895: Robert Waldinger | Unlocking the Science of Happiness

24:41Okay. So Killingsworth and Kahneman organized what they called an adversarial collaboration where they took all the data they could find on this and they crunched it together. What they came up with was a kind of middle ground where it turns out happiness can go up after you get your basic material needs met. That's what the 75K really stands for. Okay. Do we know what that is adjusted for inflation, by the way? Like, oh yeah. And, and, you know, think about 75K in, you know, in Manhattan and then 75K in Des Moines, Iowa. And they're very different. What year was that? Do you know? 2017, I believe.

25:20Okay. But what I would say is that it's really about getting your basic needs met. And then what we know is that that's really true, that if you don't have a stable place to live and food security and access to healthcare and all that, and able to educate your kids, you are less happy. So when you get all that, which gets you to 75K or whatever the number is. It's$94 ,020,$23, by the way. Okay. So it's still a lot of money we need. Yeah. Per household, right? Per household. But then what it's saying, and this is what Killingsworth and Kahneman found together is that if you're unhappy and you're looking for more money to make you happier, like let's say, if I make 10 million, then I'll be happy.

26:04That doesn't work. You don't get happier when you make yourself wealthier. Good luck convincing anybody of that. I know. That's tough, man. Good luck. I know. That's the thing because our culture tells us, you know, you really will be happier. And then you hear, you know, it's like a truism that wealth doesn't make us happy. And some of the richest people are some of the most miserable. That's why White Lotus is fascinating for people. You know, they watch this TV show and it's about these awful, obnoxious, rich people who are having problems. What is White Lotus? I don't think I've ever heard of this.

26:38Oh, it's a streaming thing. It's about people who go to an elegant resort. And it's a lot of drama. And, you know, think of succession. I don't know if you've heard of succession. I have, of course, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's another one where you don't have this super wealthy family who are like hateful to each other, right? And we love that. We love seeing that. Oh, oh, they're, you know, they're not happy. We want them to be miserable because they have jets. They don't deserve to be happy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're pissed off about it. Yeah, it's unfair. But we do keep imagining, we do live in hope that the people who are rich really have it all figured out.

27:13I mean, think about how we elect these rich people who claim to be so spectacularly wonderful because they made a lot of money. And that's just not the truth of life. It's a weird, very uniquely, I think uniquely American thing where we idolize and we deify rich people, but we also want them to be miserable. Yeah. But then we ascribe all these positive qualities to them as if we didn't just wish that they were unhealthy and miserable and had their lives falling apart. We want to see them have a crushing downfall and then two minutes later, we're voting for them to run the entire state or country.

27:47It makes no sense. Exactly. And we see how well that works out. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Robert Waldinger. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by 1-800-CONTACT. You know that last pair of contacts panic? My wife, Jen, knows it way too well. She's had these mornings where she's out of contacts and stuck wearing these old glasses. She's got to keep wiping clean with her sleeve. But now she make sure to load up ahead of time because her next set is always on the way from 1-800-CONTACTS. They're the only major retailer that lets you renew your prescription online, so Jen gets her same doctor-prescribed contacts fast with free shipping without leaving the house.

28:221-800-CONTACTS has been doing this for over 30 years. They've got millions of lenses in stock, award-winning customer service, and perks like free returns, free exchanges, even free torn lens replacement. Jen loves their Express exam, which lets you renew your prescription online in under 10 minutes. It's a vision exam, not a full eye exam, but it gives you a doctor-issued prescription if you're seeing clearly with your current lenses. No waiting rooms, no dilation drops, remember those things? And with their best price guarantee, if you find your contacts cheaper somewhere else, they'll beat it.

28:49Getting contacts doesn't have to be a hassle. Let 1-800-CONTACTS get you the lenses you need right now. Order online at 1-800-CONTACTS.com or download the free 1-800-CONTACTS app today. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell. It's time for Cyber Monday, Dell Technologies' biggest sale of the year. Enjoy the lowest prices of the year on select PCs like the Dell 16 Plus featuring Intel Core Ultra processors, and with built-in advanced features, it's the PC that helps you do more faster. Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, price match guarantee, and expert support.

29:19They also have huge deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC and make perfect gifts for everyone on your list. Shop now at dell.com slash deals.

29:31This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel comfortable you're finding top talent you can't find anywhere else. The best part is that those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn, they're 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. That's a big deal when every hire counts. Think about the last time you worked with somebody who just got it.

29:57You didn't have to redo their work after hours. You could actually trust them. Now, compare that to the cost of a bad hire. Training time, salary, lost opportunities, stress on your existing team, and then the emotional fun of letting them go and starting all over again. When you add that up, spending a bit of energy up front to find the right person is a no-brainer. That's exactly where LinkedIn Jobs shines, helping you get it right the first time so you're growing your business instead of constantly cleaning up hiring mistakes. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash harbinger.

