đź’ˇThe Upside of Aging: Discovering the Happiness Curve
IoNTELLIGENCE is the Playbook for Professional Success, Personal Transformation, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
- 🚨 The Big Idea: It’s normal to experience a dip in life satisfaction in midlife. But the good news is you might be even happier at 70 than at 30.
- 🔧 What To Do Next: Applying this knowledge to work, health, and life.
- 🔬 Go Deeper & Get Smart Fast: Read “The Happiness Curve” and learn about 13 areas where you improve with age.
đź“– Reading Time: 8 Minutes
47.2.
That is, apparently, the age of peak midlife misery.
Almost twenty years ago, social scientist David Blanchflower published a paper finding that “well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people’s mid-to-late 40s.”
That’s the bad news. The good news is that he also identified a U-shaped happiness curve whereby people’s satisfaction in life starts high, dips mid-life, and climbs after that. The best news is that the same studies show that personal contentment peaks not, as you might imagine, in your youthful twenties but in the surprising seventies and beyond.
I read Jonathan Rauch’s masterful book on this topic as I hit 45 and now make a point of gifting it to friends and family as they enter mid-life. If you read that last sentence and think this issue doesn’t apply to you, the “middle-age” category is bigger than you believe. According to the American Psychological Association, mid-life spans from 36 to 64.
So, if you were born in 1988 or earlier, I hate to break it to you, but you’re middle-aged.
This life stage has come to be associated with lost youth, declining health, increased responsibilities, unfulfilled dreams, and — most ridiculously — buying overpriced red sports cars. All is not lost, however. Science tells us that only part of this story is true, while it’s not nearly as inevitable or permanent as we assume. Moreover, if you do a few things right, there’s an excellent chance that your later decades will be your happiest ones.
Read on to find out how to sidestep crisis and achieve contentment in midlife.
🚨 The Big Idea
The Happiness Curve is shorthand for a persuasive idea that charts the trajectory of satisfaction across our lifespan. This arc suggests that happiness tends to dip in midlife, bottoming out in our 40s or 50s, before ascending again as we age. The distinctive U-shape pattern offers a reassuring message: while many of us might face a slump, a natural resurgence of happiness awaits us in the later stages of life.
People in their 50s are happier than people in their 40s, and perhaps even more shocking, people in their 60s are happier still.
Source: https://retireby40.org/how-i-hacked-the-happiness-curve/
The reasons behind the Happiness Curve are psychological, social, and economic.
As people progress through the middle of their lives, they often face increased responsibilities (big jobs, young kids, elderly parents) while confronting existential questions concerning regrets and roads not taken.
These challenges often lead to a temporary decline in happiness. However, as people age, they develop more effective coping mechanisms, adjust their expectations, and become more adept at finding contentment in their circumstances.
This shift in perspective is crucial in propelling the upward trajectory of happiness in later years. It’s not so much that life improves objectively; instead, we naturally focus more on what we’re thankful for and less on what we think we’re missing. Jonathan Rauch puts it simply: “Gratitude comes easier.”
This pattern has been observed globally, in both sexes, across various cultures and demographics, indicating a universal trend in how our life satisfaction matures over time. It’s even been detected in great apes! This suggests that there is an aspect to this phenomenon that is fundamental to humans (and similar primates). For some reason, evolution has wired into us a tendency to experience malaise in mid-life, so keep that in mind the next time you find yourself frustrated and in your forties …
The Neuroscience of the Happiness Curve
Recent research provides further insight into the biological basis of the Happiness Curve, emphasizing changes in brain chemistry and function as we age. For instance, the brain’s dopamine system, linked to reward and motivation, changes over time. Younger adults may experience happiness in pursuing goals and rewards, while older ones find more joy in social connections and emotional well-being. Additionally, the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in emotional regulation, continues to develop into advanced adulthood, allowing older people to become wiser and better manage stress and negative emotions.
One reason is the feel-good brain chemical oxytocin, widely known for its role in social attachment, empathy, gratitude, and contentment. Studies have found that the release of oxytocin increases with age and that people who release more oxytocin are kinder to others and more satisfied with their lives.
The Bottom Line: We need to realize that midlife dissatisfaction is, for the large majority of people, not a crisis but a natural and healthy transition.
That said, there are proactive steps that you can take to navigate this adjustment and accelerate into the upward part of the Happiness Curve.
🔧 What To Do Next
Rate your life (and see where you rank).
First, assess your life satisfaction on a scale from 0 (completely dissatisfied) to 10 (completely satisfied). How did you score?
In the US, 80% of people rank between 7 and 9, and anything below 6 is rare enough to indicate severe misery. In the rest of the world, the average global response is in the 5 to 6 range.
