- The video discusses the importance of money and wealth in leading a happy life.
- It highlights that people's memories are unreliable in determining what makes them happy.
- The video introduces the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running since 1938 and follows participants throughout their lives.
- The study focuses on factors such as physical health, exercise, and relationships in determining happiness and longevity.
- It emphasizes the importance of relationships in promoting happiness and overall health.
- Loneliness is identified as a growing public health concern, with real consequences for mental and physical health.

- Loneliness is the subjective experience of feeling less connected to people than desired.
- Introverts and extroverts have different social needs, but both require human connection.
- The quality of close relationships is more important than the quantity of relationships.
- Strong relationships contribute to happiness, physical health, and brain health.
- Loneliness and social isolation can lead to cognitive decline and increase the risk of dementia.
- Relationships act as emotion and stress regulators, preventing chronic stress and its negative effects on the body.
- Spending more time with loved ones is key to maintaining good relationships and preventing health issues.
- Social engagement has decreased due to technology, leading to more social isolation.
- Money and achievements do not necessarily lead to happiness, but meaningful work can.
- Higher incomes can increase happiness, especially for those who are already happy.
- Relationships, meaningful work, and money all play a role in overall happiness.

- Relationships are crucial for happiness and physical health.
- Building deep connections with people is important for happiness.
- Many people prioritize family and giving back to the community.
- Making relationships a practice and staying connected regularly leads to happiness.
- Small actions can cultivate relationships and lead to positive changes.
- Don't give up on relationships as they can change at any age.

The video emphasizes the importance of money, relationships, and meaningful work in leading a happy life. It discusses the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which focuses on factors like physical health and exercise. Loneliness is identified as a growing public health concern with negative effects on mental and physical health. Building and maintaining strong relationships is crucial for happiness and overall health. Small actions and staying connected regularly can lead to positive changes in relationships.

How to lead a happier, healthier and longer life. Check out our sponsor: https://betterhelp.com/veritasium to get matched with a professional therapist who will listen and help.

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A huge thanks to Prof. Robert Waldinger for all his help with this video. 

To learn more about what makes for a good life, visit: https://the-good-life-book.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkKuTCFvzI&pp=ygUJd2FsZGluZ2Vy 

A special thanks to Prof. Julianne Holt-Lunstad for her expert advice on the importance of social connections and the detrimental effects of loneliness and social isolation.

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Additional Videos:
Family Reacts to Winning CA$1 Million Lotto, NowThisNews via YouTube - https://ve42.co/CA1Lottery  

Woman claims to be $1 billion Powerball winner, KTLA 5 via YouTube - https://ve42.co/1BilLottery  

Old Lottery Winner Meets Young Lottery Winner | The Gap, LADbible TV via YouTube - https://ve42.co/LADBibleLottery  

Why eyewitnesses get it wrong - Scott Fraser, TED-Ed via Youtube - https://ve42.co/TEDFraser  

Surgeon General discusses health risks of loneliness and steps to help connect with others, PBS NewsHour via YouTube - https://ve42.co/PBS-SG  

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References:
Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon and Schuster.

Lindqvist et al. (2020). Long-run effects of lottery wealth on psychological well-being. The Review of Economic Studies. - https://ve42.co/Lindqvist2020 

Wen et al. (2011). Minimum amount of physical activity for reduced mortality and extended life expectancy: a prospective cohort study. The lancet. - https://ve42.co/Wen2011 

Nocon et al. (2008). Association of physical activity with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. - https://ve42.co/Nocon2008  

Blondell et al. (2014). Does physical activity prevent cognitive decline and dementia?: A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. BMC public health. - https://ve42.co/Blondell2014 

Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The US Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. - https://ve42.co/LonelinessEpidemic  

Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS medicine. - https://ve42.co/Holt-Lunstad2010  

Valtorta et al. (2016). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for coronary heart disease and stroke: systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal observational studies. Heart. - 
https://ve42.co/Valtorta2016  

