time and breaks down our body systems.
The research shows that people who have a secure connection with a partner in late life have slower brain decline. In addition, the research shows that people who are lonely in late life have more rapid brain decline. So we know that this same process of increased stress or decreased stress affects how our brains age.
Chapter 3: Strengthening Your Connections
The Practice of Social Fitness
ROBERT WALDINGER: When we looked at all these lives and how they played out over time, we found that the people who were the happiest and the healthiest paid attention constantly to their relationships. They were inviting people over, they were joining clubs, they were maintaining connections with family and friends and in community.
And we began to think of this as a kind of fitness, a social fitness analogous to physical fitness. So if you think about it, you don’t go to the gym today, and then you come home and say, “I’m done. I never have to work out again.” We know that maintaining our physical fitness is an ongoing practice.
And what we found was that our happiest, healthiest people did the same with their relationships. And so what we’ve come to understand is that each of us can do that through small actions that we repeat over and over again. Reaching out to friends, to family, through little texts or emails or phone calls, day in, day out, certainly weekly. Making sure that we see people in person, who we want to stay current with and who we want to keep in our lives.
That these actions, paying attention to how often we’re seeing people, how often we’re in touch with people, pay off. They build over time into social networks that are vibrant and make us happier and keep us healthier.
Mapping Your Social Universe
So the question comes up, how do I know how I’m doing? Am I socially fit? And really, it’s in the eye of the beholder that you can check in with yourself and say, do I have the kinds of relationships that I would like? Do I have as many relationships as I would like?
You could even do a little exercise where you map out your relationships, draw a set of concentric circles, and then see who’s at the center of your life, and then who’s farther out, who are your more peripheral relationships, and see how well populated your world is and whether that feels like the right amount for you. And if it doesn’t feel like the right amount, there are things you can do to make things the way you would like them to be.
One way to map your social universe is to think of it as four quadrants. That on the horizontal axis, it’s how frequently do I see this person? From infrequently to frequently. And on the vertical axis, it could be how energizing is this relationship. Up at the top, it could be very energizing. Down at the bottom, it could be depleting.
And then see where each important person in your life fits on this grid. You might find that there are some people you see frequently who are quite depleting, who drain your energy. You might see that there are other people who you don’t see very often but are so energizing when you’re with them. And that can give you some pointers in terms of changes you might like to make in your relationships.
Recognizing Energizing vs. Depleting Relationships
When we think about relationships that are energizing, check in with yourself and think about whether you feel more positive, whether you feel more physical energy, whether you feel more open and more optimistic. And then in terms of depleting relationships, think about when you feel drained of energy, when you feel more gloomy, when you feel more closed off.
And you can think about that with each voice you listen to in your social world. You can even think about it in your social media world. You can think about it in our political life. Who makes you feel more open? Who makes you feel more closed off and afraid? And what we can do is turn more toward those people that allow us to feel more open, more hopeful, more energized.
I think we can learn again to pay attention to what’s energizing and depleting. I think we do that as kids. You will notice kids are just very open about being energized, excited or down and unhappy. And we’re taught to squash all of those signals and not to pay so much attention. I think as we get older and we have to sit still and we have to behave and we have to do all the things we should do.
And so it’s something we can learn to cultivate again, that inner sense of being able to read our own energy levels. They’re always there. It’s just a matter of whether we’re tuning into them.
Managing Difficult Relationships
One thing we wonder about is what do I do with a relationship with somebody where I see this person frequently and I feel really drained when I’m with them? Well, couple possibilities. One is, could you see them a little less often? Another possibility is see them with the same frequency, but have the kind of interaction where you don’t feel as drained.
Perhaps you don’t talk about the most draining subjects, or you don’t do the activities that deplete you of energy. Try to alter the way your encounters proceed to see if you can emerge feeling less drained when you’re with that person.
Sometimes we don’t have control over how often we see those people who make us feel drained. But what we can do is change our approach to think about this other person and what they struggle with. Actually, one of my favorite quotes comes from a 19th century minister who told his flock, “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
So with those difficult people in your life, you might try to remember that each of us is struggling to live the best way we can. And we’re all doing what we can to keep going in a difficult world.
Finding Your Social Sweet Spot
People often ask, how many good friends do I need? And one size does not fit all. People vary a lot in the number of friends they need and whether they need a lot of close friends or a lot of peripheral friends, that we’re all on a continuum from shyness to extroversion.
