In 1983, Sting was at the pinnacle of his music career. His band, The Police, had a number one album, Synchronicity, and their song “Every Breath You Take” was the most played single on the radio (ever). Every concert was sold out.
After leaving the relative safety and comfort of a teaching job in Newcastle at the age of 27, Sting had succeeded in every way possible in pop music—and was miserable. Despite his success, fame, and riches, he was deeply unhappy.
How could a successful pop star be so unhappy?
Popular culture is wrong about happiness
That’s because there’s a disconnect between what many of us think will make us happy and what actually makes us happy. When we’re young, popular culture leads us to believe that happiness can be found in gaining riches, having fame, or working hard.
However, none of these activities led to happiness. The world is filled with stories of unhappy rich people, tortured celebrities, and lonely workaholics. So what makes us happier and healthier?
According to Robert Waldinger who heads the Harvard Study of Adult Development, our happiness and well-being are rooted in our social connections and experiences, not in any accolades or material possessions.
Why riches and accolades won’t make you happy
Due to habituation, material possessions like new cars, new phones, new clothes will only excite you when they’re fresh off the lot. Once you’ve used them and become accustomed to them you won’t receive pleasure from them any longer.
Even more troubling, says Waldinger, material possessions can lead you to unhappiness because you will make comparisons out of envy. Someone always has something newer, better, more appealing than your “cherished” object and knowing that will make you unhappy.
As for riches, a certain amount of money is good, but once your basic material needs are met (food, shelter, health, recreation), research shows you become no happier at 75,000 dollars than at 75 million.
Celebrity status will not make you happier either. As Waldinger says, the constant media intrusion and lack of privacy for most famous people make them significantly less healthy, not to mention less happy.
What makes us happier and healthier
According to the results of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of adults known, social connections are the most important ingredient for our health and happiness. In his popular TED talk, Waldinger explained the researchers derived three lessons about happiness.
1) Researchers found that social connections are really good for you and that loneliness kills. In the study, the people who were more socially connected to family, friends, and community, were happier, physically healthier, and lived longer than people who were less connected.
2) Researchers determined that the number of connections you have is not as important as the quality of your close relationships. People who valued quantity over quality when it came to relationships had poorer health and were less happy than those who had fewer, quality relationships.
3) Having high-quality social connections is not just important for your body, but it’s also good for your mind. Waldinger said that subjects in the study with better social relationships had sharper memories than those in poor relationships. People in poorer relationships showed a steeper memory decline.
Suggestions to lead a better life
The research shows that those people who lean into relationships with their families, friends, and community have happier and healthier lives. If you want to have a happier life, Waldinger says the steps are not difficult.
Having better relationships could be as simple as replacing screen time with people time, doing something new to liven up a stale relationship, or reaching out to someone you haven’t spoken to in a long while.
Finally, good research has shown that experiences make us happier for a longer time than material goods. One of the reasons experiences are better than material goods, riches, or accolades is that they cannot be compared and because they connect us to other people who are the sources of our happiness and well being.
Happiness leads to success
If that isn’t enough to convince you to spend more time developing good relationships, let me add one last piece of advice. According to another happiness researcher, Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, people who are happy are able to organize information better, retain data longer, retrieve facts quicker, and think more quickly and creatively. (And here are some exercises to make you happier by Achor).
In fact, the notion that we will be happy once we are successful (fame, riches, accolades) is incorrect as we’ve seen in the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Achor concurs with these findings and adds that research shows it’s not your success that brings you happiness, but rather it’s your happiness that makes you successful.