The most recommended quality of life books

It’s hard to not want instant gratification, especially in our “get what you want, and now” culture. We see the shiny objects and opportunities for a quick win, and we chase them. Unfortunately, as Dorie Clark maps out in The Long Game, this frenetic behavior isn’t helpful if you want to achieve big goals. 

I discovered this book when life was starting to feel like a giant game of Whac-a-mole. Sure, I was achieving success, but I could never seem to find the time to get to a couple of long-range projects that really matter to me. 

The Long Game gave me several tangible tips for staying focused on my long-term goals in a world that pushes me, and all of us, to grab for those immediate, more shallow victories.

How does one even begin to describe Samantha Irby as a writer? She sets you off breathless from page one with her raunchy, articulate banter about her life and the complications of being a black, gay essayist.

While one may think they are nothing like her in personality or even life circumstances, the familiarity of the way she recounts her drinking, dating, and clubbing days is so spot on you can’t help but feel like you just pulled an all-nighter with her.

The best part is she is, at heart, an introverted writer and always contemplating the perplexities of living in Michigan, raising kids, and being married.

What is most bountiful about the book is the essay format, where one minute you are reading the cheeky Guide to Simple Home Repairs, and then next an essay called Lesbian Bed Death, which is a series of prompts that start off “Sure,… show more.

Tim Ferris is a genius. In his book, he describes how he crafted a lifestyle while building a very successful business. This book demonstrates how to make the most of your extremely busy day in commercial real estate and creates a "maximum value/productive capacity" that is crucial when getting started in a commercial investment career.

He discusses how he went from micro-managing everything to virtually managing nothing, all while traveling the globe and having some life-changing adventures. He is the undisputed king of outsourcing and taking back control of your life.

I read this book and started to implement some of his concepts immediately, and while I am not working 4 hours a week, I am not working 60-70 hours either; I am getting down there!

It's amazing how our thinking is influenced by a biased statement. This book shows that there is still hope when you look at the real facts.

The author asks a number of questions that require basic knowledge of everyday data that we read a lot about in the press. Questions such as: "How many people in the world are illiterate?" or "How many women are not educated?" are answered incorrectly by politicians, bankers, and scientists, those who determine our policy.

It is confronting to realize that more questions could have been answered correctly by simply guessing.

The British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have an American doctor friend who has a fascinating exercise for his first-year medical school students.

This doctor asks his students to write a speech detailing why the USA has the world’s best health. The students eagerly set about collecting all the relevant data and quickly find themselves absolutely shocked. Among major developed nations, the USA turns out to have the worst health.

Americans also turn out to be up to ten times more likely than people in other developed nations to get murdered or become drug addicts. What’s going on here? Inequality!

The more wealth concentrates at a society’s summit, Wilkinson and Pickett vividly show in this 2009 classic, the worse that society performs on the yardsticks that define basic health and decency. 

A large part of our environmental issues, including climate change, arises from the massive amount of materials needed for our consumption habits (and the resulting waste when we tire of our things). And we all consume a lot! James Wallman’s thesis is that both we and the environment would be better off if, instead of buying things, we had experiences. Experiences often (though not always, I might add—flying to your experiences is problematic) engender less material consumption and, topping it off, tend to make us happier and stay with us longer.

This book is the sparkling gem out of all the books I read this year. It also made it onto my shelf of books that I read and reread yearly or, in this case, throughout the year.

Stepping into 2023, I craved a space where I didn’t feel like my life was moving a million miles an hour. This book was a welcomed pause button, nudging me to slow down and appreciate the little things, helping me to truly see the value in living life in the moment.

The book is packed with real-world tips and practical advice (something we all love) from some of the world’s longest-living individuals and from centenarians in Okinawa. What I think makes this book so popular is that the authors have a way of discussing these deep concepts without making it feel like a dense lecture.

Every time I pick up the book to… show more.

Both classical political philosophers and today’s politicians agree that a good society is one in which people are happy or satisfied with their lives. Happiness, of course, depends on individual traits and events, but there are also societal factors that can be affected by political choices.

Benjamin Radcliff uses surveys of happiness and tests a number of explanatory factors in a series of impeccable statistical analyses. The surprising fact is that the question of which society makes its members most satisfied with life has a clear answer, which is…? No spoiler here – read the book!

I found this book to not only provide the current science of longevity but also lay out concrete guidelines and recommendations.

The first part of the book offers up-to-date science on metabolism, immune function, and neuroscience. He then moves on to contrast conventional assumptions about these topics with recent discoveries. The later part of the book features beliefs that he once held that are now understood as inaccurate.

Throughout the book, he uses himself as an example of someone who thought he knew about health and longevity and how he has recently discovered that some of his efforts were not helpful.   

Moments of joy are often all that can be had by people in the later stages of dementia when life is lived moment by forgotten moment. What people may not realize, though, is that while the memories of joyful moments (an ice cream cone, petting a dog, looking at pictures, taking a walk) may be quickly forgotten, the emotion of joy will linger.

Brackey tells us how to create moments of joy for our loved ones with dementia and that people with dementia have much to teach us about ourselves.