Shy people may need just a few others in their life. And actually, shy people get a lot of their energy from solitude, from alone time, whereas extroverts get their energy from people. And they may want a lot of people in their lives. So each of us needs to check in with ourselves what’s right for me, and to really work on our social world based on what we know works for us, whether it’s a lot of people or a small number of people or something in between.
Keeping Relationships Healthy
So how do we keep a relationship healthy? We’ve learned some things about that. First of all, paying attention really matters. One of my Zen teachers used the phrase, “Attention is the most basic form of love.” And if you think about it, our undivided attention is the most valuable thing we have to offer another person.
But we rarely do that these days. We are constantly distracted by our wonderful screens that are always grabbing our attention and drawing us away from each other. So really paying attention. When your longtime friend or your partner who you’ve been with for 20 years wants to tell you about their day, really turn to them, give them your full undivided attention. That goes a long way toward strengthening relationships.
Another thing is to really be curious about the people you’re with, particularly the people you think you know so well. There was a study of couples and how well they understood each other, how well they knew each other’s feelings, and the couples who were most tuned into each other were couples who had just started dating. And the couples who were least tuned into each other were couples who’d been together a long time.
And if you think about it, it makes sense, because the couples who just start dating are really concerned, how into me is this other person? Right? Whereas the couples who’ve been together for 20 years can assume, “Oh, I know exactly what this person’s going to say.”
So what we suggest is that bringing curiosity to relationships that you might take for granted, that bringing that curiosity can be so powerful and so enlivening again. One of my Zen teachers once gave me the assignment to look and say to myself, “What’s here right now that I have not noticed before?”
And if you think about sitting down to dinner with your longtime friend who you think you know so well, what if you ask yourself that question, “What’s here right now that I’ve never noticed before?” And that kind of curiosity can get you to notice new things, can get you to talk about new things in a relationship that seems old and maybe a little stale.
And finally, we know that working on difficulties in relationships really matters, that finding ways to work out disagreements so that you both feel okay, so that you get to the other side and nobody feels like one person has won and the other person has lost. That when you can do that kind of working out of difficulties, relationships get stronger and deeper.
The Good Life as an Ongoing Process
When we watch these thousands of lives play out over time, what we see is that the good life is an ongoing process. And it’s a process of continual change, which is different from what we all wish for, which is that we would finally get to a place where everything’s good and it’s going to stay that way. That’s not the truth of anybody’s life.
That there are always challenges, there are always unexpected things happening, and that the good life involves a practice of ongoing care for each other, for our relationships, care for ourselves, and weathering all the unexpected challenges that come along day after day, week after week.
My hope for what people will take away from these ideas is the truth that nobody’s happy all the time. And that if you’re not happy all the time, that doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. That 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.
Let me tell you, from having studied thousands of people over eight decades, that everybody has ups and downs. We never figure it out ultimately, and that that’s perfectly normal. And actually it’s what makes life rich and interesting.
INTERVIEWER: Chapter 4 Mindfulness Zen and the Good.
The Practice of Zen and Its Impact on Life
ROBERT WALDINGER: I am a Zen practitioner, and I’m an ordained Zen priest, and I’m a Zen teacher. I’m actually a Roshi, a Zen master. And so I meditate every day. I teach meditation here in the United States and actually internationally. It’s a big part of my life.
And what I find is that it is an enormous benefit in terms of how I think about my own life, other people’s lives, how I think about my research, how I think about working with patients.
Zen emphasizes community. It’s called sangha in the Buddhist language. And it’s really the idea that we practice learning about ourselves and each other by being in relationships with each other, both during meditation sessions and out there in the world.
So we practice with whatever comes up for us. So if I get annoyed at my friend I practice with that, I notice the annoyance. I feel what it feels like in my body and in my brain, and I notice what I do with annoyance. And then I notice how my friend reacts to me when I’m annoyed.
All these things are part of this kind of deep dive into what is my experience like of being in a relationship, what’s joy like in a relationship?
Understanding Our Messy Minds
One of the principles of meditation is that if we really look at our own lives, our minds are messy and chaotic, and we’re not always proud of what we feel or what we think. And we come to accept all of that as just part of being human.
