There are many participants in the Harvard Study who held “dream jobs”—from medical

researchers to successful authors to wealthy Wall Street brokers—who were nonetheless unhappy at work. And there are inner-city participants who held “unimportant” or difficult jobs and yet derived much satisfaction and meaning from them. Why? What is the missing piece? In this chapter we focus on one important aspect of work that many of us, regardless of what we do for a living, often overlook: the impact that our relationships at work have on our life. Not only because these relationships are important to our well-being, as we’ve discussed, but also because they’re aspects of our work lives that we have some control over, and that have the potential to improve our daily experience immediately. We may not always get to choose what we do for a living, but making work work for us may be more possible than we think.

Henry’s realization about wanting to be around people also teaches us an important lesson—not about retirement, but about work itself: the people we work with matter. It’s important to look around our workplaces and appreciate those coworkers who add value to our lives. Since work is often so shrouded in financial concerns, in stress and worry, the relationships we develop there sometimes don’t get their due. We often don’t notice how significant our work relationships really are until they’re gone.

Advances in communication technologies are making remote work much more common for jobs in business, media, education, and other industries, and an always-on mentality threatens to make workers’ home lives into an extension of the work sphere. To say the least, a consideration of how these changes have affected our social fitness has not been a top priority. And yet the state of our relationships is among the most important factors in our health and well-being.

If we want to take full advantage of the hours of our lives—many of which are spent at work—we must remember that work is a major source of socializing and connection. Change the nature of work, and you change the nature of life.

Every workday is an important personal experience, and to the extent we can enrich each one with relationships, we benefit. Work, too, is life.