The Good Life: Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz

1: What Makes a Good Life?

“Spoiler alert: The good life is a complicated life. For everybody. The good life is joyful... and challenging. Full of love, but also pain. And it never strictly happens; instead, the good life unfolds, through time. It is a process. It includes turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls. And of course, the good life always ends in death.

A cheery sales pitch, we know. But let’s not mince words. Life, even when it’s good, is not easy. There is simply no way to make life perfect, and if there were, then it wouldn’t be good.

Why? Because a rich life—a good life—is forged from precisely the things that make it hard.

The engine of a good life is not the self, as John Marsden believed, but rather our connection to others, as Leo DeMarco’s life demonstrates. The movements of the engine are those feelings inside us that our ancestors passed down, from the biggest heartbreaks to the subtle sensations of camaraderie to the sadness of loss to the exhilarations of romantic love; or as Jon Kabat-Zinn called it, borrowing a line from Zorba the Greek, “the full catastrophe.” It’s there that the good life happens, in the real-time, momentary experience of connection.

You might be thinking right now, Okay, sure, but how? How do I change my relationships for the better? I can’t just snap my fingers. What would change even look like? Where do I start?

Changing your life—especially your habits of daily living—can be challenging. Many of us start out with the best of intentions to improve our lives, only to be overwhelmed by the force of our well-worn mental habits and the momentum of the culture we live in. It’s tempting when confronting the complexity of life to say, I’ve tried, but I just cannot figure this out. I’ll just go with the flow.

6: Facing the Music

“George Vaillant summed this point up well when he wrote: “There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the [Harvard Study].... One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.

No two relationships are the same, but one person will often get stuck in similar places in different relationships.

Step out of old routines. As we go about the business of life, our relationships can begin to feel like they are stuck in repetitive cycles that are not exciting.