This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

My colleague Derek Thompson has written about Americans’ social isolation and anxiety. But this week, he writes, “I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?”

Reading about the key to happiness can sometimes feel like a trick: Could it really be as simple as a given expert makes it out to be? As Derek notes, “Clever sociologists will always find new ways of ‘calculating’ that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount.” But his research leads him to what he calls a “subtler truth”—a “happiness trinity” of which “finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs” rising together and falling together.

Today’s newsletter explores some subtler truths about American happiness.

On Happiness

The Happiness Trinity

By Derek Thompson

Why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

Read the article.

Take a Wife … Please!

By Olga Khazan

Why are married people happier than the rest of us?

Read the article.

A Happiness Columnist’s Three Biggest Happiness Rules

By Arthur C. Brooks

A good life isn’t just about getting the details right. Here are some truths that transcend circumstance and time.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Ten practical ways to improve happiness: For when you need advice that goes beyond “Be Danish” What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life: “We neglect our connections with others at our peril,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write.

Other Diversions

Sphere is the mind-killer. We’re all reading wrong. A dentist found a jawbone in a floor tile.

P.S.

Courtesy of Karolina L.

Last week, I asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Karolina L., 26, in Warsaw, wrote: “I always look up at the moon when I’m walking at night. No matter where I am, it makes me feel at home—like I have a friend watching over me.”

I’ll continue to share your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— Isabel

In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to class—usually late and unprepared.

My high-school guidance counselor had had good reason to tell my deflated parents that there was no way I was college-bound: I graduated in the bottom third of my 100-person class at Lourdes Academy in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I had to attend the Menasha extension of the University of Wisconsin, a two-year school, just to smuggle myself into the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, a four-year school in my hometown. A year into that, I was staring at a 1.491 GPA and making the guidance counselor’s case daily, unambiguously, emphatically. I was one more wasted—literally and figuratively—semester away from getting the boot.

This article has been adapted from VandeHei’s new book, Just the Good Stuff.

Then I stumbled into a pair of passions: journalism and politics. Suddenly I had an intense interest in two new-to-me things that, for reasons I cannot fully explain, came naturally. My twin interests were animated by my innate mischievousness, contrarian impulses, long poker nights, antiestablishment snobbery, and ease with people of all stripes at dive bars. These passions launched me on a wild, wholly unforeseeable ride through presidential impeachments and congressional coups, aboard Air Force One, onstage moderating a presidential debate, inside an Oval Office lunch with Donald Trump, on TV, and at the helm of two successful media start-ups: Politico and Axios.

Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than not—at least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.

[Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life]

An inherent hubris comes in offering this kind of advice, as I do in my new book, Just the Good Stuff. You naturally come off as arrogant or a know-it-all. I am acutely aware of the kind people, awesome family, and twists of fate that landed me here. And I am like so many others: an imperfect, middle-of-the-pack, small-town guy who worked hard, who never lost sight of life’s serendipity, who feels blessed to share with others what others—or life’s face slaps—shared with me.

It is nonsense that to shine, you need to go to a fancy school, bootlick bosses, or pay your dues at soul-sucking jobs working for bad people. You do not need to get 1500 on your SAT or to have a sky-high IQ or family connections. You don’t even need sparkling talents. You simply need to want to construct goodness with whatever life throws at you. This starts by grounding yourself with unbreakable core values and then watching, learning, and copying those who do it—and get it—right. But it also includes watching and studying those who screw it up. You need to find your own passions, not have them imposed by others. Then outwork everyone in pursuit of shaping your destiny—your own personal greatness—on your terms, by your measures, at your pace.

My own life is littered with mistakes. But I learned something from every dumb move and used it to try to get the big things right. Five decades in, that is what matters most to me: cutting myself slack on my daily sins or stumbles so I can focus on the good stuff.  

[Read: How to succeed at failure]

For me, that list includes pursuing deep, meaningful, unconditional relationships with my kids; a healthy, resilient marriage; strong, loving relationship with my parents and siblings; a few deep and durable friendships; faith and connection beyond myself; and doing consequential work with people I enjoy and admire.

I’ve often fallen short of these goals, and so I’ve learned the value of grace. We’re all deeply flawed, wounded, selfish, clueless, and mean at different times. It does not make us bad. It makes us normal. That’s why we need to extend grace to others, and to ourselves.

