by Jim McCarthy
Instead, after I got my cancer diagnosis at age 49 and hit rock bottom in various aspects of my life, I decided that I would focus much more on family, friends, and community, as well as do work that is really meaningful for me. This meant giving up on a few of the dreams of my earlier life and embracing the beautiful possibilities of the now.
According to research, others feel this way, too. A 2013 study by the National Council of Aging reported, “When asked what is most important to maintaining a high quality of life in their senior years, staying connected to friends and family was the top choice of 4 in 10 seniors, ahead of having financial means (30 percent).”28
Celebrated author Tom Wolfe echoed this sentiment. As he approached age 70, he said, “Your soul is your relationships with other people. And that’s the part of you that really doesn’t die.”29 So, based on your relationships with others, what part of you isn’t going to die? What is your legacy going to be? This next activity should help you explore these existential questions.
Writing Activity 3:
A). Imagine you died today. What would other people honestly say
about you? How would they feel about you? Include family,
friends, community, and colleagues.
B). Imagine you died today. What would you say about yourself?
If we are lucky, we will have adequate time to repair our important relationships, before we leave this world. Unfortunately, not all of us will be so lucky. Instead, some of us will pass suddenly — without having the opportunity to say, “I’m sorry,” “Thank you,” “You meant so much to me,” or, “I have always loved you.”
In my master classes, often people find that they get different answers from Part A and Part B. Perhaps more than with any other writing activity in this book, I encourage you to share what you’ve written with a few family members, friends, or colleagues. It’s easy to be harsh with ourselves. Too harsh, in fact. It’s very therapeutic to get a sanity check from someone else, who might say, “Hey, I think you’re awesome. That’s why you’re my friend in the first place! Remember that time when …”
Sometimes, we need to forgive ourselves, so that we can more easily forgive others. As the Buddha advised, “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”30
We discuss forgiveness in detail in Chapter Ten.
“Community? I Don’t Have a Community.”
What community do you belong to? Who’s in your community?
In the previous activity, I asked you what your community members would honestly say about you. When I ask this question in my workshops, younger people will often say, “Wow, I just realized that I don’t have any community.”
Growing up in Omaha in the 1970s, I was part of a strong community, whether I realized it or not. My parents were (and still are) devout Catholics, and they made sure my brothers and sister and I all went to Christ the King Grade School, a short 10-minute walk from our suburban home. Many other families in the neighborhood sent their kids there, too. My siblings and I all had daily newspaper routes, so we knew everybody in the neighborhood by name. We would play with other kids in the neighborhood — football, basketball, soccer, baseball, sledding, frisbee football. And then we would also see them in church every Sunday.
On Friday nights I would caddy for my dad in his Knights of Columbus golf league, which was also associated with the church. For many years, my dad played softball on the parish team. My mom and dad played in the church’s league for the card game known as bridge. During the winter months, they played in the church bowling league on Sunday nights. Throughout the year there were various fundraisers for the church. We attended church weddings and funerals for people we knew. My brothers and I were all altar boys. We all went to confession regularly. Later, my brothers and I attended the all-boys Jesuit high school in Omaha. The community expanded — but remained tight.
I might be making this parochial life in Omaha sound ideal, but it wasn’t. Not by a long shot — for many reasons, including racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, and priests I knew sexually molesting boys I knew — although I did not learn of these sexual assaults until decades later. But on the positive side, there were very strong social bonds: kids, parents, grandparents, great-aunts, teachers, neighbors, coaches … and some good priests, too.
There was also tremendous consistency in my parents’ jobs. For decades, my dad worked for himself as a solo practitioner lawyer, had the same office on 90th Street, and enjoyed the friendship of others in the firm. My mom was a devoted homemaker for years, and then later taught elementary school. My parents lived in the same house from 1967 until 1981. They’ve lived in Omaha for the last half-century, relishing a seemingly endless supply of friends and acquaintances, even as many of them are gradually dying out.
Today, this consistency is missing for many people. In a place like Silicon Valley, people arrive from all over the world to get jobs in technology. Housing costs are insanely high. Most people work extremely long hours. Even if you make a good friend, they could move away at any time, as I’ve repeatedly experienced. (Goodbye, Glenn, John, Jan, Margrethe, Tony, Tony, Mike, and Lauren!) Unlike the world of my upbringing, most people are not part of religious or spiritual communities. Their only “friends” are people they work with. A person can go through an identity crisis if they change jobs or — even worse — get fired.
Many people are lonely.