30:26Then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash harbinger to post your job for free terms and conditions apply back If you're wondering how I managed to book all of these amazing authors thinkers and creators every single week It is because of my network and I know that networking is a gross word Nobody likes doing well good people generally don't like doing it, right? It seems schmoozy This is non-cringy. It's down to earth and it's not awkward and it's free jordanharbinger.com slash course You'll become a better connector a better colleague a better friend a better peer and you won't be that annoying network quirky guy or gal.

31:02And it just takes a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Once again, you can find it for free at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now back to Dr. Robert Waldinger. Back to this money study with Kahneman, 75K, whatever, 93K after your material needs are met. Does your happiness level, I'm trying to do the graph here in an audio only format. We do use the video, but it's not going to help with me rolling my hand through the screen. But I would imagine there's a pretty steady uptick up until your needs are met, right?

31:36At lower levels, your health is suffering because maybe you can't even afford healthcare or you're eating crap food. You're stressed out. You're working two jobs because otherwise your kids can't, well, you don't have a house in a nice area. Yeah. Let me just say that the reason for our naming that is that it's easy for some people to say, oh, you know, the poor are really happy and they're content with their lot. Well, that's bullshit. This kind of basic privilege matters. Like the having enough, having your needs met really matters. And so we want to name that even as we say getting super rich doesn't make you happy.

32:14I bristle a little bit when I see those studies where it's like, here are some people that live in literal landfills in India. Look at them smiling. And I'm thinking, well, they're smiling because you're taking pictures and maybe they look happy sort of day to day. But if you look at if you really, I don't know, spent more than five minutes photographing these people and you spent time, there's probably so much tragedy in their life. Oh, yeah. They're one of eight kids, but six of them died of preventable diseases caused by waterborne pathogen. Their parents died when they were 11. But I think that photographing them and putting them in whatever National Geographic is more popular because we can go, wow, look at these people.

32:51They're happy despite having nothing. I just I don't I don't buy it. Yeah. Right. And so I don't have to worry about them, right? Yeah. I don't have to worry that I'm over here and business class complaining about the pork shoulder being too overcooked, right? Because these people are also happy. Yeah. It's very odd to me. And at higher levels, money is less about stuff and is way more about status. Maybe there's a power element if you're really loaded and you need only look so far as these billionaires who are building different phallic rockets to go into space to learn that you can never have too much money because you just shift the goalposts to something else status-wise.

33:29Yeah. And also, you know, in many ways, it's like a quest for immortality. You know, there are a lot of billionaires who say, well, I'm going to be the first guy to put a rocket into space and bring it back. Or, you know, I'm going to put my name on so many buildings. And a lot of it can be this quest for, okay, I'm really a person who's important and I'm going to be remembered, you know, forever. Right. And of course, none of us is remembered forever. A thousand years from now, you know, like, do you remember who was King of England in, you know, 1356? Of course not. I don't, right? The superstars of the world are all forgotten, but there's this wish, oh, I got to be remembered.

34:11So I'm going to exert my power. I'm going to put my name on everything. That I think is one of the strong motivators for some people with a lot of wealth. Yeah. It's a little sad because you, you read about, and the only reason I even know about these folks like Emperor Nero or whatever is because of Ryan Holiday writing books about stoicism, you know, and that having a resurgence. Now there was probably a thousand years where nobody cared about that stuff, right? There was just all lost to time or mostly lost to time or, or sort of niche. But then you look at, you're like, well, look at those accomplishments those people have.

34:42And, but then half the stoic stories bizarre about how their kids hate them and then they screwed up everything and they were responsible for the downfall of their entire empire. And it's like, yeah, I don't know if I want to be remembered for that part. And it's like, well, you don't get to pick man. Well, you get to pick in this life. Yeah. You get to pick in this lifetime. But it's like, well, how did you, how do your kids remember you? The people that actually mattered in your life. There's no data about that really, or they all died, you know, or they killed you and try to get your kingdom, something along those lines.

35:10Yeah. So your happiness goes up until your needs are met. And then does it slowly taper the happiness line or does it continue to just go up and up and up? That's the part I don't understand about this study. Well, it's complicated. So it goes up and up, but it tapers off. It doesn't go up anywhere near as fast as it does while you're getting your basic needs met. So you get a continued boost, but not that much. And as I say, if you are not happy, increasing your wealth doesn't make you happier. Wealth gives us freedom. It gives us opportunities to do certain things and that can increase happiness.