And then what we realize is that everybody is having the same experience. Everybody’s minds are messy and chaotic, and everybody has thoughts they’re not proud of and impulses they don’t like. And when we realize that, we come to have a lot more compassion for ourselves and for other people. There’s a lot more acceptance.
The idea is that we move from a place of wanting the world to conform to what we like and don’t like. We move from that place to not needing other people to be different from who they are, realizing that each of us is just showing up in the world as we are. And that’s something to be celebrated and accepted.
The Goal of Zen Practice
Well, the main explicit goal of Zen is nothing. Zen is a practice. Now, the side effect of practice is waking up. Waking up really means understanding more deeply the truth of what it means to be alive.
The truth, for example, that everything is constantly changing, including me. That even the things that look like they are fixed and stable are always in a process of continual change.
That’s really helpful because often we try to fix things. We try to hold on to things and make them stay the same. And we suffer a lot when we do that. So learning about the truth of what we call impermanence relieves a lot of suffering that we inflict on ourselves.
The Power of Impermanence
I would rate the concept of impermanence as number one, as the greatest hit of Zen. Buddhism, basically, the idea of everything constantly changing means that Bob has no fixed self or identity. Bob is always fluid. I am always in the process of change and I’m always connected with other people and other things in the world that are themselves changing.
And so there’s nothing fixed, there’s nothing to hold onto in the deepest sense. And that, on the one hand, that can be scary. On the other hand, it can be an enormous relief. Because we tell ourselves so many stories about who we are and who we’re supposed to be and how the world is supposed to be. And when we really know the truth of impermanence, we let a lot of that go.
One of the things that impermanence helps us understand is the ebb and flow of all of our experience. So when we really get that arises and then passes away, that means that my annoyance at this other person is only temporary. It’s not going to stay the same no matter what.
All you have to do is watch an emotion for long enough and you’ll see that it changes. That’s helpful when we’re caught in the middle of some unhappy relationship, some unhappy argument or something going on with another person where we can fall back on that awareness that it is not going to feel this way forever.
In fact, it’s probably not going to feel this way an hour from now, certainly not a day from now or a week from now. And keeping that long term perspective of impermanence can go a long way to make us feel more accepting of the ups and downs of a relationship in any given moment.
The Four Noble Truths and Suffering
The Four Noble Truths are perhaps the most iconic teachings of the Buddha. They’re translated in many different ways, but they start with the Buddhist statement that life is suffering. Or better translated, I think life is unsatisfactory, that there are always aspects to life that we don’t like, and that that’s an inevitable part of being alive.
And then the second teaching is that the source of suffering is known, that it is greed and aversion, or hatred and ignorance, that suffering can be relieved. That’s the third truth. And the fourth truth is that there is a way of life that the Buddha called the Eightfold Path that can help relieve all this suffering in life.
It’s often said that the Buddha was teaching that you could get to a point where you never suffer anymore. Zen does not teach that. Zen does not teach that anybody finally arrives at a place where we don’t ever feel pain, where we don’t ever feel worry or unhappiness.
Rather, what we can do is learn to be with what’s unsatisfactory in life, learn to be with unhappiness, even be with pain, in a way that makes it more bearable, in a way that doesn’t layer on optional suffering.
The optional suffering being the stories we tell about how unfair it all is, for example, that I have back pain, or how unfair it is that I’ve got a cold today, that all of these things are workable.
But Zen teaches that unsatisfactoriness is always there in life and that we do have preferences, that we’re never going to completely give up our preferences, but that what we can do is learn to cling less tightly to our preferences. In other words, to insist less that the world be a certain way.
I mean, think about in relationships, how much we try to insist that someone else be a certain way that we want them to be, and how much less we suffer if we let that go and just assume that that person is allowed to show up in the world as they are, and we’re allowed to show up in the world as we are.
So this idea of relieving suffering is, in Zen, the idea of being able to face towards suffering, looking at it and living with it in a way that hurts less.
Attachment and Beginner’s Mind
Buddhism talks about the idea of attachment, and it doesn’t mean attachment in the way we normally think of it, like just being connected to somebody or something. It’s really about holding on tightly to a fixed view of something. So I’m attached to the idea that there’s one true religion or one true political party or one true anything.
There’s a wonderful teaching in Zen about beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind being the idea that we let go of all the stories we tell ourselves that we’re so sure of, that we become an expert in life and an expert in ourself.
