The source of your happiest and saddest moments is the same…

October 15, 2023.

About a dozen years ago, hundreds of humans were asked about their most delightful and depressing life events..

It’s an interesting question…when scanning the arc of your life up till now, which scenarios have given you the most suffering — and which the most satisfaction?

In this age of unbridled narcissism, you’d think it was your significant, individual achievements, like getting into Harvard, or acing the law boards, or individual failures, like failing an exam, or getting terminated from a job.

But according to research from Buffalo, it’s the highs and lows of social relationships that provide the highest highs and lowest lows that humans experience.

Dr. Shira Gabriel, whose study this finding is based on, summed it up:

“Most of us spend much of our time and effort focused on individual achievements such as work, hobbies and schooling.

However this research suggests that the events that end up being most important in our lives, the events that bring us the most happiness and also carry the potential for the most pain, are social events — moments of connecting to others and feeling their connections to us.”

How the study was conducted…

• Across a series of interviews, humans were asked about the most positive and negative events in their lives.
  
  College students had a tendency to describe intimate moments with their significant other as being the happiest of their lives. Middle-aged humans also did the same.

• For the young students, and the middle-aged, they cited academic, and career success respectively.

However, here was the major take away from this study…whether people were college students or middle-aged, they both recalled that life-events that were related to others, offered both the highest and lowest moments they’d ever experienced.

Dr. Gabriel explained that these were…

“…the moments when close relationships began or ended; when people fell in love or found a new friend; when a loved one died or broke their hearts.

In short, it was the moments of connecting to others that touched peoples’ lives the most.”

Final Thoughts

Intimacy is hard. Your desire to connect with other humans may either thrill or kill your soul. But most of us, in fumbling through our memories, recognize the awful truth, that the source of our most cherished and darkest memories were how we treated, and were treated by other humans.

Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Lisa M. Jaremka , Shira Gabriel & Mauricio Carvallo (2011) What Makes Us Feel the Best Also Makes Us Feel the Worst: The Emotional Impact of Independent and Interdependent Experiences, Self and Identity, 10:1, 44-63, DOI: 10.1080/15298860903513881