35:47Fair enough. And sometimes, you know, wealth can give us the opportunity to be generous. And we know that actually people are happier when they're generous. So, you know, there's this thing, the billionaire's pledge. You probably know about it. Yeah, is this the giving pledge? The giving pledge, exactly. Die with half your wealth or the majority of your wealth. Exactly. I'm gonna give away at least half of it during my lifetime. That's a big deal. But these people really feel better about their lives because they're doing that. And they spend a lot of their life now figuring out how am I going to give this away?

36:22That's an opportunity that huge wealth can create that actually makes you happier. Again, hard to internalize, right? Because I work so hard for my money. Look at all the things I've traded for it. Give it away. Are you insane? I'm not doing that. It's very difficult to do. one thing that really stuck out for me in the book was the comparison thing, right? The more we compare ourselves to others, the more unhappy we are. Okay, duh. But what I didn't know was that the more we compare ourselves to others and the more unhappy we are, even when the comparison is favorable. And that is really something that I think we need to, if that's one thing you take away from this whole episode, this is it.

37:01Because it made me cringe so hard because I think we all do this all the time. And for me, it's like my primary source of misery. It's such a terrible habit, but you compare yourself and you go, oh, well, at least this one is favorable. I feel better about myself because I'm comparing myself to this other person who has less or did less or accomplished less or, but that's not actually working. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work that when we don't compare ourselves, we are in a much more peaceful place. So think about it. I mean, you have a hugely successful podcast, right? I trade it all for just a little more.

37:35But that means your numbers can go down as well as I, right? And so even if you are crushing it, you look at those numbers and you say, well, okay, for now, they're okay. You know, or in my field, you know, am I publishing in the right journals and am I getting the right recognition, right? But if I am, that means it can go down. It's one of the ways that we are misguided in how we raise our kids. You know, getting A's is great, but that means you can get B's, you can get D's. That means, and evaluating people constantly saying, you're so great, that's terrific, is different from helping people to learn who they are, which is very different from you're good, you're bad, you're better than him, you're worse than her.

38:20And so all of this comparison and an evaluative stuff leaves us kind of empty and kind of anxious. It's so hard to remember, because even when you're miserable, and that goes back to the social media thing, right? It's so hard to not compare yourself. It's almost, it's so human to do this. And you really do think you're winning if you're comparing yourself to others that have or do or have accomplished less. It reminds me of the, there's a study that says that you're, or at least I thought it said, that if you feel like you are not wealthy, the best thing you can do is move to a place where you're the wealthiest guy in the neighborhood.

38:55And so by comparison, you'll feel like you have more. But this sort of seems to fly in the face of that. You just end up comparing yourself. Yes, you're the wealthiest guy in the neighborhood, but you're still perhaps miserable in some other way. Yes. It's the comparison problem. You're right. It is true that when people feel that they are less than the people around them, they do feel worse. So that means that if that's one of the reasons why unequal pay is so devastating and destructive. It's not just that you get less money. It's that you feel disrespected and it's completely demoralizing. And so it is true that we're going to compare ourselves to some extent, no matter what, you know, if you find that somebody else is getting more for the same work, you're going to feel worse about yourself as well as you're going to feel worse about your workplace.

39:46But all of that means that comparison is something we have to manage. It is a fact of our existence, but we can manage it. We can put ourselves in positions where we compare less. That's where turning off social media. So one of the things I do, I'm a psychiatrist, and one of the things I do every day is I see patients in psychotherapy. With my younger patients particularly, I've had to help them see that they have to turn off social media and they decrease their emotional pain when they turn off social media. It's what you've found. I mean, you have to be really careful with social media. You are absolutely the norm, right?

40:23And so what we know is that we have to manage comparison or it's gonna drag us down. What factors determine our level of happiness? You mentioned the happiness set point, which is genetic, I'm guessing, and that's what, 40 % of our happiness? What else is there? Well then, and this is from Sonia Lubomirsky, who's a psychologist who does these estimates. She says 40 % genetic. She says only about 10 % your current life circumstances, only 10 % of your happiness. And then about 50 % is movable, is under our control, she estimates. So that means there's stuff we can do. And that's why I'm out here talking with you and talking about this, right?

41:09To say, look, this matters. If you build and maintain good relationships, you are setting yourself up to be happier more of the time. And it is true that taking care of your physical health does the same thing. It keeps us disability-free longer. It keeps us out of pain longer. So all of that is to say that if half of our happiness is under our control, that means that we can build a foundation of well-being so that even if like moment-to-moment happiness is kind of an accident, like I'm having a good time now talking to you, but an hour from now, something really annoying may happen and I won't be happy.

41:46But if we build this kind of bedrock of well-being, then I make myself more prone to be happy more of the time. You could do another podcast, and there's no way it'll be as fun and lively and entertaining as this one. Exactly. Exactly. This is the peak, man. This is the peak. Absolutely. The lack of relationship ties is a strong indicator similar to smoking in terms of risk to longevity. I want to let that one sink in. I read that in your work, and I thought, imagine being lonely and thinking, it's basically just like you're smoking cigarettes. That's a really good reason to try and make some freaking friends, man, anywhere, any way possible.

