Sigmund Freud, when asked what a psychologically healthy person should be able to do, reportedly gave an answer so simple it almost sounds like a non-answer: lieben und arbeiten— to love and to work.

That’s it. Two things. No elaborate taxonomy, no clinical framework. Just those two.

When I first came across this in my psychology studies in my early 20s, I remember being mildly skeptical. It felt too clean. Too easy. The kind of thing that sounds profound until you sit with it for a moment and realize it could mean almost anything.

But that skepticism has steadily eroded the older I’ve gotten — not through reading more theory, but through watching people. Including myself. And the thing that keeps striking me isn’t how simple the idea is. It’s how precisely it describes the specific failure mode most modern people are living inside.

The asymmetry no one talks about

We don’t usually talk about love and work as a system. We treat them as separate domains — career ambitions over here, relationship goals over there — and optimize for each in isolation. Which makes it possible to do quite well on one axis and not notice for years that you’re quietly hollowing out on the other.

I’ve seen people who are professionally exceptional and privately lonely in a way that doesn’t fit neatly into any category. Not depressed, not unhappy exactly, just… thin. Like there’s less of them than there used to be. And I’ve seen the opposite — people with warm, full relational lives who feel restless and vaguely ashamed that their work doesn’t mean more to them.

What Freud was pointing at, I think, is that these two things aren’t separate needs. They’re two dimensions of the same underlying human requirement: to matter. To have your presence in the world mean something — to other people, and through the work you put into it.

What the research actually shows

The science on this has gotten harder to ignore. The Harvard Study of Adult Development — one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever conducted, tracking hundreds of men across eight decades — found that close relationships, more than money or fame or professional success, were what kept people happy and healthy as they aged. The quality of a person’s relationships at 50 was a better predictor of physical health at 80 than their cholesterol levels.

Meanwhile, the loneliness data is now alarming enough that the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on it in 2023 — comparing the health effects of social isolation to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analysis found that loneliness increases mortality risk by 26 percent.

These are not soft, feel-good findings. They’re mortality data. And they point at something Freud intuited without any of it: that you cannot route around the need for connection by achieving enough in other areas.

Why the modern version of this is particularly dangerous

What strikes me about our particular cultural moment is that we’ve built an entire infrastructure for optimizing work — productivity systems, goal frameworks, hustle culture, the whole apparatus — while leaving the love side almost entirely to chance. We track our output in granular detail and leave our relationships to run on whatever fuel is left at the end of the day.

The result is a generation of people who are more professionally capable and more quietly starving than perhaps any before them. Not unhappy in a way that’s easy to name. Just subtly unwell. Successful and thin.

And the reason Freud’s formulation still cuts through, I think, is that it refuses to let you off the hook with partial credit. You don’t get a full life by maxing out one dimension. The emptiness on the neglected side doesn’t disappear just because you’re busy. If anything, the busier you are, the louder it eventually gets.

What I’ve come to think

I’m not going to end this with a prescription. Partly because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t know love matters — they do — and partly because I’m still working this out myself. The skeptical psychology student in me still wants to push back a little on anything that feels too neat.

But I keep coming back to the specific word Freud intuited without any of it.

Not success and love. Not achievement and family.

Work and love.

Work in the sense of effort, craft, something you put yourself into. Love in the sense of actual investment in other people — not the idea of connection, but the daily, inconvenient practice of it.

Maybe the surprise isn’t that he got it right. Maybe it’s that we keep acting surprised when the alternative doesn’t work.