Shunryu Suzuki was a Zen master who had a saying that I love. He said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” And what he meant by that is when we can remain open to many possibilities rather than narrowing everything down and being so sure that we know what’s what, that we become open to surprise, open to new ways of experiencing ourselves and the world that make us suffer a great deal less than when we are so called experts.
And the older I get and the more people call me an expert, the more aware I am of how little I know.
Having a beginner’s mind really helps in relationships because it allows us to be curious. It allows us to say, okay, there’s so much I don’t know about this person. Let me watch closely. Let me notice what I haven’t seen before about this person. Let me find new ways to interact with this person. And that brings a kind of freshness and openness to relationships that can otherwise easily get stale.
Mindfulness in Daily Life
The best definition I know of mindfulness is simple. It’s paying attention in the present moment without judgment. So it’s really just paying attention to whatever’s here.
So right now, for me, that’s talking with you, that’s the feel of the chair on my back. It’s the feel of the air on my skin. It’s the sound of my voice kind of reverberating in my head, all of those things. And simply being open to all the experiences that are here right now, not just the little thoughts going on in my head.
And so mindfulness asks us to be more expansive, to open our awareness and beyond thinking, to everything going on in the world.
You can work on it right now. You can work on your mindfulness right this moment by simply paying attention to whatever stimuli are reaching you. It might be your heartbeat, it might be your breath, it might be the sound of the fan in the room, the traffic outside, anything. And simply letting yourself be open and receive whatever is here right now.
And you can do that in any moment. You can do that when you’re sitting in a meeting. You can do that when you’re waiting for an airplane at the airport. You can do that when you’re driving your car. In fact, being mindful could be really useful when you’re driving your car.
How Mindfulness Improves Relationships
When we really know what it feels like to suffer, to be in pain, to be unhappy, to be scared, we’re better at knowing what’s coming from inside, from me, and what’s coming from outside. Many times we mistake those two.
I come home and I don’t realize that actually my knee hurts, and I find myself more irritated at my partner. And so one of the things that being really mindful about my own experience does is it makes me a little less likely to blame other people for what’s going on in me. And that can be hugely helpful when we talk about harmony in relationships.
The other way that being mindful about my suffering can help in my relationships is it helps me realize, oh, everybody suffers in this way. If I’m more irritable when I’m not feeling well, that must mean that everybody’s more irritable. Most people are when they’re not feeling well. And it allows me to remember to cut people slack when they’re not feeling well. Right. Instead of just being annoyed that they’re a little short with me.
So there are these ways that knowing about my own discomfort and what I do with it can be a huge help in being empathic toward other people.
Cultivating Loving Kindness
There’s a concept of metta, loving kindness in Buddhism, and there are a couple of different ways that it’s talked about. One is an explicit skill that we can cultivate. You can do a loving kindness meditation where you think about another person and you meditate on that other person and you say to yourself, “May you be peaceful, may you be happy, may you be at peace.” And you do that over and over again, and you come to feel differently about the other person, including about people you don’t like very much or you’re angry at. So there’s that way of actively cultivating a skill.
There’s another way, which is simply by becoming more and more aware of your own pain, your own anxious, angry thoughts, your own difficulties. Because what happens when we become more aware of that through meditation, for example, is that we become much more empathic toward other people.
And naturally that kind of loving kindness arises where we see an angry person and say, oh, I wonder if that person is having a terrible day, rather than immediately reacting with our own anger. That’s a different way to cultivate loving kindness, but it happens pretty reliably through meditation.
The Reality of Enlightenment
There’s a lot of talk about enlightenment. It’s a concept that’s very old in Buddhism, but also in other spiritual traditions. And it can mean so many different things. But in my Zen tradition, it really refers to waking up to the truth of what life is and to some of the surprising aspects of life that we don’t normally see.
Most specifically, the interconnectedness of everything, the essential oneness of everything. That, yes, on one level, everything exists separately. I exist separately from you, and this chair exists separately from me. And at the deepest level, none of it is separate. All of it is completely interconnected and always changing. That is awakening to the truth of life.
Now, enlightenment is often held out as a thing that we can get. And in fact, you can read accounts of people sitting in long periods of meditation, sometimes on retreats, where they essentially have these amazing experiences. Sometimes they feel like out of body experiences, and they can write elaborate descriptions of what these are like.
