Close relationships, more than money or fame, I wanna…
Close relationships, more than money or fame, I wanna keep people happy throughout their lives. Those ties protect people from life, disconnects, help to delay, mental and physical decline, and our better predictor of long and happy lives and social class, IQ, or even jeans.
— from Friends, Community & Society (Relationships/Community/Society)
In the book
"Close relationships, more than money or fame, keep people happy throughout their lives — they are a better predictor of long, happy lives than social class, IQ, or even our genes." (Sample epigraph — replace with one of your own, or with a line of mine you remember me saying.) We have flown the inner cockpit and the tight formation of family. […] I want to start with the single most important finding I know about a human life, because it should reorder your priorities the way it reordered mine. The longest study ever conducted on human happiness — Harvard followed the same people for more than eighty-five years — reached one overwhelming conclusion: the quality of your relationships is the strongest predictor of a long, healthy, happy life — stronger than money, stronger than fame, stronger than how clever or accomplished you turn out to be. The people who flourish into old age are the ones who stayed connected. […] The relationships. More than anything else, the relationships. I learned the value of connection, I think, partly from its absence — I spent my early years rather lonely, in a nursing home with few friends nearby, and I have spent the decades since deliberately building and guarding the bonds I once lacked. — Friends, Community & Society (Relationships/Community/Society)