Shovestul et al. (2020). Risk factors for loneliness: The high relative importance of age versus other factors. PloS one. - https://ve42.co/Shovestul2020  

Donovan et al. (2017). Loneliness, depression and cognitive function in older US adults. International journal of geriatric psychiatry. - https://ve42.co/Donovan2017 

Lara et al. (2019). Does loneliness contribute to mild cognitive impairment and dementia? A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Ageing research reviews. - https://ve42.co/Lara2019  

Holt-Lunstad et al. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on psychological science. - https://ve42.co/Holt-Lunstad2015  

McIntyre et al. (2015). Compulsive Internet use and relations between social connectedness, and introversion. Computers in Human Behavior. - https://ve42.co/McIntyre2015 

Kahneman & Deaton. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences. - https://ve42.co/Kahneman2010 

Killingsworth. (2021). Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - https://ve42.co/Killingsworth2021 

Killingsworth et al. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - https://ve42.co/Killingsworth2023  

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Directed by Casper Mebius
Written by Casper Mebius, Petr Lebedev, and Derek Muller
Edited by Peter Nelson
Animated by Fabio Albertelli and Ivy Tello
Filmed by Derek Muller, Emily Zhang, and Zyan Treadwell
Produced by Casper Mebius, Petr Lebedev, Han Evans, and Derek Muller
Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Images and Storyblocks
Music from Epidemic Sound
Thumbnail by Ren Hurley

This video is about 1 of the most important questions.

Being wealthy is definitely a big aspect of it.

It's easy for people to say They don't care about having money and that money can't buy happiness, but that's really not true.

Because I would rather cry on a yacht than in a, like a Subaru.

Clearly having a successful career and financial wealth are important to people.

In a survey from 2018 of around a hundred thousand college freshmen, about 55% said they wanted to be successful in their career and 83% reported that they wanted to become rich.

But do these accomplishments really increase happiness?

Well, that's what I wanna find out in this video.

But how do you study what makes people happy?

But people aren't really good at judging what will make them happy.

Winning the lottery seems like it should make you happy, but numerous studies on lottery winners find that After the initial surge of happiness wears off, many are no happier than the rest of us.

Some are in fact more miserable than they were beforehand.

The problem is that people's memories aren't reliable.

We only detect, encode, and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us.

It happens to us in all the aspects of our life, all the time.

Most studies on happiness find older people and ask them to recall what made them happy.

But as we've just seen, memory is unreliable.

So a better way to conduct the study would be to follow people throughout their entire lives, capturing the choices they make and how those affect their happiness.

That is really hard to do, but there is 1 study like this that's been running since 1938.

Now, 85 years is a long time to run a study, so it has been passed down from 1 generation of researchers to the next.

It's currently run by its fourth director, Robert Waldinger.

What is the claim to fame then of the study?

You know, the claim to fame is that it is, as far as we know, the longest study of human development that's ever been done, the longest study of any depth.

These are studies that take deep dives into people's lives and their mental and physical health.

The study actually began as 2 separate studies by 2 groups of Harvard researchers that didn't know about each other.

The first group followed 268 young men from Harvard to find out how they would develop into early adulthood.

So, of course, if you want to study normal young adult development, you study all white guys from Harvard, right?

The second group studied 456 boys from middle school onwards from Boston's poorest and most disadvantaged families.

So there were these 2 studies, both meant to be Studies of what goes right in development and how we predict who does well as they grow up.

Eventually, the 2 studies merged into 1, the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

At the start of the study, the participants were interviewed and received extensive physical examinations.

And as they grew, they entered all walks of life.

Some of them became bricklayers and doctors and factory workers and lawyers.

And 1 even became president of the United States.

Every 2 years, researchers ask them questions about their lives, like, if you could stop working without loss of income, would you?

How often do you feel isolated from others?

True or false, life has more pain than pleasure?

