Robert Waldinger

If you had to make one life choice, right now, to set yourself on the path to future health and happiness, what would it be?

These are common and practical goals that extend across generations and borders.

Success in life is often measured by title, salary, and recognition of achievement, even though most of us understand that these things do not necessarily make for a happy life on their own.

In our casual friendships, at work, and especially on social media, we tend to show each other idealized versions of ourselves. We present our game faces, and the comparison between what we see of each other and how we feel about ourselves leaves us with the sense that we’re missing out. As an old saying goes, We are always comparing our insides to other people’s outsides.

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.

Harvard Study of Adult Development,

The book is also threaded with wisdom from the recent and ancient past—enduring ideas that mirror and enrich modern scientific understandings of the human experience. It is a book primarily about the power of relationships, and it is deeply informed, appropriately, by the long and fruitful friendship of its authors.

well-adjusted men