Nationwide research from Cigna Health, published in 2018, reported that 54 percent of study participants said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Two out of five felt like “they lack companionship,” their “relationships aren’t meaningful,” and they “are isolated from others.”31Using the UCLA Loneliness Scale from 20 to 80, the average loneliness score in the U.S. was 44. (The higher the score, the lonelier the person.) The study concluded that “American adults are considered lonely.”32
This news is sobering. What’s perhaps worse is the finding that younger people are lonelier than the older generations. The study reports members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had a total average loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.33
As Generation Z has become the loneliest generation, suicide rates of those aged 13 to 18 in the U.S. increased from 2010 to 2015, especially among females.34
Loneliness by Gender
Is your husband, wife, partner, or significant other your best friend? Your soulmate? Your kindred spirit?
If so, I’m happy for you. Really. But it’s helpful to remember that in the past, husbands and wives did not look to each other to fulfill all of their physical, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, financial, logistical, and recreational needs. My mom had her circle of friends, her parents, and other moms from the neighborhood. My dad enjoyed time with his colleagues and golf buddies. They did some things as a couple, and some things with us kids, but a lot of things apart. If my mom wanted to talk about her feelings, she would not go to my dad. If my dad wanted to talk about Cold War politics, he would not go to my mom.
And that was OK. Speaking with National Public Radio, Northwestern University Psychology Professor Eli Finkel explains, “Marriage, for a long time, served a set and relatively limited array of different functions for us. And over time, we’ve piled more and more of these emotional and psychological functions. So instead of turning to our close friends and other relatives for nights out on the town, or for deep, intimate disclosure, to a larger and larger extent, our spouse has replaced a lot of what we used to look to our broader social network to help us do.”35
In effect, a lot of today’s couples place all of their social eggs in one basket — in the form of their partner or spouse. According to one episode
of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, more men than women complain that they don’t have enough friends. As one interviewee laments, “I am married. And when my wife and I are together, there are things to do and not enough time in the day to do them with our friends. When she and I are apart for more than a day or two, I turn into a hermit.”36
When a marriage ends, as it does about half of the time in our society, both people in the relationship may end up scrambling to rebuild their community. Many men, however, never recover from a divorce in midlife. According to a University of California, Riverside study, “the risk of suicide among divorced men was over twice as likely as that of married men. Among women, however, there were no statistically significant differentials in the risk of suicide by marital status categories.”37
Research finds that unmarried men show vastly higher levels of loneliness than unmarried women.38 Why would this be?
One explanation is that, sadly, these lonely males tend to be constrained by cultural stereotypes and expectations of what it means to be a man. For example, one study found that “men who display symptoms of loneliness may be regarded more negatively than women who display the same symptoms.” Another study found that “both male and female judges were intolerant of depression in men but not in women.” And one more study found that “males denied feelings of distress more than females.”39
Whereas women tend to experience loneliness as depression, men tend to express their loneliness as anger.40 This may explain why so many American men seem to vent their rage through social media as well as mass media.
Not only can loneliness make you depressed or angry — it can kill you. It has been linked to a variety of health problems: increased risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, gene alterations that can weaken your immune system, and slower recovery from breast cancer.41 Brigham Young University Psychology Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad led a research team that examined 148 different studies. Their findings: People with stronger social relationships had a 50 percent lower mortality risk than study participants who had weaker social ties. The negative effect of isolation was even worse for a person’s health than physical inactivity or obesity.42
If you don’t want loneliness to kill you, what should you do?
•Limit screen time. San Diego State Psychology Professor Jean Twenge published research in 2017 which found that “adolescents who spent more time on new media (including social media and electronic devices such as smartphones) were more likely to report mental health issues, and adolescents who spent more time on nonscreen activities (in-person social interaction, sports/exercise, homework, print media, and attending religious services) were less likely.”43 I think this is good advice for all age groups.
•Do volunteer work. We discussed the benefits of volunteer work earlier in this chapter. No matter how lonely you are, or how unlovable you might feel, I’m sure you can show up at a nearby nonprofit, social, political, or religious organization, and ask, “How can I help out around here?” They’ll be delighted to see you!
•Take an ongoing class. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn French, dance the tango, do yoga, go for long hikes, or try kayaking. This sort of regular activity will immediately give you a cohort of fellow students, who might quickly become your new friends with a shared passion.
•Seek therapy. I’m happy to see that our society is gradually removing the taboos around mental health issues. I recall that when I attended Stanford’s business school, many students liked to give the impression that they were happy, smart, and successful. Only later did I learn that a full third of these same students sought some sort of psychological help during their two years there. I was one of them. The therapy helped me a lot.