And other questions about their marriage, career, friendships, and their physical and mental health.

While the study started with just 724 participants, over time their spouses and children were also included in the study.

So how many people are we talking about in total who have been part of the study?

Between 2,500 and 3,000 people altogether in the study.

And as technology improved, so did the methods of data collection.

You know, DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938.

We measure messenger RNA, DNA methylation.

We deliberately stress them out and then see how quickly they recover from stress.

Looking at heart rate variability, for example.

Looking at cortisol deposited in hair, because that seems to be a long-term measure of circulating cortisol.

But all of these new methods are in the service of studying the same big phenomena of human well-being.

So what do 85 years of research across entire human lives teach us about a healthy and happy life.

Eating well, getting regular exercise, not abusing alcohol or drugs, not smoking, getting preventive health care.

A Taiwanese study looked at the medical data of 416,000 healthy people between 1996 and 2008.

8 years later, they followed up with each person to look at the link between exercise and mortality.

They found that people who exercised just 15 minutes a day had a 14% reduced risk of dying and a three-year longer life expectancy.

Every additional 15 minutes of exercise decreased the risk of dying by an extra 4%.

A large meta-analysis from 2008 confirms that people who are physically active have a reduced risk of dying during the timeframes investigated in each study.

Exercise also protects our cognitive health.

A meta-analysis from 2014 found that participants with higher levels of physical activity had a 35% reduced risk of cognitive decline and a 14% reduced risk of dementia.

And then the big surprising finding is relationships, not just keeping us happier, but keeping us healthier and helping us live longer.

There's now a whole list of studies that show the importance of relationships to human happiness and health.

The first is that relationships are great for our health.

In 2010, Researchers looked across 148 studies with a total of more than 300,000 participants.

They found that on average people with stronger social connections had a 50% increased likelihood of survival for any given year.

Being married in particular has a large impact on how long people live.

There's 1 study, I think it's pretty well respected, that suggests that married men live 12 years longer on average than unmarried men, and married women live 7 years longer on average than unmarried women.

Marriage is always a better deal for men on all parameters than it is for women.

And it's not because you have a marriage license, right?

It's because people living together in an intimate partnership tend to keep each other healthier.

You have somebody who's kind of watching, looking out for you.

If feeling well-connected to others makes us happier, healthier, and extends our lives, then what happens if we feel disconnected?

There's a researcher, Julianne Holt-Lundstad, out of the University of Utah, who did a meta-analysis of a whole slew of studies of the physical effects of loneliness.

And her calculation was that being lonely is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or as dangerous as being obese.

Feeling disconnected from others also makes you more prone to disease.

A large meta-analysis from 2016 found that poor social relationships were associated with a 29% increase in risk of heart disease and a 32% increase in risk of stroke.

So these have real sort of quantifiable consequences when we look at studies of thousands of people.

1 caveat is that most studies on the health effects of loneliness focus on people aged 50 and older.

The US Surgeon General today declared a new public health epidemic in America.

We are now finding that 1 in 2 adults report measurable levels of loneliness.

And it turns out that young people are most affected.

It's because we've realized that loneliness is more than just a bad feeling.

It has real consequences for our mental and physical health.

The UK has appointed a minister of loneliness.

Many many countries are concerned about this breakdown in social connection.

A question about loneliness, like what does that look like?

Because obviously everyone experiences some periods of loneliness, so when does it become sort of really detrimental and how do we define that?

Well, loneliness is different from being alone, right?

So you can be alone and quite content, and many people are.

In fact, the ability to be content when you're alone is quite a skill and it's it's a wonderful ability.

Loneliness is that subjective experience of being less connected to people than you want to be and that's why you know you can be lonely in a crowd.

We're all on a spectrum between extroversion, wanting lots of people in our lives, and introversion.

Actually needing a lot of solitude and not wanting a lot of people.

Now a lot of people are stressful for introverts.