And sometimes people feel like, well, if I just have those experiences, then I’m enlightened. And if I had those experiences once, I want them back. So I want to try to get them back again.
What we teach in Zen is that that’s actually dangerous. That nobody lives in a kind of unusual altered state all the time. Most of us never do. And if we have unusual experiences, it’s very brief.
An experience of, for example, complete interconnectedness and oneness cannot last. In fact, one Zen teacher did a set of interviews with people who had had enlightenment experiences and he put them into a book. And the title of the book was “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.”
And what he meant by that was that no matter what kind of unusual experience we might have of waking up of enlightenment, we always go back to needing to do the laundry and needing to brush our teeth and needing to go to work. That is just how life is.
So although most of us, myself included, wish that there were a way to get enlightened and stay that way, to get to a place where it’s always blissful and we never suffer, I have never met a human being on this earth who gets to that place. And Zen teaching is that that’s not possible.
That in fact we move in and out of states of being more awakened or less awakened. That no matter how evolved you are as a spiritual practitioner, you’re going to have times when you’re just all upset about stupid stuff, when you’re just deluded, as we say, and then you move back into periods where you see life more clearly.
That’s important for me because if you meet people who hold themselves out as an ultimately enlightened person, be very suspicious of that. Be very suspicious of anybody who claims to be a perfectly evolved enlightened human being.
Enlightened Activity, Not Enlightened People
Shunryu Suzuki, very important Zen teacher in the United States in the 20th century, was famous for saying that there’s no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.
And what he meant by that was that no person is finally, fully and forever enlightened. There is only this moment’s activity. So if I do something that is kind, that pays attention to my interconnectedness with everyone and everything, that is enlightened activity. If I do something that’s selfish, if I do something that destroys the planet, that is unenlightened activity.
And so the idea of pursuing enlightenment really is not pursuing a self improvement project. It’s pursuing a way to be as compassionate as I can in each moment, to pursue enlightened activity in as many moments as I can string together in my life. That’s the goal.
One fact about enlightenment is that it can’t be permanent if we really know the truth of impermanence, then why would enlightenment be permanent when everything else is not? So clearly enlightenment has to come and go, just like everything else.
Striving for enlightenment is a self improvement project. And what we talk about in my Zen tradition is that we don’t want to embark on a self improvement project. We want to strive for greater kindness and harmony in the world rather than being lost in the delusion of an isolated permanent self. And so really, what we want to strive for is enlightened activity in the world.
Chapter 5: What to Do About Loneliness
ROBERT WALDINGER: Loneliness is absolutely an epidemic in our society, but it’s been growing for decades. There are so many factors that are responsible for this loneliness epidemic. They did not just begin with the digital revolution. In fact, loneliness was on the rise, as we know, at least from the 1950s, in part because of social dislocation.
We’ve become a much more mobile society where the networks of family and friends that people would live in their entire lives more frequently get disrupted as people move for jobs and other kinds of opportunities like education. All of that is good on the one hand, but it tears us away from the fabric of belonging that many of us are born into and spend much of our lives creating.
There is the world of screens. So when television came into the American home, there was a decline in investing in our communities. People went out less, they joined clubs less often, they went to houses of worship less often, they invited people over less often. All of that seems to contribute to our increasing disconnection and our increasing levels of loneliness.
That was made worse as the digital revolution gave us more and more screens to look at and software that was designed specifically to grab our attention, hold our attention, and therefore keep it away from the people we care about.
The Growing Epidemic
Since we first started asking people if they were lonely, we know that people have been more and more isolated, less and less invested in other people, starting in the 1950s and going all the way through to today. So that now when you ask people, in some studies, as many as 60% of people will say that they feel lonely much of the time. Certainly the lowest estimates are 30 to 40% of people say they feel lonely much of the time.
We know, for example, that young adults are the loneliest age group. Age 16 to 24 has the highest rates of people responding that they feel lonely. And then again among older adults, there is an increase in loneliness, particularly as people lose friends, lose partners. But loneliness is pervasive across the world, across all age groups, all income groups, all demographics.
Understanding Loneliness
Loneliness is the sense that “I am less connected to other people than I want to be.” It’s a very subjective experience. No one can tell you whether you’re lonely or not. Only you can tell if you’re lonely. And the fact is you can be lonely in a crowd, you can be lonely in a marriage. You can also be very content and not lonely alone on a mountaintop. So it’s very much a subjective experience.
