What makes a good life? Is it accomplishment and wealth? Meaning and purpose? Relationships?

This is the question Dr. Robert Waldinger, a Harvard psychiatrist, has spent decades exploring as the fourth director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development – the world's longest-running study of adult life and happiness – following hundreds of people since 1938 and still running today. Robert is co-author, with Marc Schulz, of bestselling book The Good Life. He is also a Zen Buddhist priest whose spiritual journey has shaped how he thinks about thriving.

In this episode, Vivek and Robert talk about what the data reveal about happiness (spoiler alert: it has little to do with achievement or status). They discuss "social fitness" and the need to tend to relationships the way we tend to our physical health, along with surprising insights about marriage and loneliness, and why attention is "the most basic form of love."

Robert also shares how his Zen practice has helped him hold onto hope without looking away from the world's hardest problems. And what medicine could learn from all of this about caring for patients, and for each other.

If you're wondering what the research says about a good life, this episode is for you.