And what we know is that neither 1 is healthier, right?

Like introverts are perfectly healthy, and they just may need 1 or 2 really solid relationships and don't want a lot more people.

Whereas extroverts may want lots of people in their lives.

So the second lesson is that it's not how many people you know or see, or even whether you're married or not, because a bad marriage can be worse for your health than getting divorced.

Instead, it's about the quality of your close relationships that matters.

When we'd followed all the original people out to their 80s, we said, okay, what data actually are the best predictors at age 50 of who's going to be happy and healthy at age 80, as opposed to sick or dead.

And we thought we were going to be looking at blood pressure and cholesterol level at age 50 as the strongest predictors.

It was particularly their satisfaction with their marital relationships that was the strongest predictor.

And relationships don't just keep us happier and physically healthier, they also protect our brains.

People who are in secure relationships in their 80s, where they feel that they can rely on the other person, find that their memories stay sharper for longer.

And people who feel lonely, well, their memories fade quicker.

A study of retired US adults found that the rate of cognitive decline was 20% higher over 10 years for those who felt lonely.

A meta-analysis from 2018 further confirms the detrimental effects of loneliness, finding that it also increased the risk of dementia.

What is it about the relationships that makes them particularly helpful or helpful?

The best hypothesis for which there's some pretty decent research now is that relationships are emotion regulators.

So stressful things happen every day to many of us, right?

Well, the body goes into fight or flight mode.

Blood pressure goes up, respirations become more rapid, circulating stress hormone levels rise.

But then the body is meant to go back to equilibrium after that normal fight or flight response when we face a challenge.

If I can come home and there's somebody here to talk to, I can literally feel my body calm down.

What we're pretty sure happens is that people who are isolated, that they're more likely to stay in a kind of chronic fight or flight mode.

And what that means is that they have higher levels of circulating cortisol, higher levels of chronic inflammation, and that those things gradually wear away body systems.

So that's how, for example, chronic stress can predict coronary artery disease, but also arthritis and also type 2 diabetes because of this common mechanism that breaks down multiple body systems.

The key to preventing this breakdown is simple.

Just spend a little more time with the people you care about.

Unfortunately, we seem to be doing the exact opposite.

Before going into why we're doing the exact opposite, this part of the video was sponsored by BetterHelp.

There are many things that can negatively impact our happiness.

It could be stress or fear or a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety.

But regardless of which 1 it is, therapy can help you by giving you the tools to approach your life in a very different way.

They connect you with an experienced, licensed therapist who is trained to listen and give you helpful, unbiased advice.

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So you can try it out and see if it helps you.

And if you don't really fit with your first therapist, which is pretty common, you can easily switch to a new 1 for free without stressing about insurance, who's in your network, or anything like that.

If you feel like you could benefit from talking to someone, getting feedback, advice and help for anything that might be affecting your happiness and progress in life, then visit betterhelp.com slash Veritasium or click that link in the description below.

So I wanna thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this part of the video and now back to the importance of relationships.

There is an alarming trend in our society.

Social engagement with friends decreased from 60 minutes a day in 2003 to just 20 minutes a day in 2020.

The technology has fundamentally changed how we interact with 1 another and how we communicate with 1 another.

And unfortunately has often replaced what used to be rich in-person connections with online connections, which often are of lower quality.

Now, you may say you're an introvert and you don't need to spend much time with people to feel good.

And while it's true that introverts and extroverts need different amounts of social stimulation, both need human connection.

In 2015, Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues looked at the data of 70 independent studies with more than 3 million total participants.

Similar to other studies, they found that the subjective feeling of loneliness increased the risk of premature death by 26%.

But they also looked at the objective measure of social isolation, how much time you're actually spending with other people.

And they found that social isolation increased the risk of premature death by 29%.

And unfortunately, introverts are more at risk of being socially isolated.

Just like many young people today, many participants from the Harvard study also believed that money and achievement were what they should go after to have a good life.

