Your Neighbors Are Your World
If there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, it’s that life is local. Research from the World Happiness Report backs this up.
A few years into my marriage, my young family relocated to my childhood hometown of Atlanta. After a couple of decades moving all over the country for a series of new schools or job opportunities, I felt it was time to pick a place and put down some roots.
But after several months back home, things weren’t gelling socially quite the way I had hoped. So I called my former leadership coach, Alpesh Bhatt, and confessed that I just wasn’t finding the community I had hoped to rediscover. Al, who seemed to know me well from the first day we met, sighed and reminded me, “My friend, one does not find community. One creates community.”
He was, of course, right. I had been waiting for my new community to find me, but I had done little to reach out and assemble one of my own.
I thought of Al last week as I was speaking to John Helliwell on my podcast, Crazy Money. Helliwell is the editor of the World Happiness Report (WHR), an annual study evaluating 156 countries by how well citizens believe their lives are going. Given the downright scary issues facing us right now, I asked him, “What steps can I take to improve my…
