Meditate on this idea. You’re a father of two boys. The time you spend now building your relationships with them is enjoyable in the moment and clearly the right thing to do, but it also means you are helping creating superior happiness for them far in the future, when they are perhaps 75 years old. Their joy amplifies and radiates. This is how we bring peace to the world.
What makes for a good life?
Vaillant concludes that a loving childhood is one of the best predictors of mid and late-life riches: “We found that contentment in the late seventies was not even suggestively associated with parental social class or even the man’s own income. What it was significantly associated with was warmth of childhood environment, and it was very significantly associated with a man’s closeness to his father.”