42:25Yeah, absolutely. This comes from a psychologist named Julianne Holt-Lunstad at the University of Utah. And she did this huge analysis of hundreds of studies of loneliness. And that's what she found that it's like smoking cigarettes. It's like being obese. And the reason we think it happens is that loneliness is a stressor and it sets up body reactions. It sets up more inflammation in the body. It sets up higher cardiovascular reactivity. It sets up a bunch of things that break down your body systems in the way that smoking breaks down your body systems and obesity and other things. So it's not magic and it's not some kind of hocus pocus.

43:06It's real science that all of these things set up classic stress reactions that wear us down over time. You mentioned in the book as well that marriage or intimate relationships were more predictive of health than cholesterol levels at age 50. And I know someone's going to be like, cholesterol levels are nonsense. New science shows this. And maybe there's something to that. But the point is cultivating strong or trusting bonds maybe makes the rest of our lives more stable. Is that why this happens? Do we know why this is? Yeah, and that's a really good point. We are learning more. So the last 10 years of our research has been trying to figure out how do relationships get into our bodies and change them?

43:48And that's this kind of stress response. And the other thing is social. So for example, we know that people who have partners and they have a decent relationship have partners who remind them to eat, remind them to take their medications, get them out walking, do all the things that we know that otherwise, you know, I might just sit on the couch and watch Netflix rather than get exercise and take care of myself and see people because my wife gets me to do stuff. And what we know is that it literally works that way. Yeah. We show up for each other and we help each other stay healthier. What are some of the differences between the lives of the happiest and least happy participants?

44:29Do they have bad habits? Do they have bad relationships? I mean, some of it's luck, right? If you just get cancer four times, maybe you're going to have more stress than the average person. But what is there maybe that we could control that you found between these people over time? So really important point about luck, because there really is luck. And some people are going to be listening to this and saying, wait a minute. Some people are dealt really bad hands. But the stuff that's under our control is, you know, taking care of relationships, taking care of health. that that is the kind of bedrock of making it more likely that you'll be okay.

45:05So if you think about it, decent relationships help us weather the storms that are always coming our way. I mean, who could have foreseen COVID? So a lot of us got through COVID with the help of other people. Maybe the people we were living with, maybe the people we connected with remotely. We asked our original participants at one point, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? And most of them could list quite a few people. Some of them couldn't list anybody. And some of them were married and couldn't list anybody. Yikes. And what we think is that everybody needs that sense that there's somebody in the world who has my back.

45:46There's somebody in the world who would show up for me when times get really tough. The way that stress acts on the body is something that we're understanding more and more. but one of the interesting studies that you cite in the book is regarding stress and wound healing. So essentially what they give punched a hole in somebody's skin and found that people who are under a lot of stress took longer to heal. Is that accurate? Exactly. This comes from a psychologist, Janice Kekul-Glazer at Ohio State. She did an experiment where she took people of the same age and basically same health status, but one group of people was taking care of demented relatives and the other group of people wasn't.

46:26And she gave each of them a little wound, a little skin biopsy. It's a normal procedure. It's done in dermatologist's office. It doesn't hurt much. And it's a way to see what's going on in the skin. So she did it with each of these people. And the people taking care of demented relatives took 39 days longer to heal those little wounds than the people who were not taking care of demented relatives. And we know that, for example, taking care of a disabled person in your life is one of the most stressful activities on the planet. I thought you were going to say maybe three days longer, a couple of, that's incredible.

47:08I mean, you're talking about 40 days and that means that what, if somebody took two weeks, somebody else took six or seven weeks to heal from the same thing. Yep, yep. And think about what that means. For example, if you are really stressed and you need to have surgery, your body is having a hard time healing again after a procedure that you need to have. Some of the findings are equally surprising in the book. The empty nest boost, which is essentially a boost in satisfaction with your relationship or your life when your kids leave the house, I would have expected the exact opposite, right? People get sad, their kids leave something, something, emptiness, depression.

47:46But it's like, no, actually people, people are stoked when the kids are gone, which is so funny in so many ways. Right. And of course, not everybody is the same. Some people get depressed, right? Yeah. But when you study thousands of people, which is what we were talking about. And I found this, I found that when my second son left for college, I was dreading it. I thought, oh my God, our lives are going to be so empty. What are we going to talk about with each other? And for about two days, I was bereft. And then I picked my head up and said, oh my God, this is great. It's so quiet in here. I can do whatever I want.

