How can you best make that shift to the next chapter of your life? How can you find happiness and purpose in the second half of life?
One book describing the key to success is “The Good Life” by Dr. Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. This book looks at lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Dr. Robert Waldinger made this study popular in his TED Talk, “What Makes a Good Life” which has been viewed over 48 million times.
The study from this book lists several factors that matter a great deal for being happy:
- Don’t smoke
- Quit drinking if it is a problem
- Maintain healthy body weight
- Exercise
- Have an adaptive coping style
- Engage in purposeful learning with lots of reading
He says that if we could boil the study down into a single principle for living, it would be this: “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.”
All kinds of relationships can bring this happiness: marriage and long-term partnerships, family, friends, people at work, people at church, people you play pickleball with, people at your book club. You can cultivate relationships at any chapter in your life.
Building strong relationships takes effort, especially as we move into the second half of life. Life circumstances can create empty spaces—children move away, people we love die, or we retire. The people who were the happiest in retirement took the steps to actively replace “workmates” with new “playmates.”
The path to a good life is built with good relationships. This path isn’t easy, but it is something you can do. This is not a choice you make once, but over and over.
Take steps to make, keep, and strengthen relationships. Attend community events, join clubs, take up a sport, or volunteer. These can be fun in their own right and provide an opportunity to make some friends.
Dr. Waldinger concludes his viral TED talk by quoting Mark Twain: “There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburning, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”