Meaningful relationships foster a resilient, happy life
Who are your friends? Do you have more “real friends” or “deal friends”?
Arthur Brooks raised this question in his 2022 book, From Strength to Strength. Actually, his son raised this issue when his dad referred to someone as a “friend,” knowing full well that the relationship was more about self-interest and the hope that it might result in a lucrative deal. This was one in a series of realizations that led to a major pivot in Arthur’s life. He began to call into question a lot of things that he’d taken for granted, including who his real friends are.
The global pandemic prompted a lot of us to think about things we’ve long took for granted. Does work can have meaning or is “just work?” Is free market capitalism really the gold standard? ….Rugged individualism as a necessary condition for freedom? Singular, pull-yourself-up-by-your-boostraps meritocracy as a precursor for personal, meteoric performance? Productivity as a proxy for “high marks” for oneself and any good employee? I could go on. I don’t know about you, but I’m not so sure about these things anymore.
Last year, I heard a CHRO for a Fortune 25 company state to hundreds of employees that in order for an employee to receive the highest rating in their annual performance review, there should be evidence that the employee was neglecting other parts of their lives — such as family life, their health, or social connections. This sounded so unbelievably out of touch that I almost couldn’t believe those words were even spoken. He said something about “maybe being old school” and I had to laugh. Yes sir, that point of view is most certainly “old school.” He was basically saying that in order to achieve high performance at work, an individual must necessarily be neglecting the relationships in their lives. This is a fallacy. In other words, while this may be the norm in our definitions of success, it doesn’t have to be this way.
The last several hundred years of industrial, widget-making for profit, growth-at-all costs, highly efficient productivity & performance has gotten us here. But it won’t necessarily get us to a better future for ourselves, our communities, and our planet. The downsides to our current path is that people are deeply lonely, we humans are systematically and rapidly destroying the habitats that we require for our own survival, and we’re creating another mass extinction of other species along with our own. For whatever reason, for the last five centuries or so, we humans have taken this path. That said, we’ve been around for roughly 200,000 years, and we need to seriously consider what comes next.
Start with one key fact: resilience is about adaptability. This applies to you and to your life too. Resilience is actually not about grit. It’s not about productivity. And it’s not about efficiency. In fact, efficiency is often in opposition to what is needed to create the conditions for resiliency. We’ve never had to adapt to the kinds of conditions we’re now seeing in our changing climate. In our deep history, we’ve also never before had to adapt to the changes to society brought about by new technologies like social media and artificial intelligence.
My years of disaster mental health research and work taught me that social connection is the most critical factor for both individual and community resilience following a crisis. In the post-industrial world we live in, we are not only living in a near-constant crises, we’re manufacturing our own existential crisis too. We’ve also become masterful at creating conditions that foster isolation and diminish meaningful, emotionally-rich connection with others. If you need evidence, the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration has declared a “loneliness epidemic” (2023) in the U.S. It’s a startling finding until you starting talking to people and realize how few meaningful relationships most Americans seem to have.
One reason for this loneliness has to do with the relentless pursuit of what we define as success — for both ourselves and for others. What strikes me is that we already empirically know what makes a good life, thanks to reams of research, including a decades long, longitudinal Harvard study.
We’ve found that the most important thing for a happy life is to have rich, meaningful relationships with others.
While we may recognize that truth, we also believe it’s hard to achieve. Or as Arthur Brooks points out, many of us have been conditioned to seek feeling “special” over feeling happy. But feeling special wanes as we age, especially as our skills and intelligence transition to new permutations that hinge on accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Our contributions to the world change with that transition. In the latter half of our lives, we need meaningful relationships more than ever.
But it’s a wonder any of us can maintain close friendships at all. So many of the systems around us support the erosion of our social connections through overworking, busyness, focusing on relationship utility over real emotional connection, obssession with material success, and prioritizing superficial connection over deep connection in community with others.
Aristotle pointed out the difference between different kinds of relationships in his Nicomachean Ethics. Envision a ladder that starts with a bottom rung of “utility.” These are the weakest type and are transactional in nature. This category includes “deal friends” who aren’t really genuine friends but those who have some utility in our lives. The relationship serves us. The next rung holds relationships that are rooted in “pleasure,” which means they are attractive because of some attribute — perhaps the other person is charming, or beautiful, or intelligent. But still, there is nothing that keeps us deeply connected.
The last and highest rung is reserved for relationships that enjoy “shared love.” Only this last category is reserved for the possibility of “perfect friendship.” For Aristotle, a perfect relationship is about shared love for something that exists outside of ourselves. Perhaps this love is something you collectively believe in and can work towards together. A vision for art, a new community, a new world.
The challenge is that deep friendships require investment, time, effort, and the skills needed to give and receive love, affection, attention, and affirmation. We might respond to that reality by saying “but I don’t have any time.” Why don’t you have time? Look closely at what you prioritize and what that might mean for your future happiness and contentment. There may need to be trade-offs in order to prioritize the relationships in your life. What are the adjustments you could make right now to begin to prioritize relationships with others?
Achieving resilience implies a move away from effieciency and productivity and towards redundancy, space, and adaptability. Your ability to be resilient later in life requires you to form, foster, and nourish meaningful, emotionally-connected friendships now. It may sound difficult to start fresh, especially if you’ve allowed old friendships to wither, but I encourage do your best to examine your life and consider the ways you can make space for deep releationships. Consider it a gift to your future self.
Resources: Arthur C Brooks, From Strength to Strength (2022); Robert Waldinger, TED Talk (2015): “What makes a good life?”