48:21It's so quiet. We can go to the movies when we want. We can do it. We don't have to be home to make sure nobody trashes the place and there aren't teenage parties. And, you know, and so you realize that each new phase of life can move you into new spaces and new opportunities. And that's really what people tend to find. That's so funny. I, well, 17 more years and we're almost there. Are you? Yeah. I mean, I've, you know, I've got a one and a half year old and a three year old. I got a lot of time. Oh my gosh. You, you are, you are a busy man. Yeah. I'm in the beginning of, and we're also like, do we have another one?

48:54And we're like, oh, we want our life back. And I'm telling Jen, my wife, I'm like, we're not going to get our life back for a long time. We might as well just, what's another year or so at this point? You might as well, but it's more like having enough hands to hold the diapers. Absolutely. Speaking of kids, how does our upbringing as children and relationships with our parents or other figures in our life, how does that translate to adult behaviors and happiness in connection with others? I know that's a ridiculously long question, but does that make sense? Like, what does it say? It does make sense.

49:25About our patterns. You know, as a psychiatrist and doing talk therapy, I talk about this all the time with people, But what we know is that we're not born knowing how human relationships are supposed to go. The way we learn about that is first and foremost in our families, right? So you have a certain kind of father, a certain kind of mother, a certain kind of sibling. And you come to expect that people are going to be like that. And then also what happens to you with your friends, with your enemies in school, all that. But that you come to have a certain set of expectations. And if we're lucky, we grow up with the expectation that people are reliable and they'll help me when I need help and they'll comfort me when I'm hurt.

50:11Like all that good stuff that we hope happens for everybody. But it doesn't happen for some people. And that's what we think of as the basis of trauma. And so some people move out into the world as adults, believing that the world isn't a safe place, that people cannot be trusted. And then often there are self-fulfilling prophecies. if you expect people aren't going to be trustworthy, you treat them like they're not, and you're very suspicious, and then they kind of back away. So what that means is childhood is hugely important, but it's not your whole destiny. You know, what we know is that somebody who grows up feeling that the world isn't safe can have new experiences that we call them corrective experiences.

50:53You can find friends who are decent people and don't betray you. You can find a partner who's really caring and doesn't act like your parents did, and that that can turn your expectations around. So what we find, again, is this sense that it really isn't too late, that childhood isn't destiny, that people really can change what happens to them in their relationships over time if they're lucky and if they search for good, trustworthy people. That's really good news, because I think if my Feedback Friday is sort of advice inbox as any indicator, a lot of people are extremely worried about this, right?

51:32My parents were fighting all the time and then this happened and then this person was bad and then when I went to college or grew up, then my relationships were always rough because of my childhood and they're just wondering, am I just doomed to this? I have people write and say, should I even bother trying to get married and have kids because my childhood was so screwed up that this is just gonna make it worse for another kid and there's no, is there any way for me to get out from under this? Well, one way is to pay really close attention is to who you choose. So unfortunately, we often tend to repeat the same thing over and over again.

52:08So believe it or not, people who were victimized as kids often choose partners who victimized them. Now, why would you do that? You don't do it deliberately, but you can end up doing it because it feels familiar. You don't know why, but you're just, You had an abusive father and you just happened to be attracted to edgy guys who have a little violence streak in them, right? Because it's sexy, because it feels so familiar. And so what we can say is really important to pay close attention to who people are and to take a long time choosing your friends, take a long time choosing your partner, get to know them well, get to know them under stress and see how they are before you jump into a long-term investment in another person.

52:55And that way, you're more likely not to repeat the thing that you're trying to get away from. This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Robert Waldinger. We'll be right back. The wait is over. Dive into Audible's most anticipated collection, The Best of 2025, featuring top audiobooks, podcasts, and originals across all genres. Our editors have carefully curated this year's must-listens, from brilliant hidden gems to the buzziest new releases. Every title in this collection has earned its spot. This is your go-to for the absolute best in 2025 audio entertainment. Whether you love thrillers, romance, or nonfiction, your next favorite listen awaits.

53:42Discover why there's more to imagine when you listen at audible.com slash best of the year. Right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well. That's over at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Robert Waldinger.

54:15Many of the happiest people in the study seem to have really good work lives and really good relationships with people at work. But also, it seems like they had a good work life and home life boundary. So they had a great life at work, but they didn't make work their whole life. And I kind of need that tattooed on my forehead, where actually I would never see it. I need it on my forearm, maybe. I think a lot of people make this mistake. They go, well, I don't want work to be my life, or I want my work life to be great, but then they have a hard time realizing, oh, I need separate home and separate work lives.

54:49It seems almost counterintuitive. If work's so great, why not blend it with your life and hang out with those people 24-7? That seems to not be a good idea. Well, what's not a good idea is working 24-7. Well, yeah. You know, if you have a great friend, right, who you work with, now that sometimes happens, and you want to hang out with that friend on your off hours, absolutely, but don't work all the time. You know, invest in the people you care about and wanna have around and not just in the workplace. The danger is not in having good relationships at work, it's in investing in the workplace at the expense of having a life.

