Joe Gentry

The call came late on a Friday afternoon, in August 2024. “Joe, how would like some shoes?” 2,500 pair of high-end retail shoes and boots later, we had the opportunity to distribute needed footwear throughout our community. Why United Way of Northeast Michigan? Why now? Connections and relationships! (Since this initial shipment we’ve received subsequent gifts of assorted apparel and additional boots & shoes.) Again, connections and relationships.

A number of years ago a fellow member of the Human Resources group I belonged to invited me to apply for his position with a large steel company upon his retirement. A career enhancing opportunity. Why me? Connections and relationships.

A staff member at Alpena Community College reached out to me while working at Besser Company and asked if I would be able to fill a vacancy teaching a daytime economics class. With the approval of my superiors at Besser, I embarked on a 15-year journey adjuncting as a nighttime economics instructor. One of my most enriching responsibilities. Again, why me? Connections and relationships.

Sitting on the porch of a northern Michigan restaurant, my wife reached to a couple dining next to us on the impressiveness of the food they had ordered, which led to a very interesting and fulfilling conversation that allowed us to find out more about each other. Why? Connection and relationships.

Harvard University embarked on a study of human development 87 years ago, in 1938, in an attempt to discern the habits of healthy and sound men. In the study, 268 Harvard undergraduates from the classes of 1939 through 1944 were recruited in search of young men who could “paddle their own canoe,” among them John F. Kennedy and future Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee.

The college students were studied from every conceivable angle. They were interviewed for more than 20 hours each by psychiatrists; family histories were explored; parents were interviewed about the student’s childhoods and they were given a barrage of physiological tests. Insulin tolerance was assessed as well as respiratory function as they were treadmill tested to the point of exhaustion. They were measured from head to toe in pseudoscientific pursuit of a connection between body shape and personality. After leaving college, a majority of the men continued to submit to medical exams and completed lengthy questionnaires that asked about their lives and their state of mind. Once a decade, a researcher would travel to interview them in person.

In the 1970s, researchers brought another group of 465 men into the study, from Boston, who came from disadvantaged backgrounds. These men had participated in interviews while they were still boys in 1939. Researchers were hoping to compare fates of the original group to this group of young men from the community who had been labeled juvenile delinquents.

Some 30 years after the study started, researcher George Valliant switched the emphasis away from a search for the inherent qualities of those considered the best and brightest toward deeper questions about how people change over time and what makes them happy and healthy in the long run. In 2001, when the men were in their late 70s and early 80s, Valliant published some of his most significant findings: He found that for both groups of men, one of the best predictors of the men’s overall well-being in their old age was how happily married they were at age 50.

Robert Waldinger became the fourth steward of the Harvard study, was moved by the consistency of his own research and work that preceded him — the thousands of questionnaires, saliva samples, genetic analyses, cholesterol reports, dental records, I.Q. tests, wide-ranging interviews and brain scans. Much of it added up to one key insight: “The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this — Good relationships keep us happier and healthier, Period,” he said in a TED Talk in 2015. Strong, long-term relationships with spouses, family and friends built on deep trust — not achievement, not fortune or fame — were what predicted well-being.

Julie Rohrer, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, in 2016 tried to find a rigorous way of looking at the connection between happiness and social relationships. She analyzed a survey that asked 2,000 Germans to write down ways they thought could make themselves happier, or at least as happy in the future. She separated the answers into “nonsocial” (“get a better job”) or “social” answers (“spend more time with family and friends”). Rohrer found that people who proposed a social goal had taken more steps toward that goal and were happier a year later. She concluded that “socially engaged pursuits predict increase in life satisfaction” as published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science.

At the same time, other researchers were finding, in high-quality and replicated studies, even fleeting social interactions could improve happiness. Researchers Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, University of Chicago, conducted an experiment in which they asked people to interact with strangers on public transit – to have a moment of human connection – and found commuters seemed to get a mood boost from the exercise.

Stanford researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky found that finding purpose in serving others, spending time with others – all points toward the same thing, “After all these years, it hit me, the reason that all these interventions are working is because they make people feel more connected to others. So, when I write a gratitude letter to my mom, it makes me feel more connected to my mom. When I do an act of kindness, it makes me feel more connected to the person I’m helping, or just humanity as a whole. Yes, you could go running, and that would make you happier, and meditation doesn’t necessarily have to be about other people. But I would say that 95% of things that are effective in making people happy and that have been shown to be true through happiness interventions are because they make people feel more connected to other people.”

She continues, “If someone were to ask me what’s the one thing you could do tomorrow to be happier, that’s my answer: having a conversation with someone — or a deeper conversation than you normally do.”

Social connections are good for us. My own experiences have improved and enhanced my life.

Good relationships impact your body and your brain.

The quality of close relationships is important. Wealth, fame and working harder are often not the answer. Relationships and human connections are the path to happiness.

Joe Gentry is the executive director of the United Way of Northeast Michigan. Reach him at 989-354-2221 or jgentry@unitedwaynemi.org.