The good life....................

 

In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.

-Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

via

Hugs are pretty important....................

 But, trust me, money is no substitute for mental health. I would rather be poor and happy, than subject myself to constant stress in a work environment. You will not starve if you opt for a solo practice. You probably won't have luxuries that others have; but, in the end, spend your time developing a happy relationship with another human being. Your money can't hug you in the middle of the night.

-Rick Georges

not-so-subtle downsides.............

 There are a million ways to get rich, most of which involve exploiting specific niches and one-off opportunities, to say nothing of luck. Universal rules about how to get rich are hard to come by.

But losing money, or losing happiness when you have money, or becoming a slave to your money – those stories tend to have common denominators. They are so common you can call them laws.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

On striverly instincts......................

 In my field of economics, we have something called "Stein's Law," named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  Obvious, right?  Well, when it comes to their own lives, people ignore it all the time.  But you ignore this about your professional success at your peril.  It will leave you falling further and further behind, shaking your fist at the heavens.

     There is another path, though, instead of denying change in your abilities, you can make the change itself a source of strength.  Instead of trying to avoid decline, you can transcend it by finding a new kind of success, better than what the world promises and not a source of neurosis and addiction: a deeper form of happiness than what you had before; and in the process, true meaning in life—maybe for the first time. . . .

     A word of caution, though: This path means going against many of your striverly instincts.  I'm going to ask you not to deny your weaknesses but rather to embrace them defenselessly.  To let go of some things in your life that you worked hard for—but that are now holding you back.  To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don't make you special.  To face decline—and even death—with courage and confidence.  To rebuild relationships you neglected on the long road to worldly success.  And to dive into the uncertainty of a transition you have worked so hard to evade.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

the "striver's curse".............

      What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn't just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers.  I came to call this the "striver's curse": people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

replace.........................

 Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.

-Kevin Kelly

Connections.......................

 People who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives.

The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.

-as culled from here

Studies show.................

 Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.

-as culled from here

Talking about money............

 So the goal here is to have a healthy relationship with money. You don’t want the porridge to be too hot or too cold, but just right. How do you know when you have a healthy relationship with money? When you no longer stress about money. People who spend too much experience stress—they’re always worried about how to make the next credit card payment. People who spend too little experience stress—they’re agonizing over every penny. The goal is not only not to experience stress about money, but to not even think about it at all. I have an assignment for you: try to go a week without even thinking about money. I bet you can’t do it. It’s a lot harder than you think. Everywhere we go we are bombarded by financial decisions. Shit, the price of gas is high these days. Shit, Chipotle is $20 nowadays. Shit, my HOA dues went up this month. Do any of these things cause you stress? If so, that provides an insight into your psychology.

-Jared Dillian, from this post

On the importance of....................

 ..............................."self-expansion."

But how does this increase love? It’s due to the criminally underrated concept of emotional contagion. When we feel excited, we associate it with what’s around us, even if that thing is not directly responsible. When we feel partner = fun, we enjoy their presence more. And that lets us be somewhat lazy by letting environments do the work for us. Go to a concert. Get on a roller coaster. You want a fairy tale? Great. Go fight a dragon together.

Inversely.......................

I would say that the quality of our society will be inversely proportion to the level of political energy. One of the toxic effects of social media is to elevate the level of political energy. We would be much better off with people putting energy into their relationships and their work.

-Arnold Kling, from here

Your share......................

 To maintain good relationships with your colleagues means, among other things, to give credit where credit is due; to take your share of the jobs no one wants but still must be done; to deliver on time and in a high-quality manner when teamed with other people; to show up when expected; and, in general, to be trusted to do somewhat more than your job formally requires.

-Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order:  12 More Rules For Life

Face to face............................

