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David Tian, Ph.D., is Private Advisor to Founders, High Achievers, and Senior Leaders, Brown University Certified Leadership & Performance Coach, Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (L3), ICF Certified Coach, devoted husband, proud father, and former university professor — helping build lives of connection, meaning, and fulfillment through Asian philosophy, psychological insight, and relational depth.
LATEST FROM OUR BLOG
Why Successful People Cannot Be Alone With Themselves: What the Daoists, Aristotle, and Seneca Understood
The founder is forty-three, single, and has not been alone with himself for fifteen years. The exit closed seven months ago. The number was good. But the feeling on the other side has been a low background hum of dread he cannot trace to anything specific, because nothing specific is wrong. What he cannot do, and has not been able to do since he was young, is sit in a room with no outward goals and be ok with himself. The Daoist tradition, Aristotle, and Seneca all reached the same conclusion from different starting points more than two thousand years ago. The capacity he never built is precisely the activity in which a life worth living gets built.
Is Marriage Worth It? Why the Wedding Is the Wrong Question.
You have been with your partner for years. The two of you are starting to think about a wedding, or your families are, or you are wondering whether you need one at all. The pressure of the day already feels out of proportion to anything else in your life together. A hundred thousand dollars, a guest list, a venue, a date. Before you decide whether marriage is worth it, you should know that almost everyone considering it is confusing two completely different things. Until you see the difference, the question of whether to marry will keep feeling impossible. Once you do see it, the pressure of that day dissipates, and the answer becomes clear.
Is Marriage Worth It for Successful People? The Data Says It Depends Entirely on Whom You Marry
Most successful people in midlife look at marriage as a financial risk, and they are half right. The wrong spouse can cost you decades of your peace and half of what you built. The mistake is to blame marriage. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study of adult life ever conducted, found that married men lived seven to seventeen years longer than unmarried ones. But the same research shows that men in unhappy marriages carry a twenty-one percent higher risk of dying from any cause than men in happy ones. A good marriage adds years. A bad one takes them. The question is not whether to marry. It is whether you have found the partner whose partnership in your life over the next decades would give you back at least double what you brought to them.