My happiest days are those that start out like an empty canvas, waiting to be filled up with ideas and creative interactions. But as I spoke with my Taiwanese guide and thought later about the lessons he taught me, I realized that the Western metaphor might not be the right one as I live the back half of my life. It might actually be becoming a hin

crystallized intelligence. This is defined as the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past.

Here’s the bottom-line summary about your relationships—the key points for cultivating your aspen grove: • You need strong human connections to help you get on the second curve and flourish. • No matter how introverted you are, you cannot expect to thrive into old age without healthy, intimate relationships. • For married people, a loving, companio

But before you abandon all hope, I have good news: satisfaction is possible—just not with the old formulas. We need to toss out all that bad math and use this one equation instead, which incorporates the wisdom of Siddhartha and Thomas and the best modern social science: Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want Your satisfaction is what you hav

There have been no studies of happiness and competence when we professionally self-objectify, when we think “I am my job.” But common sense tells us that this is a tyranny every bit as nasty as physical self-objectification. We become Marx’s heartless work overlord to ourselves, cracking the whip mercilessly, seeing ourselves as nothing more than H

The small rush of pleasure we get from being envied by others one minute is swallowed up by the unhappiness from having less than someone else the next minute. But the urge to have more than others tugs at us relentlessly.

The decline problem is a double whammy, then: we need ever-greater success to avoid dissatisfaction, yet our abilities to stay even are declining. No, it’s actually a triple whammy, because as we try to stay even, we wind up in patterns of addictive behavior such as workaholism, which puts strivers into unhealthy relationship patterns at the cost o

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.

What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn’t just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers. I came to call this the “striver’s curse”: people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their re