If there’s one finding in the psychological literature that warrants your most urgent attention, I’d argue that this is it: Social relationships are our most powerful psychological currency; they are the key to our psychological health. There is no "I" in "Self." The "I" is always in "Society."

Human beings are social before they are anything else. Human interaction shapes our psychological landscape more than any other factor. As I argue in my new book, from which this post is adapted, psychological research has converged to support this conclusion. Bang for the buck, social connectivity is the most powerful predictor of well-being and life satisfaction, and the link is not merely correlational. Social connectivity creates well-being. Social isolation, by contrast, has been convincingly linked to higher mortality risk from all causes, on par with other well-established risk factors for mortality, such as smoking or alcoholism.

In 2017, psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University and colleagues summarized the literature on the effects of social connectedness to conclude that, “[a] robust body of scientific evidence has indicated that being embedded in high-quality close relationships and feeling socially connected to the people in one’s life is associated with decreased risk for all-cause mortality as well as a range of disease morbidities” (see also here). More recently, an extensive review of the research by Holt-Lunstad (2024)

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