In human relations, risk avoidance means the avoidance of accountability, the refusal to stand judged in another’s eyes, the refusal to come face to face with another person, to give oneself in whatever measure to him or her, and so to run the risk of rejection. Accountability is not something we should avoid; it is something we need to learn. Without it we can never acquire either the capacity to love or the virtue of justice. Other people will remain for us merely complex devices, to be negotiated in the way that animals are negotiated, for our own advantage and without opening the possibility of mutual judgment. Justice is the ability to see the other as having a claim on you, as being a free subject just as you are, and as demanding your accountability. To acquire this virtue you must learn the habit of face-to-face encounters, in which you solicit the other’s consent and cooperation rather than imposing your will. The retreat behind the screen is a way of retaining control over the encounter, while minimizing the need to acknowledge the other’s point of view. It involves setting your will outside yourself, as a feature of virtual reality, while not risking it as it must be risked, if others are truly to be encountered. To encounter another person in his freedom is to acknowledge his sovereignty and his right: it is to recognize that the developing situation is no longer within your exclusive control, but that you are caught up by it, made real and accountable in the other’s eyes by the same considerations that make him real and accountable in yours.

-Roger Scruton, from this New Atlantis essay, Hiding Behind The Screen

If we must have rules...........

.............these three (from James Altucher) are pretty good:

I have three rules that I try to live by each day:

• improve my RELATIONSHIPS with the people around me. Be around people I love and support, who love and support me. Get rid of toxic people.
• improve at CREATIVITY. Improve at the things I love. If I study something I love and feel I am getting better at it, then I know that will compound into “life abundance”.
• improve at my feeling of FREEDOM in life. If every day, I can take more actions that are MY decisions versus the descisions of others, then I know I will have freedom in life.

thanks Chris

Tethered.................................

Affection exchange theory, introduced by Professor Kory Floyd, postulates that affection strengthens bonds, provides access to resources, and communicates your potential as a parent, increasing your pool of potential mates.   I think it goes deeper.  I know a lot of people who, despite their good fortune, are wandering.  Few meaningful relationships, an inability to find reward in their professional lives, too hard on themselves, etc.  It's as if they're not grounded, never convinced of their worth . . . wandering.
     When I look at my own success, it mostly boils down to two things:  being born in America and having someone irrationally passionate about my well-being—my mom. . . .
      Having a good person express how wonderful you are hundreds of times changes everything.  College, professional success, an impressive mate—these were aspirations, not givens for a remarkably unremarkable kid in an upper-lower-middle-class household.  My mom was forty-three, single, and making $15,000 a year as a secretary.  She was also a good person who made me feel connected and, while waiting for our Opel, gave me the confidence that I had value, that I was capable and deserving of all these things.  Holding hands and laughing, I was tethered.

-Scott Galloway,  The Algebra of Happiness:  Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

Environment design............................

     Environment design is powerful not only because it influenced how we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it.  Most people live in a world others have created for them.  But you can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative cues.  Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life.  Be the designer of your life and not merely the consumer of it. . . .
     Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them.  In fact, this is a useful way to think about the influence of the environment on your behavior.  Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects.  Start thinking about it as filled with relationships.  Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.

-James Clear,  Atomic Habits

Organic and messy..................

Relationships bring us everything from joy to sadness to angst - sometimes the same relationship on the same day can bring all those!  Give your relationships attention and they will be the better for it:  more joy, less haste;  more up times, fewer difficult times.  As organic, messy human beings we cannot predict the consistency of our relationships, nor should we try and control them.  We should simple do our best to care for them.

-Nicholas Bate,  as excerpted from here

the same pity........................

I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

-John Templeton

Saw this quote while looking for something else, but thought, "Ah, an excuse to re-play (again) one of my favorite cartoons":

a guiding principle....................?

In a democratic society, such as the United States, where wealth is the ultimate determinant of status, there lingers a constant fear of being left behind materially.  We may say that the guiding principle of American society is not to grow richer in absolute terms, but to avoid becoming poorer in relative terms.  And nothing makes a man feel poorer than being a passive bystander during a bull market.   Therefore, the fiercest struggle for the preservation and restitution of economic equality in the United States takes place in the stock market, where everyone is seeking to discover what others are doing and anticipate what they intend to do.  As Keynes observed with all the cultural disdain of the Old World for the New:  "Even outside the field of finance, Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be;  and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the stock market."

-Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

On reflecting.............................

     Despite our relatively poor investment performance, 1988 was a great year for Bridgewater, because by reflecting on and learning from our poor performance, we made systematic improvements.   I have come to realize that bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships.

-Ray Dalio,  Principles