55:30You know, there are many people who do this and they pick their heads up and, especially men in their forties, they pick their heads up and say, I don't have a life. I've been ignoring my partner. I've been ignoring my kids. I work all the time. I don't have any friends. That's the most common scenario. That said, having good friends at work can be a great asset and a great source of happiness. There's this exercise like find a photo of yourself when you're half as old as you are now. What is this about? I want to see if it's relevant to where we're going. Okay. So what that's about, one of the things we find when we study people over their whole life, we realize that life looks so different depending on where you are in your own lifespan.

56:12So think about what life looked like to you when you were half as old as you are. Or think about what life looked like when you were 10, what seemed most important. And think about what it looks like now. A lot has changed. And what you find is that people in their 20s have a certain view of life and what's most important. And when you're in your 60s, it changes. Not everything changes, but boy, it can look really different. So what we do by studying the entire lifespan is we look at the perspective change that age gives us as we grow older. And that's what we're talking about when we say, take this photograph, look at you as your younger self and think about, okay, what did I care about the most?

56:56And how has that changed now? I don't wear a Superman costume anymore and jump off the bed a lot. That's not what I do these days. You know, it's changed. And what value does that bring? Just knowing that our perspectives change and that they might change again? Well, it gives us more understanding for people of other generations. You know, a lot of times we think, why do those old people think that way? Or why do those young people think that way? Or, you know, these young people are all snowflakes or blah, blah, blah. And so part of it is the kind of disdain we have for other people in other phases of life who see things differently.

57:34And it's helpful to remember, oh, wait, I see things differently than I used to too. And I'm going to see things differently again as I get older. That's really helpful. I think the other thing is just to remember that we're all works in progress, that I'm not going to stay the same. How I use my time, my energy isn't going to stay the same. My body's not going to stay the same. Okay, I'm telling you something that's completely obvious and we live in denial about a lot of the time. I find this stuff fascinating and I think a lot of us know a lot about happiness and happiness studies, especially people who listen to the show, but the hard part is internalizing it enough that you apply it to your life.

58:16And I wanna wrap with something that I found really interesting and also self-serving because it overlaps with, I have a free course called Six Minute Networking that I'm always sort of plugging on the show. And you mentioned cultivating casual ties. I think they're called weak ties, but you didn't want to call it that because weak ties are so important that calling them weak ties seems like a disservice. Exactly. Tell us about what this means, why this increases our happiness and possibly even our longevity as a result. What we find is that we get little hits of well-being from talking to the barista in Starbucks or talking to the Uber driver, that when we connect with other people, even people we're not gonna see again, we learn stuff, it takes us out of our usual thought loops.

59:04It affirms our connection with the world. I mean, what I've started doing now when I take an Uber or a Lyft and I hear that my driver has an accent, I will ask them, where are you from originally? And they're usually happy to tell me and tell me about their life. I have learned so much cool stuff, so much heartbreaking stuff about what it's like to be an immigrant. And I get out of that ride more energized and actually more compassionate about the world. And so all of this just makes me feel more like a citizen of the planet. So that's one advantage. Another advantage is they've studied this and they find that these casual ties, that's where we're more likely to get our next job.

59:45So it turns out that the people who are in your close network, you know a lot of the same people they know. You have a lot of the same connections. It's the people you barely know. And you happen to mention, hey, you know, I'm looking for another situation who might say, well, you know, I know somebody looking for that kind of thing. Let me connect you with them. So you're more likely to get connected to new people about new things from people who you don't know very well. Perfect. Well, I need to definitely figure out a way to phrase that succinctly, because I think a lot of people will write and go, I don't really need to network.

1:00:21Look, I'm a teacher. I just don't need it. There's no networking or they'll go, I'm in the military or the government. It's very, the way we get promoted is very seniority based. I just don't need this. And not only does that ignore the fact that they might not want to do that forever and might need a new job, but the happiness dividend, I think that might push a few people over the fence because a lot of people just don't want to do these very simple things because they just don't quote unquote need to network forgetting that this is good for your health. It's good for your health. And network gets them.

1:00:52It's a dirty word. That term is a dirty word. So let's not call, you know, like if we say just the more people you know and you have some small connection with, the more possibilities are there in your life and possibilities that you can't foresee. I'll give you an example. I was fired from my first job as a psychiatrist and they said, you know, there's really no future for you in our organization. So you probably want to find a new job. So I did. And I was devastated. Sure. So in my new job, I happened to meet the third director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. And eventually, several years later, he came back to me and said, how would you like to take over this world-famous study?