This quick exercise will help you benchmark yourself against others (which is particularly useful since we tend to assume that everyone else is happier than we are).
Here’s another useful reference point: for almost everyone, going from age 20 to 45 decreases life satisfaction — at least temporarily. If you’ve hit 4-oh no! and are feeling down, welcome to the pity party. We’re all here with you!
Thankfully, this drop is not permanent. Why? In part because it’s not too late to have a second act (or third or fourth …)
Reinvent yourself. Start a business (seriously).
A pioneering study of entrepreneurship found that the average age of a business founder in the United States is 41.9. To put that into context, that’s four years older than AI wunderkind Sam Altman is today.
Older people don’t just start businesses more than many realize; they also succeed at creating highly profitable companies more often than their younger peers. Older founders consistently have higher probabilities of success, at least until the age of 60, according to social scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz:
“A 60-year-old startup founder has a roughly three times higher chance of creating a valuable business than a 30-year-old startup founder.”
So don’t stop believing in your entrepreneurial dreams because you’re not wearing a hoodie (not that there is anything wrong with that!) or currently dropping out of Harvard (like Zuck and Bill Gates famously did).
Realize that aging is not a story of decline. These are some of the things that get better as we get older.
I know the narrative: your looks, health, and fitness all decline as you age. But it’s simply not accurate: my personal hero, George Clooney (the man who made grey hair cool!), was more popular at 40 than 30; Novak Djokovic is still the number 1 tennis player in the world as of this writing despite the onset of competitors in their teens and twenties chasing him.
Those are outliers, you might say. However, there are a host of areas that researchers have discovered that all of us reach peaks in our golden years. Here are a few, along with the age at which they reach their summit.
Healthy self-esteem is a critical component of good mental health, and long-term data analysis has found it climbs from adolescence onwards, cresting somewhere between 50 and 70.
It’s common sense that wisdom increases with age, and for good reason. Wisdom results from the accumulated things we’ve encountered and our ability to detect patterns in those experiences. The more seasoned you are, the more wisdom you can tap into. Unsurprisingly, vocabulary scores also peaked at 65. More time alive gives you more opportunities to play more Wordle games (or Scrabble, for my fellow middle-agers out there).
The surprising thing is when older people are asked to pinpoint the happiest time of their lives, the most common response in a recent survey was 82! And this is before the full impact of longevity and healthspan advances is felt by a broad segment of the population. Believe it or not, 80 is the new 20 for many people from a contentment perspective.
The data doesn’t lie: life, in large part, improves with age. But we can take concrete steps to stack the deck even further in our favor. Starting with …
Investing in Your Health. It is the true wealth.
Being healthy is a big part of being happy. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer opined that “9/10s of our happiness depends on health alone. A healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king.”
Today, though, too many people trade health for wealth.
This is why I always urge my executive clients that choosing their work over their workout is a losing bet in the long term. Daily vigorous activity is an investment, not an indulgence.
Exercise is an insurance policy for a long and happy life. Every time you go to the gym, you extend your warranty, and — as readers of this newsletter know well — movement is a massive driver of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphin release.
Prioritizing your relationships. They matter most of all in determining life satisfaction.
Author Eric Barker has a cryptic but telling take on the fraught period when mid-life kicks off. “The 30s are the decade where friendships go to die.”
The same forces — marriage, mortgage, munchkins — that lead to more stress in middle age also constrain our ability to invest in relationships outside our nuclear families. It’s understandable but regrettable because research has revealed a startling fact (apologies if this shocks my married friends!):
Friendships make you happier than any other relationship — even more so than romantic ones. In fact, it’s the friendship within romantic relationships that brings the most long-term utility.
So don’t neglect your basketball crew or your book club gang; reconnect with your college roommates and — for the black belt move — continue making new friends as you age.
One final set of data points from Barker is worth noting:
Want to keep your friendships strong? Talk to your friends every two weeks. Otherwise, that same study indicates that half of your close friendships are no longer tight in seven years. As with most things in life, tend to it or risk losing it.
Realize that aging is not a story of decline. Invest in the one true wealth. Prioritize your relationships above all.
🔬 Go Deeper & Get Smart Fast
- If you have a few hours, 👓 “The Happiness Curve” by Jonathan Rauch.
- If you have under 1 hour, đź‘“ this article from Harvard Business Review by philosopher Kieran Setiya on how to face a mid-life crisis.
- If you have under 10 minutes, đź‘“ this article from The Guardian about 13 Peaks We Reach at 40 or Later.
Originally published at https://iontelligence.substack.com.