•Open your mind about age and gender. Many men suffer from loneliness but don’t feel like they can share their feelings with others. Shankar Vedantam, the host of the Hidden Brain podcast, suggests, “Think how much better life could be … if we could be OK with being vulnerable, with being dependent on someone who’s not a spouse, if we didn’t look suspiciously at older men who are friendly or shame boys who talk about their love for their friends, if we expected friendships to endure, even as our lives change, so they don’t have to fade to silence.”44
•Create a good work/life balance. A Cigna study found that people who “work MORE than desired” or who “work LESS than desired” suffered more from loneliness.45 Never getting out of the house to go to work and see your colleagues can make you lonely. Working constantly and never having time for family or friends can make you lonely as well.
Writing Activity 4: Action Plan
Consider what you wrote about your relationships with
family, friends, community, and colleagues in Writing
Activity 3. What, if anything, do you need to do or change?
Based on what you wrote, I invite you to reach out to others and share your thoughts with them. If you miss their friendship, let them know. If you want to see them more, then schedule a time to get together. If you’re sad because you’re lonely, they’ll appreciate hearing this. They might be sad and lonely, too.
We spend much of our lives at work, so now let’s turn our focus toward relationships in the workplace.
Compassion at Work?
Compassion is not just for relationships outside of work. Compassion can help in the workplace, too, bringing purpose and meaning to what you do and helping you interact better with others. In an interview with Greater Good Magazine, University of Michigan Psychology Professor Jane Dutton said that “employees who’d experienced compassion at work saw themselves, their co-workers, and the organization in a more positive light. Statistically, they demonstrated more positive emotions, such as joy and contentment, and more commitment toward the organization.”46
Indeed, compassion is such an important part of leadership that one of the most popular courses at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is called “Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion.” The class integrates traditional contemplative practices such as meditation with current practices and research from psychology and neuroscience.
Ambitious people tend to set the bar high on their own performance, and beat themselves up when they don’t succeed. One way to address this is to practice self-compassion. Dr. Leah Weiss, who teaches the Stanford course, suggests the following approaches:
• “Take it personally.” Acknowledge your emotions and process them, rather than trying to suppress them.
•“Sit Uncomfortably with Vulnerability.” Take the “good” with the “bad.” Expose your weaknesses in order to give compassion to yourself and others.
•“Remember You’re Human.” You are not perfect. Nobody else is, either. Realize that even your greatest heroes have flaws, pain, and challenges.
•“Rewrite Negative Scripts.” Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a dear friend, giving encouragement rather than destructive criticism.
•“Stop the Worst-Case-Scenario Train.” Instead of obsessing over the worst possible thing that could happen, step back for a second and address the much more realistic challenge at hand.
•“Self-Soothe.” Instead of whipping yourself, pamper yourself with simple joys such as a cup of tea, a foot massage, or your favorite stroll in nature.47
But does all this compassion stuff help a company make more profits?
Yes! “It’s hard to think of a way in which compassion is not relevant to leadership, success and well-being” says Dr. Jamil Zaki, director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Laboratory, in an article about the Stanford course. “People with high empathy and compassion excel themselves. Folks who are managers or leaders who can connect with others succeed, and their bottom line is better.”48
What does this mean for your own bigger picture? In the next section, we’ll explore what you can do to find greater joy, meaning, and happiness in your work.
Chapter Three:
Work
One day in 2004, I was going to go to the funeral of Brian, a neighbor of mine in Cupertino, California. I had known him and his lovely wife for a couple of years. He was a smart, kind, and very successful marketing entrepreneur. Unfortunately, he lost his battle with cancer.
When I woke up the morning of the funeral, my plan was to drive to work, put in a few hours, then leave over the lunch hour to attend Brian’s service, which was taking place just 20 minutes away from my office. But suddenly my day became very busy — as was often the case — and at the last minute I decided not to go.
I don’t remember what I was working on that day. I barely remember what I was working on that month. But I’ll never forget that I missed out on the funeral of a friend, because I thought work was more important.
Of course, work is important. But it’s not everything. It’s helpful to understand what work can and cannot do for you, and how it fits with everything else that’s important in your life. This chapter explores the essential role that work contributes to your happiness — or unhappiness.
Your Work … Viewed from Your Deathbed
Bronnie Ware was an Australian palliative care nurse who helped patients suffer less as they faced chronic or terminal illnesses. She spent many hours with people right before they died. She wrote a blog post, which later became the book, The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.