What does it take to be happy? Three simple and surprising questions may hold the answer, research found. While most of us seek more money and greater achievement as paths to happiness, these questions are all about connection. They’re more strongly associated with self-measured life satisfaction than either money or success. That’s according to the 2025 World Happiness Report published by Oxford University and based on a study of people in 147 countries. The questions are:
How often do you eat meals with other people, rather than alone?
Do you generally expect strangers to be kind and trustworthy?
How often do you do things for other people, such as making donations, volunteering, or helping strangers?
This may all sound like wishful thinking, but the research shows that, while economic security and career satisfaction contribute to happiness, these prosocial factors make a much bigger difference. If you want to be happy,
1. Eat with others
This is a rare instance where the report’s happiness advice coincides with frequently offered success advice to never have lunch alone. Lunching at your desk can mean missing out on valuable opportunities for networking or relationship building. It turns out it can also mean missing the chance to be happier by building a stronger social connection. Research suggests that we often expect spending time alone will make us happier than being with others, especially people we don’t know well. But then when we do spend time with others, it makes us happier than we expected.
The research looked at whether subjects ate with others or alone for lunch and dinner (it didn’t consider breakfast). Happiness appeared to peak at a whopping 13 lunches or dinners with others per week, which is more meal sharing than most Americans do. But it showed that any amount of eating with others will increase your happiness. So go ahead and grab yourself a lunch or dinner date, even if the person you invite isn’t a valuable business connection. It will make you feel more connected, and boost your happiness, too.
2. Expect strangers to be trustworthy
If you dropped your wallet on the street, how likely is it that someone would return it to you with the money still inside? World Happiness Report researchers found that most people underestimate how often they would get their wallets back in this scenario. They also found that those who thought the wallet return was likelier also tended to be happier.
But while eating with others would be an excellent business practice, trusting strangers probably isn’t. In a world where not every stranger is trustworthy, how do you balance the benefits of trusting strangers against the very real risks of trusting the wrong one?
But consider how many breakout companies are built on the outlandish idea that you can indeed trust strangers. Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, eBay, and other online marketplaces let strangers buy and sell from each other. Uber, Rover, and other such companies encourage us to put our safety, or that of our beloved pets, into the hands of people we’ve never met. Why do we trust these strangers? Because other strangers left reviews saying we could. It seems illogical and yet it works.
Does this mean you should blindly accept business propositions from people you don’t know without any due diligence? Of course not. You also should not leave your wallet in the street and assume someone will bring it back to you. But if you tend to automatically distrust anyone you don’t know, try to change that mindset. It will make you happier. It might make the people you do business with happier too.
3. Be kind to others
The report looked at three types of benevolent acts: donating, volunteering, and helping strangers. “The well-being benefits of benevolent acts depend on why and how people engage in them. Both helpers and recipients experience greater happiness from caring and sharing when they do so in the context of caring connections, choice, and clear positive impact,” the researchers write.
For one thing, choice is important. If you hear about a disaster in your area and feel inspired to make a donation to help, that’s likelier to make you happy than, say, feeling compelled to donate to a charity because your biggest customer or your boss has asked you to. And both giver and receiver of a benevolent act benefit more when they can see a clear positive impact. If you make a donation or volunteer your time to help rebuild a local park, and then spend time there watching people enjoy the park, you’ll get a bigger happiness boost. If the people there know you helped out and can thank you, they will too.
Performing benevolent acts gets you the biggest happiness result for the smallest effort. Being kind to other people doesn’t just make you happy, it makes them happy too, World Happiness Report researchers found. That may inspire those people to their own acts of kindness, inspiring others to be kind, and so on. Pretty soon, you might have a self-perpetuating happiness machine. That could benefit any organization or community.
—Minda Zetlin
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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