Are you paying attention to what matters most in life?
Our relationships are among our most valuable tools for sustaining health and happiness.
Think for a moment about a relationship you have with a person you cherish but feel like you don’t see nearly enough. This needn’t be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when you’re with them, and who you’d like to see more often. Run through the possible candidates (there may only be one!) and get this person in mind. Now think about the last time you were together and try to re-create in your imagination how they made you feel at the time. Were you optimistic, feeling almost invincible? Did you feel understood? Maybe you were quick to laugh, and the ills in your life and the world felt less daunting.
Now think about how often you see that person. Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours in a single year you think you spend with this person. Write this number down and hang on to it.
My colleague Marc Schulz and I meet up every week by phone, but we see each other in person only for a total of about two days (forty-eight hours) every year. How does this add up for the coming years? I’m 73 years old. Marc is almost 62. Let’s be (very) generous and say we are both around to celebrate my 100th birthday. At two days per year for twenty-seven years, that’s fifty-four days that we have left to spend together in our lifetimes.
Fifty-four out of 9,855 days.
Of course, this is assuming a lot of good fortune, and the real number is almost certainly going to be lower.
Try this calculation with your own cherished relationship, or just consider these round numbers: If you’re 40, and you see this person once a week for a coffee hour, that’s about eighty-seven days before you turn 80. If you see them once a month, it’s about twenty days.
Once a year, about two days.
Maybe these numbers sound like plenty. But contrast them with the fact that in 2022, the average American spent an astonishing thirteen hours every day interacting with media, from television to radio to smartphones. From the age of 40 to the age of 80, that adds up to eighteen years of waking life. For someone who is 18, that’s thirty-three years of life before they turn 80.
The point of this mental exercise is not to alarm you. It’s to bring clarity to something that goes largely unnoticed: how much time we actually spend with the people we care about. We don’t need to be with all of our good friends all the time. In fact, some people who energize us and enhance our lives might do so specifically because we don’t see them very often, and like anything else in life, there is a balance that should be struck. Sometimes we are compatible with a person only to a point, and that point is good enough.
But most of us have friends and relatives who energize us and who we don’t see enough. Are you spending time with the people you most care about? Is there a relationship in your life that would benefit both of you if you could spend more time together? These untapped resources are often already in our life, waiting. A few adjustments to our most treasured relationships can have real effects on how we feel, and on how we feel about our lives. We might be sitting on a goldmine of vitality that we are not paying attention to—because this source of vitality is eclipsed by the shiny allure of smartphones and TV or pushed to the side by work demands.
Over and over again, when the participants in our longitudinal study of lives, The Harvard Study of Adult Development, reached their 70s and 80s, they would make a point to say that what they valued most were their relationships with friends and family. If we accept the wisdom—and more recently the scientific evidence—that our relationships are among our most valuable tools for sustaining health and happiness, then choosing to invest time and energy in them becomes vitally important. And an investment in our social fitness isn’t only an investment in our lives as they are now. It is an investment that will affect everything about how we live in the future.
For a moving illustration of the math exercise you just read about, watch this video.
Adapted from Waldinger & Schulz, “The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness,” Simon & Schuster, 2023.
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Thank you so much sir