I have blown many months beating myself up for being a selfish husband or an inattentive son or a harsh leader or an absent friend. And all of those things were often true. But life is not measured by a moment. In the end, I want to be able to say what we should all be able to say about ourselves: I learned a little every day, tried to do the next right thing, and got the big things right.

This article has been adapted from Jim VandeHei’s new book, Just the Good Stuff.

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After writing about how and why Americans are depressed, I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?

The message of W. Bradford Wilcox’s new book is right there in the title: Get Married. “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America,” Wilcox writes. “When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.” According to survey data from Gallup, matrimony improves every flavor of well-being you can think of. Married couples experience more “enjoyment,” less “worry,” less “sadness,” less “stress,” less “anger,” and much, much less “loneliness.”

Wilcox is not unusual in hailing the salubrious effects of getting hitched. As my colleague Olga Khazan has reported, a recent analysis of General Social Survey data found that Americans’ happiness generally declined from the 1970s to 2020. The author of the paper, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, concluded that, after adjusting for demographics, one thing explained “most of the recent decline in overall happiness”: the decline of marriage.

That would seem dispositive—the definitive answer to my question. But marriage is a lot of things at once. Legally speaking, marriage is a license. Practically speaking, marriage is love, friendship, sex, joint checking accounts, coffee routines, co-parenting, and the sheer fact of another person just being there all the time.

I focused on this last aspect when I recently interviewed Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, the director and the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the longest-running study of adult happiness ever conducted. In their book, The Good Life, Waldinger and Schulz proposed that the most important predictor of lifelong well-being was “social fitness,” their term for the quality of relationships in our lives, across family, friends, and community.

“Most people find that marriage provides that secure base of attachment, that sense of, ‘I’ve got somebody here when I’m in trouble,’” Waldinger told me. “But then what we discovered was that marriage provides all these benefits that are quite mundane, like somebody who gets you to remember to eat, somebody who gets you to remember to go to the doctor, to take your medication. It sounds trivial, except it turns out to really matter for whether you’re happy and whether you stay healthy.”

Social fitness isn’t marriage, exactly—it’s more like the genus under which marriage is the dominant species. Life is an obstacle course of one mess after another, Waldinger and Schulz told me; people need friends and companions to pull them through the Tough Mudder. But platonic relationships often ebb and flow over time, as people change, switch jobs, and move around. There’s no such thing as a legally binding social institution that forces platonic friends to maintain intimacy. But that’s exactly what marriage is (among other things): a legally binding social institution that encourages friends to maintain intimacy.

I’m fond of the analysis and worldview of Wilcox, Peltzman, Waldinger, and Schulz. There is something undeniably warm and comforting about the idea that other people are the core of contentment. But sometimes, I get a nagging suspicion that all this talk about companionship overlooks a crucial pillar of well-being: money.

After all, marriage and several key measures of social fitness rise and fall with income. High-income people are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced. And, in part because marriage allows people to combine incomes and avoid redundant expenses, married people tend to be richer in their 50s and 60s, Wilcox reminded me. When it comes to social fitness, several surveys show that people with more money have more social time and are less lonely.

Maybe because high wealth is more exclusionary than marriage or friendship—it’s much easier to get married than to become a millionaire—we delude ourselves about the happiness premium of income. There is a popular idea known as the Easterlin paradox, which says that the correlation between rising incomes and rising well-being suddenly hits a ceiling around $75,000 for an individual, in 2010 dollars. But this theory is almost certainly false—and, indeed, it has been repeatedly falsified. In a 2012 paper, the economists Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers concluded that “data show no evidence for a satiation point above which income and well-being are no longer related.” Rather, the correlation weakens a bit over time, in a way that’s totally intuitive. It feels better to get a $5,000 raise if you’re earning $40,000 as a restaurant server than it does if you’re already earning $10 million as a chief executive.

Last week, I called Gallup’s principal economist, Jonathan Rothwell, and repeated a version of my initial question: What matters most for happiness—marriage, social well-being, or income? Rothwell, to his credit, told me that the question would be incredibly difficult to answer to any level of full satisfaction, but he’d give it a try anyway. A frequent writer on happiness issues, Rothwell defines happiness using a statistical measure called “thriving in well-being,” which combines current life evaluations with future life evaluations. This is because happiness is a slippery thing to define temporally. If I am having a bad day but am generally happy with my life, that’s not misery; if I am having a good week but am miserably depressed about the next five years of my life, that’s not contentment.

