My friend Trace told me a story about showing up to a wedding — the wrong wedding. He sat down, smiled at strangers, looked around for a familiar face, and slowly realized he didn’t know the bride. Or the groom. He had walked into someone else’s party and pulled up a chair. Right venue - wrong wedding - wrong room.

Then I sat with my friend Shaina, who was in a season of feeling stuck. We talked for a while. Toward the end, I heard myself say it out loud: “Is it possible you’re in the wrong rooms?” I don’t know why but I started to cry. My heart went out to her. She wasn’t being supported but constantly being torn down just for being who she was.

Then - since all good things come in three’s - a few days later I was sitting at an investing conference. It hit me like a ton of bricks - what if I've been in the wrong rooms? Rooms where my voice got smaller. Rooms where my faith got quieter. Rooms where the version of me that showed up wasn’t actually me. Rooms where I wasn’t being challenged or cheered for being who I am.

Three different stories. Same question hiding underneath all of them.

That’s not a comfortable question. Most of us would rather not ask it, because the answer might cost us something. A new friendship. An honest conversation. An exit.

But I’ve started to think we duck this question at our own expense.

We worry about microplastics in our water. We worry about seed oils in our food. We worry about screens, sleep scores, cortisol spikes, and what’s hiding in our cleaning products. All valid subjects to explore…

And meanwhile, the strongest predictor of how long we live, how well we age, and how happy we feel might be sitting across from us at dinner.

Researchers at Harvard have been following the same group of men since 1938 — almost ninety years. Careers, marriages, bank accounts, cholesterol panels, kids, divorces, regrets. The longest study of human flourishing ever run.

Their headline finding? It isn’t money. It isn’t fame. It isn’t IQ or a clean diet. The single biggest factor in a long, happy life is the quality of your close relationships.

Robert Waldinger, who runs the study now, puts it bluntly in his TED talk. Loneliness kills. Good relationships protect us — not just our minds, but our bodies.

Other research backs that up in ways that should stop us in our tracks. A meta-analysis from Brigham Young University looked at 148 studies and concluded that being chronically lonely is roughly as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Worse than obesity. Worse than physical inactivity.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness a public health epidemic — on par with smoking and the opioid crisis.

If you cared about your health enough to drink filtered water, you should care this much about who you spend your Tuesday nights with.

Here’s what nobody tells us about the ‘wrong room’. It doesn’t feel like a disaster. It feels like fine. It feels like you’re slowly turning the volume down on your own life and not noticing.

You may laugh at jokes that aren’t really funny. You shrink your dreams to fit the table. You start to believe that your hopes were a little too big - too audacious. That your faith was a little too earnest. That your ideas were a little too out there.

You don’t lose yourself in one night. You lose yourself in a hundred small Thursday nights.

The opposite is also true. The right room makes you bigger. You walk in tired and walk out with ideas. You hear someone else’s story and remember your own. Hope feels less embarrassing. Goals feel less ridiculous. You start to believe again.

That’s not soft stuff. That’s biology. Hopeful, supportive relationships actually move our nervous systems toward calm, our hearts toward steadier rhythms, and our brains toward better sleep.

There’s a Japanese idea I keep coming back to. Ikigai — your reason for being. The thing you’re here for. Your purpose and calling.

It lives at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can build a life around. It’s about purpose. It’s about potential. The longest-lived people on earth talk about it constantly. They wake up with a reason.

But here’s the part that took me a while to see. You don’t find your ikigai alone.

You find it surrounded by people who can see what you can’t see in yourself. People who name the gift before you knew it was a gift. People who keep nudging you toward the thing you were made for, even when you keep ducking or acting like you don’t know.

If the people around you aren’t pushing you toward your purpose, they may be quietly pushing you away from it. Most of the time without meaning to. Can I get an amen?!

Who in your life makes you feel more alive after a conversation, not less? Write the names down. Then reach out to one of them this week.

Whose work do you actually respect? Not whose feed you follow — whose life you admire. Get closer to those people. Buy their book. Show up to their thing. Ask them a question.

Where are you shrinking? In what room do you make yourself smaller to keep the peace? Where others think you’re ‘too much’. You don’t have to blow it up. But you do have to notice it.

Who are you bringing into a new room? Connection is a two-way street. You can be the right room for someone else this week. Mentor a younger version of yourself. Make the introduction. Open the door.

What is one offline conversation you can have this week that would challenge you? Phones down. No camera. No comments. Just two humans, a long table, and the truth.

I’ve spent years optimizing the things I could measure. Sleep. HRV. Glucose. Macros. All worth doing.

But the older I get, the more I think the most important health habit might be the people I share a meal with. The voice on the other end of a long phone call. The friend who tells me the truth when I need it.

I’m not writing this from a podium. I’m in the same trenches as you. I’m asking these questions in my own life right now.

So, are you in the right room?

If you’re not — it’s not too late to walk into a different one.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

Here are a few topics I think you’ll love if you haven’t checked them out before:

• How to Find More Joy

• The Vital Role of Empathy in Enhancing Health and Relationships

• The Art and Science of Flourishing

I write this newsletter each week because I feel my best when my body, mind and soul are all healthy. I want the same for you. If you feel like you’ve seen something valuable here, please do me a favor and forward this newsletter to a friend or let me know what you think by replying to this email or texting me - (310) 879-8441

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, is provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition.

Here are links to things that have helped me improve my health:

Whoop - Track your HRV and REM Sleep

Function Health - Optimize Your Health via 160+ BioMarkers

Sources

Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Harvard Study of Adult Development.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7).

Holt-Lunstad, J., et al. (2015). Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237.

U.S. Surgeon General (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Buettner, D. (2017). The Blue Zones of Happiness. National Geographic.