For many people, there is one special person to whom they feel closest—often a romantic partner, but sometimes a best friend or family member. Significant others are the first people we turn to when we’re suffering, and their support can benefit not only our mental health but also our physical health:

What are they good for? Friendship helps us meet our needs for belonging and our need to feel known and appreciated for who we are. It also allows us to know and understand others more deeply than we can know strangers: Research suggests that our friends bring out the best in us when it comes to empathic accuracy, or the ability to know and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings.

Professional contacts can play an integral role in helping us launch or advance our careers. You might learn that your dream employer is hiring through a post from a seemingly random LinkedIn contact, or meet your future business partner through a colleague at a conference. Researchers have referred to these kinds of ties, as well as other types of looser connections such as neighborhood acquaintances, as bridging capital. Bridging capital may involve weaker ties, but the breadth and diversity of these ties can expose us to new ideas and opportunities beyond what is available in our narrower inner circles.

A lifelong friendship usually feels different than a casual acquaintance you make at a networking event or a friend you acquire on Facebook. Yet according to research, we need both weak ties and strong ties in order to build “social capital,” which researchers define as the web of relationships in our life and the tangible and intangible benefits we derive from them.

Prioritizing positivity: Deliberately organizing your day-to-day life so that it contains situations that naturally give rise to positive emotional experiences. Laura Catalino, Sara Algoe and Barbara Fredrickson's study compares pursuing happiness to prioritizing positivity, and their results suggest that prioritizing positivity is a more promising approach to boosting happiness. 

Hedonic adaptation (aka the "hedonic treadmill"): Our ability to adapt to changes in our life circumstances or sensory experiences. Research suggests many of us have a remarkable ability to get used to things that might initially bring us pleasure, such as getting married or winning the lottery, and even to eventually return to our happiness set point after a traumatic accident.

Set point theory: The theory that we each have a relatively stable level of happiness that is largely determined by our genes and personality. Though we might experience some fluctuations in happiness due to events big and small, this theory holds that we eventually return to our basic set point of happiness.

Impact bias: The tendency to overestimate how an event or experience in the future will affect our emotional well-being, for better or worse. For instance, we often underestimate our ability to recover from difficult experiences

Affective forecasting: The process of making predictions about how you will feel in the future. According to Daniel Gilbert, who coined the term "affective forecasting" with his colleague Timothy Wilson, affective forecasting is simply "the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they’ll like and what they won’t like." However, as Emiliana explained in the previous video, we are often poor judges in the present of what will bring us happiness in the future, causing us to look for happiness in the wrong places.

Finally, as we think about the relationship between the structure of information and cultural production and liberal society, there is the question of how the transition to more commons-based production will affect social justice, or equality. Here in particular it is important to retain a cautious perspective as to how much can be changed by reorganizing our information production system. Raw poverty and social or racial stratification will not be substantially affected by these changes. Education will do much more than a laptop and a high speed Internet connection in every home, though these might contribute in some measure to avoiding increasing inequality in the advanced economies, where opportunities for both production and consump- tion may increasingly be known only to those connected.

Autonomy, or individual freedom, is the second value that I sug- gest can be substantially served by increasing the portion of our in- formation environment that is a commons and by facilitating non- market production. Autonomy means many things to many people, and some of these conceptions are quite significantly opposed to oth- ers. Nonetheless, from an autonomy perspective the role of the indi- vidual in commons-based production is superior to property-based production almost regardless of the conception one has of that value.