After a day or two crunching data, Rothwell got back to me with the results. He told me that his analyses clearly confirmed Wilcox’s theory: Marriage definitely, definitely matters, a lot. It improves well-being in every dimension, for every level of income. Overall, the average marriage-happiness premium was about 18 percent. That is, among all adults aged 30 to 50, about 41 percent of unmarried adults said they were thriving versus nearly 60 percent of married adults.

But when he compared happiness across income levels, another story emerged. Income, he said, plays an enormous role in predicting happiness as well. Low-income adults in Gallup’s survey were mostly unhappy, whether or not they were married. The highest-income adults were mostly quite happy, whether or not they are married. For example, married couples who earn less than $48,000 as a household are as likely to say they’re happy as single adults who earn $48,000 to $60,000, and a married couple who makes $90,000 to $180,000 as a household is almost exactly as likely to say they’re happy as a single person making $180,000 to $240,000.

Finally, Rothwell ran a test to isolate the correlative strength of several factors, including education, religion, marriage, income, and career satisfaction. Marriage was strongly correlated with his measure of happiness, even after accounting for these other factors. But social well-being (Gallup’s proxy for what Waldinger and Schulz call “social fitness”, which includes rating on the quality of marriages and close relationships) was even stronger. Income was stronger still. And financial well-being—that is, having enough money to do what you want to do and feeling satisfied with your standard of living—was the best predictor of Gallup’s definition of thriving.

One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.

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In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the onetime associate of Sigmund Freud who died more than 60 years ago. If you think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Those are his coinages, too. Persona, archetype, synchronicity: Jung, Jung, Jung.

When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem a bit of a downer. “‘Happiness,’” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody who does not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a single objective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.”

[Carl G. Jung: God, the devil, and the human soul]

Clearly, this observation should not discourage any serious student of happiness. On the contrary, Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of pure happiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions, which in fact arose to alert us to threats and keep us safe. Rather, the objective should be progress—or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, my co-author on our recent book, Build the Life You Want, “happierness.”

If Jung was a happiness skeptic in some sense, however, he was by no means a denialist. In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realizing that goal of progress. Refined with the aid of modern social science, Jung’s precepts might be just what you’re looking for in your life.

Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars.

1. Good physical and mental health
Jung believed that getting happier required soundness of mind and body. His thesis is supported by plenty of research. For example, the longest-running study of happiness—the Harvard Study of Adult Development—has shown that four of the biggest predictors of a senior citizen’s well-being are not smoking excessively, drinking alcohol moderately if at all, maintaining a healthy body weight, and exercising. Even more important for well-being is good mental health. Indeed, one study from 2013 showed that poor mental health among Britons, Germans, and Australians predicted nearly two to roughly six times as much misery as poor physical health did.

This raises what might seem like a nitpick with Jung’s contention: Good health practices seem not to raise happiness, but rather to lower unhappiness. Today, many emotion researchers have uncovered evidence of a phenomenon that Jung did not conceive of: Negative and positive emotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each. Furthermore, researchers have identified how activities such as physical exercise can interrupt the cycle of negative emotion during moments of heightened stress, by helping moderate cortisol-hormone levels. I have found in my own work that this helps explain why people with naturally low levels of negative emotion tend to struggle with staying on a regular exercise regimen: They may feel less benefit to their well-being from going to the gym than people naturally higher in negative feelings do.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why so many people are unhappy in retirement]

2. Good personal and intimate relations, such as those of marriage, family, and friendships
The intertwined notions that close relationships are at the heart of well-being and that cultivating them will reliably increase happiness are unambiguously true. Indeed, of the four best life investments for increasing personal satisfaction, two involve family and friendships (the others are in faith or philosophy, and meaningful work; more on these in a moment). And as for marriage, an institution that has taken a beating over recent decades, more and more evidence is piling up from scholars that being wed makes the majority of people happier than they otherwise would be, as the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox has argued. This research seemed so conclusive to Wilcox that he titled his recent book, simply, Get Married. Jung himself was married to his wife, Emma, for 52 years, until her death at the age of 73.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development comes to one conclusion more definitively than any other. In the words of my Harvard colleague Robert Waldinger, who has directed the project for nearly two decades, and his co-author, Marc Schulz, “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.” Waldinger’s predecessor running the study, George Vaillant, was just as unequivocal about the evidence: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

3. Seeing beauty in art and in nature
Jung believed that happiness required one to cultivate an appreciation for beautiful things and experiences. Although this might sound intuitively obvious, the actuality is more complicated.

