Dr. Robert Waldinger

Well, I would say, and it's not just me saying it, it's the research that shows that social connection is the biggest driver of well-being, of happiness, right?

And it also buffers us against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

When bad things come along, social relationships help ease that pain.

So I would say, if you're going to make only one investment, invest in friendships and family relationships.

It's the easiest answer.

I'm the fourth director of the longest study of human life that's ever been done, as far as we know.

It started in the year 1938 with 724 teenagers and has followed them and their spouses and their kids everywhere.

now in our 87th year.

And the purpose of the study, most research on human beings is about what goes wrong so we can figure out how to fix it, right?

And this study in 1938 was radical because they said, we want to know what helps people thrive.

What are the predictors of who's going to be happy and healthy as they go through their lives?

That just hadn't been done.

So that's what we've done for 87 years.

Well, we had finished the Great War, which we thought was the war to end all wars, World War I, and it wasn't going to be, right?

Yeah.

In the US, we were in the midst of a Great Depression, a terrible depression.

Yeah.

And I think people were getting more pessimistic about this kind of ever-expanding vision of life and the economy and all that.

And so they began to want to know what actually turns out to be important in human beings having good lives.

The research was measuring all kinds of things as people went through life.