And that makes it different from isolation. So I can deliberately isolate myself and feel great about that and in fact yearn for solitude. Artists, writers sometimes want nothing more than to go off to a cabin in the woods and create. And they are thrilled to have that space and time, not a problem. So it’s different. Social isolation may include loneliness, or it may not include loneliness.
The Health Impact
We know that loneliness and social isolation are stressors. When people feel too isolated, too alone, their bodies are in a kind of chronic, low level fight or flight mode, meaning they have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, they have higher levels of inflammation, and these things break down body systems. They break down our coronary arteries, they break down our joints, all kinds of body systems suffer when we’re in fight or flight mode.
We think that stress is one of the main causes of physical health breakdown that comes from loneliness. But there are probably other causes as well, and many research groups are trying to understand this now.
There’s good work by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who is a researcher who studies loneliness. And what she finds in reviewing many studies is that loneliness is as dangerous to our health as smoking. In her estimate, half a pack of cigarettes a day, as dangerous as being obese.
What We Need in Relationships
When we think about what we need and want in relationships, most of it boils down to feeling like we belong in the world with some people, feeling like we matter to some people. In fact, often the experience that marginalized people will have at a workplace, for example, is that they don’t matter, that their comments aren’t heard in meetings. And we feel that with friends, we feel it with family.
And so often it’s just that experience that when we show up, people appreciate that we’re there. When we have an idea to offer, people listen and they reflect back that they heard us. The mattering that comes with people acknowledging you in a friendly way.
So the person who makes our coffee in the morning at the coffee shop, who exchanges some friendly words, makes us feel like we belong and like we’re seen in a little way. And all of that gives us these small hits of well being that say to us, “You belong, you matter, you’re connected.”
The Power of Casual Connections
One of the things we find in research is that it’s not just our closest relationships that matter and make us feel like we belong and make us feel connected. It’s all kinds of relationships. It’s the person who delivers the mail. If we have a friendly little chat, it’s the cashier who checks us out at the grocery store. It’s all these casual encounters. If we make pleasant encounters of those meetings, what we find is that we get these hits of well being, we get a sense of connection.
One minister said that her new procedure, her new practice, is to look at people’s name tags as she interacts with them and to call them by name and to look them in the eye and to say hello and ask about their day. So when she goes through the TSA line, the security line at the airport, she looks at the worker’s name tag and says, “Hi, Joyce, how’s your day going?” And she said, people are amazed. They feel noticed, they feel seen, instead of like these anonymous people who are just passing you on through.
So all of these ways of making it a little bit more personal do a lot to make other people feel like they belong, and they make us feel more like we belong.
Building New Relationships
One of the things we know about relationships is that they often start when we’re in a situation where we encounter the same people casually over and over again. That’s why the water cooler at work has become iconic. Or it could be the coffee machine at work, but someplace where you come together with people at random who you see and might see again and again.
What that tells us is that one way to make new relationships, if you’re feeling too isolated, is to do something you care about alongside other people. So it might be volunteering for a political cause. It might be volunteering at a soup kitchen or a food pantry. It might be joining a gardening club or a bowling league. Go to a place and do something with other people that you enjoy.
What it does is it puts you in contact with the same people over and over again. You have something in common because you’re doing something you both care about, and it gives you an immediate place to start conversations. Those are some of the best ways to make it more likely that you’re going to make new relationships.
Finding Ways to Serve
Another way to make new relationships is to find ways to be of service. All of us have things we can do that other people will be grateful for. As I said, it could be volunteering at a soup kitchen. It could be reading to a child who wants to be read to, or tutoring someone in school or teaching English as a second language. There are always things we know how to do that other people would be grateful to learn from us.
Many people who are lonely feel that others don’t want to be with them. And what we know is that lonely people can sometimes give off the message that they don’t want to be approached because they’re afraid of others. They’re afraid of the world. And so it may be that lonely people can learn more about making gestures and giving off signals that say, “I would like to connect” even when they’re a little bit afraid to do so.
And so they’ve actually developed forms of cognitive behavior therapy where people are taught these social skills and taught how to revise their assumptions about not being wanted by other people.
My recommendation, if you’re feeling lonely and a little bit afraid is find a place where you are comfortable. If there is one. Find a setting. Find an activity where you’re comfortable and let yourself do it around other people and see what develops.
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