Long before I focused my scholarly life on happiness, I was dedicated to art and beauty. My earliest memories are of painting with my artist mother; I learned to read music before written language; I made my living as a classical musician from ages 19 to 31. News flash: Artists are generally not the world’s most blissfully satisfied people. In a 1992 study from Britain, researchers found that performing artists reported depression at higher rates than the control group. At some point, I will write a book not on the art of happiness but on the very troublesome happiness of art.

Among nonartists, however, the issue is somewhat simpler and in line with Jung’s thinking. First, a big difference exists between beauty in nature and beauty in art. Specifically, engagement with nature’s beauty is known, across different cultures, to enhance well-being. Second, with aesthetic experience, happiness depends on the artistic mood. For example, experiments have shown that if you listen to happy music on your own, it makes you feel happier; if you listen to sad music while alone, it makes you feel sadder.

[Kelly Conaboy: What your favorite personality test says about you]

4. A reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work
As with physical and mental health, employment and income seem tied more to eliminating unhappiness than to raising happiness. For one thing, scholars have long shown that unemployment is a reliable source of misery: Depressive symptoms typically rise when people, both men and women, are unemployed. This cannot be explained simply by the lack of material and social resources that typically accompanies joblessness; rather, work itself helps protect mental health.

But if we can upgrade “satisfactory work” in Jung’s list to “meaningful work,” then positive gains in happiness do come into play. The two elements that make work meaningful for most people are earned success (a sense of accomplishing something valuable) and service to others. These can be achieved in almost any job.

The relationship between money and happiness is a hotly contested topic; older studies show that well-being tops out at relatively low income levels, but more recent studies show that such contentment continues to rise for much higher incomes. My own assessment of the evidence is that money alone cannot buy happiness, nor can spending money to acquire possessions make one happy; but having the money to pay for experiences with loved ones, to free up time to spend on meaningful activities, and to support good causes does enhance happiness.

5. A philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience
Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the tedious quotidian travails of life, and put events—including inevitable suffering—into perspective. The son of a pastor, Jung was deeply Christian in his worldview, as his own words published many years ago in The Atlantic make clear: “For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.” He did not insist that his spiritual path was the only one—“I do not imagine that in my reflections,” he wrote, “I have uttered a final truth”—and allowed that even a nonreligious, purely philosophical attitude could do. But everyone, he thought, should have some sense of transcendent belief or higher purpose.

Research clearly backs up Jung’s contention. Religious belief has been noted as strongly predictive of finding meaning in life, and spirituality is positively correlated with better mental health; both faith and spiritual practice seem protective against depression. Secular philosophies can provide this benefit as well. Recent papers on Stoicism, for example, have demonstrated that this ancient way of thinking and acting can yield well-being benefits. Many books have been written on the subject, including the psychotherapist Donald Robertson’s Stoicism and the Art of Happiness.

[Arthur C. Brooks: What the second-happiest people get right]

Taken together, Jung’s ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly to modern research findings. I propose this practical seven-point summary:

1. Do not fall prey to seeking pure happiness. Instead, seek lifelong progress toward happierness.
2. Manage as best you can the main sources of misery in your life by attending to your physical and mental health, maintaining employment, and ensuring an adequate income.
3. If you’re earning enough to take care of your principal needs, remember that happiness at work comes not from chasing higher income but from pursuing a sense of accomplishment and service to others.
4. Cultivate deep relationships through marriage, family, and real friendships. Remember that happiness is love.
5. If you have discretionary income left over, use it to invest in your relationships with family and friends.
6. Spend time in nature, surround yourself with beauty that uplifts you, and consume the art and music that nourish your spirit.
7. Find a path of transcendence—one that explains the big picture in life and helps you comprehend suffering and the purpose of your existence.

Beyond the scientific research that supports this strategy, we also have the evidence of its effectiveness in the example of Jung’s life. He made his list to mark his 85th birthday, which was to be the last one he celebrated. By all accounts, he made progress toward happiness over his life, had a long and devoted marriage, died surrounded by the people he loved, and was satisfied that he had used his abilities in a meaningful way that served others. In this world, that sounds pretty good to me.