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What Americans Think Is Essential for a Fulfilling Life

What Americans Think Is Essential for a Fulfilling Life

Last updated on: October 28, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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What Americans Think Is Essential for a Fulfilling Life 2026-10-26T09:55:01-04:00 Gene Veith

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An article by Rachel Wolfe in the Wall Street Journal on what Americans are doing to find friends has the following sentence: “Yet more people see good friends as essential to a fulfilling life than those who feel the same about marriage and kids, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life.”

That brought me up short. Americans think friends are more important than family? So I tracked down that study and found more things that brought me up short.

The study asks, “What is essential for a fulfilling life?” That’s not the same as “important.” “Essential” means absolutely necessary. The survey allowed for four responses: “Essential,” “Important, but not essential,” “Not important,” and “Refused to answer.”

“Having good friends” indeed came in at number one, with 58% of respondents saying this is essential; 36% said it is important, but not essential; and only 5% said it is not important.

Next came “Having a Job or Career You Enjoy”: 56% call this essential; 40% say it’s important, but not essential; and 4% say it’s not important.

Far below at number three came “Being in a Committed Romantic Relationship”: 35% consider this essential; 51% say it’s important but not essential; and 14% say it’s not important at all.

An even more distant number four is “Having children”: only 27% call this essential; 47% call this important, but not essential; and 25% consider having children not important at all.

Below that, at number five is “Being married”: 25% call this essential; 49% call it important but not essential; and 25% call it not important.

Nearing the bottom at number six is “Earning a lot of money”: 16%, essential; 68%, important but not essential; and 15% not important.

The very bottom at number seven is “Having a lot of money” (the distinction with #6 apparently being “having it” vs. working for it): 15%, essential; 69%, important but not essential; 14% not important.

So it would indeed appear that having friends and having a good job are indeed considered more essential to a fulfilling life, far above marriage and having children.

Now I would agree that it is possible to have a fulfilling life without being married and without having children. It is also possible to have a fulfilling life without having a good job and without having good friends. This is because what really makes life fulfilling is having a life with meaning and value. That is to say, what makes life fulfilling is religious faith.

The researchers did not even give religious faith as an option! It must have never occurred to them! The respondents did acknowledge that money can’t buy happiness, or fulfillment, which is a significant rebuke to materialism. They see that human relationships are more important than wealth, though “having a job or career you enjoy,” while perhaps bearing faint witness to vocation, is more oriented to personal satisfaction (a career “you enjoy”) rather than to loving and serving one’s neighbor, as the doctrine of vocation requires.

And when it comes to human relationships, friends require much less of a commitment than marriage and parenthood do. Friends connote fun and good times. Maybe that’s what nearly six out of ten Americans consider essential. Not to denigrate friendship. (See Proverbs 17:17; 18:24; and 26:6, 9-10.) But it does sound like lots of Americans are denigrating being married and having children, which I can’t comprehend, given how much my own marriage and my own children make my life fulfilling.

But here is the big reveal about this study. The report of the study, written up by Daniel A. Cox, notes a profound discrepancy:

These responses reveal a profound dissonance between what Americans say they value and how they live. According to the public, the two things most essential to a fulfilling life are having good friends and job or career that they enjoy. But most of us rate our jobs as being either mediocre or bad. And if judged by how we spend our time, then we appear to place vanishingly little importance on friendship. According to the American Time Use Survey, Americans spend less time cultivating and maintaining friendships than any other relationship.

And the Wall Street Journal article on friendship is primarily about how many Americans, despite how important friendship is to them, just don’t have friends. The title of Wolfe’s article is How to Make a Friend: Tell the Whole World You’re Looking for One, with the deck, “Admitting you’re lonely used to carry social stigma. Now people are baring their souls in classifieds-like posts in search of platonic connections.”

People used to take out “personal ads” in newspapers in an effort to find a romantic partner. I suppose those have mostly been supplanted by dating apps. But today people are taking out the equivalent of “personal ads” online in an effort to find a friend.

Just as they apply for jobs, they are posting “friendship applications” on TikTok. They go to local subreddits, post topics such as “This is going to seem sad, but I really need to find some friends,” and tell all about themselves. And Wolfe tells about how such efforts have indeed brought about friendships. And now there are apps like dating-apps to find friends.

She offers possible reasons why finding friends has become so difficult these days:

Americans spend less time socializing, and have fewer close friends, than they did a decade ago. Social psychologists cite a decline in “third spaces” outside of home and work, screens monopolizing our time and an adult trajectory where marriage, parenthood and homeownership arrive later, if ever.

One of those “third spaces,” she neglects to say–where friendships come naturally, where future spouses often meet each other, where families with children get to know each other, and where one can find the key to a fulfilling life– is church.

Photo: Friends by Geoffrey Chandler via Flickr, CC by 2.0

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