Connect.
"… On a small patio by a very small pool, Waldinger and I talked about the rise of the happiness industry — the countless podcasts, conferences, best-selling books — and his own role in it. He gives considerable thought to maintaining his own happiness in the face of becoming a kind of influencer, someone called on to travel around the world to speak about happiness at conferences, sometimes to crowds of very wealthy people, repeating the same turns of phrase and giving the same advice about deep relationships.
As a Zen priest, someone accustomed to reckoning with his place in the world, Waldinger is acutely aware of the tension between achieving status and doing work that demands humility. Before becoming the steward of the Harvard study, he walked away from a high-profile job as the director of training and education at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, after deciding that the prestige of the role didn't offset his lack of enthusiasm for the administrative work it demanded. At age 45, he started over, taking a major pay cut to pursue work he found more fulfilling: working under the guidance of Stuart Hauser, a psychiatrist recognized for his work in adolescent development. That professional step, of course, led Waldinger to the Harvard study and the work that has catapulted his visibility far beyond that of his previous career.
He reflected with honesty about how much thought he gives to keeping his newfound fame in perspective. "I grapple with the feeling that it's important," he told me, as we sat over turkey sandwiches his wife had made; ordinarily, the two of them have lunch together, a small moment of connection they started sharing during the pandemic. The work is meaningful, he said; it was the feeling of ego gratification that he struggled with. "It feels important," he said. "But it's really not. I work at a hospital where every water fountain is named after someone who was once maybe famous. But now no one knows who they are." The badges of achievement — that's the least important part of who he is, he tries to remind himself. Because otherwise who would he be when the calls from The New York Times, from Aspen, from TED, stopped coming?
Even knowing that Waldinger was a Buddhist priest, I felt somehow surprised by how quickly our conversation had moved past the discussion of research and deepened into something that felt bracingly and reassuringly honest. When we finally said goodbye after a few hours of talking, mostly in the sun, I left feeling that I had connected with someone who was, just a few hours earlier, a stranger. I noticed, as I got in the car and remembered my concerns about my back, that it was incontrovertible: I felt better."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/magazine/happiness-research-studies-relationships.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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