Nearly a century of happiness research indicates that social interactions are most significant

The article skims a significant body of replicable research that suggests the #1 controllable factor in happiness is interpersonal interactions, even trivial ones.

From the article:

Waldinger’s work was building on other prominent research about happiness and relationships that had been drawing attention in the field: Ed Diener and Martin Seligman found that happy people spent less time alone every day than unhappy people, and a large study published in 2008 found that those who were more socially engaged — attending church, belonging to organizations — were consistently happier, as were those with large social networks.

And yet at the same time the field was also recognizing weaknesses in its methods. The Harvard study, like a lot of other happiness research, posed that same question of cause and effect that had bedeviled psychology for so long: It was hard to know, for example, if happy marriages made for happier people at the end of their lives — or if happy people were simply more inclined to have happy marriages. In much of the work that researchers like Lyubomirsky conducted, the sample sizes were often too small to yield meaningful findings, and critics within and outside the field charged that psychology journals allowed researchers too much discretion in how they analyzed their data. A new generation of psychologists started re-examining the field’s practices and trying to prove, using more rigorous methods and new statistical tools, some of its core findings.

Julia Rohrer, who arrived as a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in 2016, was part of that new cohort. Eager for her work to have real meaning, she tried to find a rigorous way of looking at the connection between happiness and social relationships. Three years after Waldinger’s TED Talk, Rohrer analyzed a survey that asked nearly 2,000 Germans to write down ways they thought they could make themselves happier, or at least as happy, in the future. She coded the answers into “nonsocial” answers (“get a better job”) or “social” ones (“spend more time with friends and family”). Rohrer found that people who proposed a social goal had taken more steps toward that goal and were happier a year later. She concluded that “socially engaged pursuits predict increases in life satisfaction,” as she put it in the prestigious journal Psychological Science.

Rohrer’s work was published around the same time that other researchers were finding, in high-quality and replicated studies, that even fleeting social interactions could improve happiness. Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, researchers both then at the University of Chicago, conducted an experiment in which they asked people to interact with strangers on public transit — to try to have a moment of connection — and found that the commuters seemed to get a mood boost from the exercise. Epley and Schroeder’s research and other studies have found that people underestimated both how much they would enjoy the experience and how open the strangers would be to it.

That work was important beyond the decision about whether to talk to a stranger on a train, says Waldinger, who considers these findings some of the most helpful in recent years. “We have this innate reluctance to socially connect, particularly with strangers — and then we’re happier when we make ourselves. I find it a really useful thing to know.”

Finding purpose in serving others, spending more time with others — it all points toward the same thing, Lyubomirsky says. “After all these years, it hit me,” she says. “The reason that all of these interventions are working is because they make people feel more connected to others. So when I write a gratitude letter to my mom, it makes me feel more connected to my mom. When I do an act of kindness, it makes me feel more connected to the person I’m helping, or just humanity as a whole. Yes, you could go running, and that would make you happier, and meditation doesn’t necessarily have to be about other people. But I would say that 95 percent of things that are effective in making people happy and that have been shown to be true through happiness interventions are because they make people feel more connected to other people.”

I think of myself as an extreme introvert, both by temperament and through past traumatic interactions with people. Solitary pursuits seem intrinsically satisfying to me. Nonetheless, meaning comes from sharing activities and thoughts with other people.

I don't know if this was true for others, but the pandemic lockdowns threw this into stark relief. Online interactions, even the extremely intense activity of volunteering on a crisis line, weren't sufficient to prevent devastating despair. It was increasingly worth the risk to see people face to face, like there was some primal monkeysphere deprivation of contact.

I'm grateful for the Tildes community, not just because there are like minds here in a world where thoughtful, compassionate, respectful discourse seems scarce. The recent "How would I meet you outside of Tildes?" thread revealed many of us are still hungry for meaningful contact with others, and suffering varying degrees of unhappiness because of that deficit.

The article doesn't mention Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, but Frankl recognized that we maximize ourselves only in the context of other people:

"By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, | wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. | have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfil or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called selfactualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence."

So opening this up for discussion...