1:01:34If I hadn't been fired from my first job, if I hadn't just gotten to know casually this guy in my next job, none of this would have happened. Could I have planned that? Not in a million years. That's really funny. I won't bore the audience with this, but I basically, I had another show. I ran it for 11 years, started to disagree with my business partners, created an amicable split. They decided we don't have to actually give you anything because you're going to be broke when we fire you. And then we can sue you to stop you from competing. Spoiler, that didn't work. Here I am. But within eight months, I'd rebuilt this show to a larger version and more profitable version of the previous show, which I thought would be impossible.

1:02:13And it was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me aside from like my kids being born and meeting my wife. And I can say that honestly, but at the time it was terrible. It was devastating. Can I tell you a story that we love in the Zen community? It's the story of the Chinese farmer. It's a classic. Oh yeah. Yeah. I know it, but I don't know if it's ever been talked about on the show. So here, let's have it. Okay. So it's this classic story, but I use it all the time in my own life. Okay. The story is that a Chinese farmer had a single horse and he needed that horse to help him run his farm.

1:02:46It was vital to his well-being. And one day the horse ran away and the townspeople came and commiserated saying, what a tragedy. The horse ran away. And the farmer said, well, who knows what's good or bad? And then a few days later, the horse comes back and he's leading a pack of wild horses. And the townspeople come to celebrate saying, you've got all these horses now. You're a rich man. The farmer says, well, who knows what's good or bad? And then the farmer's son is taming one of the wild horses. The horse throws him. He breaks his leg. The townspeople come to commiserate. But then the emperor's army comes through.

1:03:23They're looking for able-bodied young men to go to war. Well, the farmer's son can't go because he's got a broken leg. Again, everybody comes to celebrate Who knows what's good or bad? And what it shows me is that all these things that we think we're so certain of about how life is going to go, we can't be certain of. And that's a wonderful perspective to hold onto, particularly when we think that something terrible is happening and things are never going to be better again, because we just don't know. Zooming out on the timeline helps a lot. That was the one big takeaway I had was really just the more you zoom out on any sort of timeline, it makes you feel a hell of a lot better at the very least, right?

1:04:05And it's hard to do that because if you're at the end of that timeline, like you're in the middle of the current event that is horrible for you, you zoom out and there's just a black box on one side and then there's the rest of your life on the other side. That helps you feel better a little bit until you realize the thing that's in front of you may look more or less like the stuff that is behind you. It might not. You really don't know. But if you're able to sort of frame that and zoom out further, you realize that the point that you're in right now that seems so devastating really is just one tiny dot on this really long life that you have and will have in theoretically, hopefully we'll have.

1:04:39Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the reasons why I love doing what I do, you know, getting to watch lives unfold, you know, thousands of lives unfold because it helps me with the person just the perspective that you're describing. And it keeps me, it keeps me from catastrophizing as much, it keeps me on a more even keel, even when bad stuff comes my way, which of course it does. I know this is probably just a ridiculous question. I'm so curious. Why did you get fired from your first job? Because now you're the director of this Harvard study. I mean, it's not like you went there and they're like, who hired this guy?

1:05:14It's just shocking, right? Because you're at the top of your field now. What could you have done? And even then, I thought I was a model. You know, I had trained at this place and I thought, I was a model student and why don't you want to keep me? It turned out my orientation was toward talk therapy. I became a psychoanalyst and I was really interested in talking and listening to people. And psychiatry was changing and it was becoming more biological. So then there was much more emphasis on reaching for your prescription pad as a psychiatrist. And of course, medication is hugely helpful. I use it.

1:05:49Absolutely. Basically, the guy who was running the hospital was saying to me, look, you're just not going to thrive here because what you are doing, what you care the most about is not in vogue here. It's not the direction we're going. Actually, it was the kindest thing he could have done as it turned out. But at the moment, it felt devastating. It felt like a rejection of me personally. Yeah, I think that's important for young people, especially, I assume you were relatively young at this point early in your career. I was, it's really easy to write yourself off. If you're not a fit at your first job, I used to be an attorney.

1:06:26I technically still am an attorney, but I worked at a big law firm in wall street doing finance law. I was not a great fit there. I didn't get fired. Um, everybody got laid off because of the economy. But before that I had an internship where they were like, uh, you can work here, but like, Oh, please don't say yes. It was one of those kinds of things. And I just remember being like, oh my gosh, I am never going to make it in this business, which wasn't necessarily true. But also, even if it was true, I think I'm okay not being able to make it in London high finance circles as an attorney because everyone I met was miserable.

1:07:01Why did I even want to fit in there? It's like the opposite of my personality. And you seem like you're having a really good time doing what you're doing right now. Yeah, I love this. Right. So isn't that key? I would be so sad if I was doing something else and just found this when I was 75 years old. I'd be like, wow, what a bummer. Exactly, exactly. So thank goodness that you and law weren't a great fit. Yeah, it's funny because the 2008 crash, me getting laid off, a lot of my colleagues were like, this is the end of our career. How are you not crying? And I had already started this podcast and I was like, I'll take like a 50 % plus pay cut.

