What Makes a Good Life According to Research? An Exciting Life Pays Best, but Not Alone

Ask what makes a good life according to research and you now get an oddly specific answer. Live an exciting one — varied, experience-rich, full — and you are likelier to report high life satisfaction than if you chase status, comfort or even sustainability. That is the headline result of a 2026 study in the Journal of Happiness Studies that sorted modern life into four competing projects and asked which project, actually lived, pays off (Springer).

It’s a strange fate for an ancient question. Aristotle insisted a good life could only be judged whole, over its full length — one swallow, he wrote, does not make a spring (Hacks Vitae). The modern version arrives as survey data from Germany, a flourishing index across 22 countries, and a single ladder question asked of about 1,000 people per country. The question survived. The instruments changed.

Four projects: prosperous cozy and sustainable life concepts tested against the exciting life

The study, by Jan Delhey, Stephanie Hess and Christian Schneickert at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, names four life conceptions, each a shared, culturally available answer to what a life is for. The prosperous life seeks economic and occupational success. The exciting life centres on enriching experiences and variety. Set against those, the prosperous cozy and sustainable life concepts respond to the downsides of affluence: the cozy life prizes relaxation, emotional comfort and mindfulness as a counter to acceleration, and the sustainable life aims at ecological sustainability (Springer).

Using cross-sectional data from the German GESIS Panel 2023, representing the adult German-speaking resident population, the authors separated two things people often blur: how much someone values a way of life, and how much they’ve actually achieved it. The distinction did the analytical work (Springer).

The exciting life offers the greatest satisfaction dividend — with one exception

The finding is clean enough to quote. The exciting life offers the greatest satisfaction dividend, followed by the cozy life, across the general population and within most sub-populations. Realising the prosperous life also paid. Realising the sustainable life was the exception — it yielded no significant dividend in the study’s results (Springer).

Two cautions belong beside that exception before anyone weaponises it. A null result in one German panel, on one evaluative measure, is not a verdict on a life oriented to ecology — the authors are measuring reported satisfaction, not worth. And cross-sectional data can’t prove direction: satisfied people may simply find it easier to live excitingly.

The study’s sharpest point is quieter. Living a valued life beat merely valuing it. Realisation held more weight than aspiration — which fits an old philosophical suspicion that a good life is a practice, not a preference. Epicurus, routinely misread as a pleasure-maximiser, defined pleasure as the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul, and warned against pleasures that bill you later (Hacks Vitae). Different century, similar discipline: what counts is the life as lived, checked over time.

Global Flourishing Study wealthier countries meaning and relationships problem

Zoom out and the German result gets company. The Global Flourishing Study wealthier countries meaning and relationships problem is now hard to ignore: in a longitudinal study of more than 200,000 participants in 22 countries, with data collected by Gallup, richer countries report higher life evaluation and financial security — but GDP per capita is negatively correlated with meaning and purpose, and many middle-income countries report stronger meaning, pro-social character and relationship quality than high-income ones (Harvard).

The contrast can be stark. Sweden reports the second-highest life evaluation of the 22 countries — and ranks 19th for meaning (Harvard). Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard, a principal investigator, argues that the single ladder question behind the World Happiness Report — rate your life from 0 to 10 — misses much of this, because people answering it often think about money and status rather than relationships (Harvard). The flourishing measure instead averages happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships and financial security (Harvard).

Other patterns cut across the map. People who attend religious services regularly report considerably higher flourishing in country after country, a descriptive result the researchers pair with analyses suggesting childhood attendance predicts adult flourishing. And in many countries the youngest adults, aged 18–24, are now the worst off, reversing the older expectation of a mid-life dip (Harvard). A separate review of 148 studies covering 308,849 people found stronger social relationships linked to a 50% greater likelihood of survival — with its authors careful to say causality is not easily established (Hacks Vitae).

Analysis: put the two studies together and a workable picture forms, humbler than either headline. Experiences beat aspirations. Money secures the floor and then stops explaining the rest. Meaning and relationships — the parts Aristotle would have recognised, the parts a single ladder question keeps missing — are where rich societies are quietly poor. The research doesn’t hand anyone a life. It does something more useful: it shows which of our measures were too small for the question.

Photo: solut_rai, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sources

1. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10902-026-01016-4.pdf
2. https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/post/insights-from-the-global-flourishing-study
3. https://www.hacksvitae.com/life-hack/what-makes-a-good-life-how-the-great-traditions-and-modern-research-answer-it