If anyone knows the secret to happiness, it’s Robert Waldinger, MD.  For 22 years, he’s led the Harvard Study on Adult Development, one of the longest-running scientific investigations into human happiness and wellbeing.

For more than 85 years, the study has tracked the lives of 724 men who lived through both the Great Depression and World War II, along with their spouses and children. The results are sharply relevant in today’s climate of political polarization and individual isolation. The antidote to both, Waldinger says, lies in the relationships that we keep.

In addition to directing the happiness study, Waldinger is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, as well as an author and Zen teacher.

You are a force in research about what you’ve termed “the good life.” What have you learned about staying happy in tumultuous times?

You know, I’m a Zen practitioner, and the Buddha famously said all the world is burning and it has always been burning. That means, essentially, that there is always hardship, chaos, and suffering. Yes, this is a really difficult time, but it is not new.

“We know that one of the ways that people get through difficult times is through connections with other people.”

We know that one of the ways that people get through difficult times is through connections with other people. Nobody is self-sufficient. The idea of a self-made man—and usually it’s a man who talks about this—is a total myth. We rely on each other all day long, every day. Other people provide what we need.

Most of the people in our original study grew up during the Great Depression and almost all served in World War II. When we asked them how they got through those trials, everybody talked about other people. They said things like, “In the Depression we just shared everything we had with our neighbors, and they did that with us; that’s one way we got through times when we didn’t have food.” And the soldiers in World War II would say, “It was so important to me that people back home were writing to me, that I knew they were waiting for me to come home.” They said, “My fellow soldiers were my buddies, the people I entrusted my life to.”

So when we talk about great big scary crises, we hear about relying on other people. I would say that’s one of the clearest messages we get from the groups that we’ve studied.

So relationships are critical. Does that also apply to introverts, or people who have social anxieties, or just broken relationships? What do you say to those people?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being an introvert. All of us are somewhere on the spectrum from being introverts to being extroverts. Our culture prioritizes and glorifies extroverts, you know, the party people, but so many of us are introverts by temperament. All that means is that we get more refueling from alone time,whereas extroverts often get their energy from time with other people.

When our original participants were middle-aged, we asked them who they would call in the middle of the night if they were sick or scared. Some people couldn’t list anybody, but most people could list several people that they had that kind of feeling about and connection to. We think that even introverts need that. But it could just be one or two people that they feel they can really count on.

The way we think about it is that every person needs to check in with themselves. How many people do I need in my life? There’s no set answer. Sometimes I get asked the question: How many friends is the right number? There is no right number. It’s highly individual.

Even the little hits of wellbeing you get when you say hello to the checkout person in the supermarket matter. That all actually helps. But what we’re talking about is that everybody probably needs one or two safety-net kind of relationships. These are my go-to people if I ever needed anything, if I was ever in trouble. But that’s not to discount the people we just have a pleasant little chat with during the day.

Any advice for early-career investigators, who are being hit particularly hard by this crisis, on weathering the storm?

“Take care of relationships with colleagues, because you never know where your next collaboration is going to come from.”

The best advice I can give is to take care of relationships with colleagues, because you never know where your next collaboration is going to come from, right? You never know where your next source of funding is going to come from. When government funding dries up, as it has at Harvard, where might the next grant be?

For me, it’s easy to just want to withdraw and go hide, but everybody weathers this better when we do it as a community.

Since Harvard stood up to the federal government, there’s been a rallying. I was on a call with Harvard Alumni with over 5,000 others to talk about what we can do, how we can support Harvard, how we can resist the encroachments on academic freedom. That was pretty wonderful.

Amazing. I’m surprised to hear that even you—a Zen master—sometimes want to run and hide from it all.

The myth about being a Zen master is that you’re totally chill and nothing bothers you. In fact, what Zen is so clear about is that the practice makes you feel more and makes you engage more with the world, rather than retreating.

The stereotype of meditators is that they kind of withdraw from the world and sit on a cushion, right? But Zen doesn’t teach that. Zen teaches you to pay more and more attention to the world. Zen practice encourages “hearing the cries of the world,” where you sit on a cushion and develop more awareness of, more compassion for, and more interest in being in the world. So if anything, my practice makes me want to be more active in these difficult times rather than withdraw.

But my temptation in darker moments is to withdraw, to say, you know, you’ve made your bed now lie in it all you crazy people. My Zen practice reminds me that I can’t do that, even when watching the very delicate fabric of scientific research be ripped to shreds.

Science is a threat to authoritarians, because science is something you can’t—and don’t want to—control. Science surprises us. Science tells us truths, sometimes truths that we don’t want to learn. Authoritarians don’t like that, so science is always going to be a threat.

I think the encouragement to younger investigators is: Don’t withdraw. Don’t give up. Don’t let them win. If you give up and go elsewhere, they’ve won. They’ve destroyed the research fabric of our country, and we don’t want to let them do that.

Is meditation the answer for all?

No, not for everybody. It is for me. It’s really been helpful for me and I think it can be for many people. Some people hate meditation, and they just shouldn’t do it. If you can cultivate some kind of activity that brings you into presence, that brings you into the present moment, that’s great. You probably have activities you can just get lost in it, and time just flies because you’re so absorbed in it.

My wife never meditates. She’s not interested in meditating, but she is an avid musician. She gets lost in playing the piano. That’s her place to go.

Gardening is a perfect example. You’re lost in the present moment of doing those gardening activities, focused in a kind of happy way. It’s very satisfying to do that.

So I would say, try meditation and see if it makes you feel like you want to do it again. If so, that’s great. But if meditation doesn’t call to you, find some other happy place. Maybe it’s walking in nature, maybe it’s playing soccer. It could be anything. Find your place of absorption in the present moment.