1:07:37I really like doing this podcast. and now it's, let's just say it's, it's not a pay cut, right? Because the show is successful. It's not a pay cut. I was ready for that. You know, I was ready to do that. When I first started the show, I was probably making like 25 grand a year and I lived in Manhattan. I was poor. Oh my gosh. Like beyond, there were people probably on government assistance that had more money than me. Almost certainly there were. Yeah. And I didn't care. I mean, being young helps, right? Being young helps, but also realizing that it's way more important to do something you're having fun with when you have the choice.

1:08:08We don't all have that choice. but you had the choice and you took it. That's really key. And that was that way in all these lives we followed, that the people who were able to do the stuff they loved were so fortunate and so much happier. Thank you very much, Dr. Waldinger. I hope people take this to heart. And here's to another 80 years of the happiness study. Well, thank you. This was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Yas Al-Azadeh, who escaped Iran after the Islamic Revolution. This uprising is about 43 years of oppression.

1:08:45We have a corrupt regime, which is an Islamist regime, and has been torturing people. It has been denying them the basics of human rights. As you see, corruption doesn't really begin and end with hijab. It's everything and anything. It's about the dignity of making a living. None of that exists in Iraq. People are poor because of this regime. They work hard, but they don't earn as much. It's horrendous the way people have been suffering in Iran, mentally, politically, psychologically, and emotionally. I don't think an American can actually imagine what it is like to live in a country that is not just a dictatorship, not just an autocracy, but a theocracy.

1:09:31That's what Iran is. This is different this time. the power of social media, the power of support by the worldwide community, and how Iranians are not backing down. There is uprising and protests in universities across Iran every day. This is a revolution, and it will end beautifully with a free Iran, free from the grips of Ayatollahs and IRGC. For more on Iran and the recent protests, check out episode 746 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. A lot of interesting stuff in the book. And of course, as a result of the study, older people, they got a reputation as cantankerous, but they're actually happier later in life.

1:10:13And it's in part because there's a sense of limited time, of course, and that makes relationships more important. So what do we learn from this? What can we do when we're not 80 years old to prioritize our important and close relationships that have the biggest result in making us happy people? Another important takeaway related to time, often, and I'm guilty of this as well, we think we can do something later. There's always more time. But really, all we have, not to get too philosophical, is the present moment. One day we will look around and realize there is no more later. And I think that's one reason why older people may actually be better at this, because they finally realize there is no more later.

1:10:49And how they handle the fact that there is no more later is a definitive factor in whether or not they are happy or bitter overall. Apropos relationships, frequency, and quality of contact with others at any age is a massive predictor of happiness. So ask yourself, who is in your life? Make a list of your 10 closest friends. The exercises from the book are very similar to what is in six-minute networking, the layoff lifelines drill, the calendar exercise, to find out who you're spending the most time with, to reconnect with older dormant ties in your network. Again, that's at jordanharbinger.com slash course.

1:11:20A lot of the happiness stuff, a lot of the happiness dividend is the same as this networking stuff. That's one of the reasons, I don't know, I should probably rename six-minute networking something else. It sounds cheesy AF, but I guess you get the point. who also is receiving your full attention on that note. Think of one to two relationships, devote extra time to those relationships. And in any relationship, try to limit distraction with others. No phones at the dinner table, no phones out at dinner. There's lots more practicals in the book and there's even more from the book, very similar in our six minute networking course.

1:11:51Once again, jordanharbinger.com slash course. All things Dr. Robert Waldinger will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chat bot also on the website. Transcripts always in the show notes. advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter every week. The team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect the lessons from it. So if you are a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that.

1:12:23jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. in, this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Emilio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who could use a little happiness in their life or just loves the science of happiness, definitely share this episode with them.

1:12:55In the meantime, I hope you apply what you here on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Everything Everywhere Daily. You've heard the phrase learn something new every day. Sounds nice, but do you actively do it? That's where Everything Everywhere Daily comes in. This podcast makes it effortless. Just 10 minutes a day, you'll walk away with a fascinating fact, a slice of history, a science gem. It's no wonder the show has climbed up to the top as the number one history podcast. It covers history, science, technology, geography, and stories of remarkable people, always in a way that keeps you hooked.

1:13:24Not sure where to jump in? Start with these favorites. The eruption of Krakatoa, nature's fury in one of the deadliest volcanic events ever recorded, or the spice trade, how a handful of spices changed the course of global history. If you want to make learning effortless and fun, check out Everything Everywhere Daily. It's quick, fascinating, and a perfect way to stay curious. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.