But what this study and plenty of others show is that The people who were the happiest were those that leaned into their relationships with their partner, friends, family, and community.

And when they were in their 80s, the researchers asked them, What are you most proud of and what is your biggest regret?

Many people said that they were proudest of something to do with their relationships.

So it could be, I was a good boss, I was a good parent, I was a good friend, I was a good mentor.

Nobody even said, you know, I won the Nobel Prize which a few people did it wasn't about those badges of achievement Right that we think of is oh, that's that's what we got to get to feel like we've had a meaningful life Everybody looking back Mentioned their relationships The biggest regret was particularly among the men because this was the World War II generation.

They said, I wish I hadn't spent so much time at work.

I wish I had spent more time with the people I care about.

Do achievements and money really make us happy?

Well, according to the Harvard study, badges of achievement do not necessarily make us happier.

Well, there's a famous study from 2010 by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton that found that above an income of around $75,000 a year, there is no improvement whatever in the measures of emotional well-being.

But 11 years later, Matthew Killingsworth studied data on 33,000 employed US adults and he found that higher incomes corresponded to higher levels of well-being.

So he wrote, There was no evidence for an experienced well-being plateau above $75,000 a year, contrary to some influential past research.

In 2022, Kahneman and Killingsworth set out to resolve the conflict with Barbara Mellors as a mediator.

When they analyzed Killingsworth's data, they discovered an interesting pattern.

Depending on how happy people were relative to others, earning more resulted in different increases in happiness.

For each income level, they divided people into groups based on their happiness.

They found that below a threshold of roughly $100,000 a year, a higher income was associated with more happiness for all groups.

But if you go above that threshold, then for the unhappiest group, a further increase is not associated with more happiness.

However, for all the happier groups, higher incomes do seem to lead to more happiness.

And the real twist is that those who were the happiest to start with stand to gain the most with increasing income.

Relationships, meaningful work, and money all play a role in our happiness.

So why can it be so hard to realize just how important relationships are?

If you think about it, relationships have been there since before we have memory, right?

So you Don't think about that as something you cultivate in order to make yourself happy.

And yet when we study it scientifically we find that that turns out to be an enormous predictor of happiness as well as physical health.

Being wealthy is definitely a big aspect of it, but that loving family is kind of like the foundation of it.

Realistically money, but like building deep connections with people are what's going to make me happy.

Having like good relationships with other people.

Seeing my family happy, that's all I really care about.

Giving back to the community where you came from the world.

A strong family base just to come home to every night.

I want to get married, have a ton of kids.

In fact when I interviewed people I was pleasantly surprised to see how many identified the importance of relationships.

So if you could give people advice on what to start doing today to start being happier, What suggestions would you make?

To think about it as analogous with physical fitness.

If you go work out today, you don't come home and say, I'm done, I don't ever have to do that again, right?

The people who were best at relationships were the people who made it a practice, day after day, week after week, to stay connected to the people they cared about.

You know, to talk on the phone, to go for walks, to have coffee, to do whatever, to play basketball.

The people who took those actions again and again regularly were the people who stayed very connected and stayed happy that way.

So What we propose is that this is a practice we can cultivate and that they're tiny actions that people can take.

We have many stories of people who thought that they were no good at relationships, that they were never going to have happy lives.

And many times it changed when they didn't expect it.

So, like, we have a story about 1 man who really didn't have a good marriage and was kind of distant from his kids, didn't have any friends, and then when he retired he joined a gym and he found this group of friends that became for the first time a kind of tribe for him.

And that's just 1 example of how our lives take these twists and turns that we usually can't predict, that we don't expect, and many of those turns are in positive directions.

The message that the science tells us is don't give up on this aspect of your life.

Because many things can change at any age.

provide an accurate summary of the episode, and be clear on the main take aways and conclusions

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What The Longest-Running Study on Happiness Reveals