Life After Fifty

Happiness as a function of age is a U-shaped curve; thus concludes Jonathan Rauch, author of The Happiness Curve, subtitled "Why Life Gets Better After 50" And that dip where you experience the least happiness? This happens in your forties, at least that’s what the average data shows. Where does this data come from? We’ll get there in a minute. First, a little motivation.

Rauch wrote the book partly because he experienced a middle-age malaise. Not a midlife crisis, mind you, but a malaise of the vague unhappy variety, not sufficiently powerful enough to act drastically and buy a red sports car (or any of the other ‘crisis’ tropes). Rauch also talked to many people who had gone through or were going through the same feeling. Mind you, this might only apply to the more well-to-do who have to some extent been ‘successful’ in the career thus far. As a journalist and writer, Rauch digs into the subject, talks to people who study such data, and weaves both data and anecdote into a brisk narrative. The Happiness Curve is an interesting read, regardless of your age or your experience with the middle years.

How does one measure happiness? There’s no easy objective measure, and so the fallback subjective self-rating survey is used. That’s not a bad thing per se, since we are interested in people’s self-perception of their happiness, and not so much whether it is grounded in an objective reality. As is standard in the quantitative social sciences, after the statistic jocks have controlled for various other factors, one still sees the U-shaped curve. The pattern holds in different countries. Here’s a snapshot from the book. (I apologize for the blurriness of my unsteady hand.)

From this subset, you can see the general conclusion that in most places the trough (the turning point ‘star’ in the graphs) is mostly in the (age) 40s. In the U.S., it’s just a little over 45, while in the U.K., it’s a little under. You’ll also notice the trough is fairly shallow once the data has been averaged (although an individual person may show larger jumps). In almost all cases, except Russia, the turning point comes well before the average death age which is in the 70s or approaching 80. This means that for most people, on average, life actually feels better after fifty. And it gets better for another 20-30 years until you die. Except in Russia where just as you might be starting to feel better, you die. On average.

The other thing to notice is the vertical scale. The U may be rather shallow, but the absolute happiness rating does differ significantly by country. Folks in the U.S. are much happier overall than in most any other country. (Not shown on this graph are the happiest countries, all located in Scandinavia for some reason, possibly having to do with hygge.) Things aren’t as good in Latin America or China, and the outlook is noticeably worse in Russia. The U.K. and Germany as representatives of Western Europe aren’t much below the U.S.

The next figure is even more interesting. In the survey, folks rated not just their current life satisfaction but also projected what they expected their life satisfaction to be five years out. The data for expected life satisfaction was then plotted with a left-shift of five years so that one can directly compare the two for a particular age.

And what do we see? Younger folks in their late teens through the 20s and 30s expect that they will feel happier five years down the road. But reality does not meet expectations. Ah, the optimism of youth! The discrepancy between and expected and current satisfaction narrows in the 40s. A growing realization that life isn’t feeling rosier and recalibration takes place (subconsciously) as life proceeds. In the early 50s current life satisfaction actually starts to rise although the five year projection doesn’t catch up for – well, another five years or so. Life after 50 feels better and gets better, but human subjects simply refuse to believe it. While the expected satisfaction curve gets flatter, it continues to trend downward. You might be feeling better at 60, but you expect you’ll feel worse at 65. Predicting the future is always difficult – in more ways than one.

The U-shaped curve isn’t limited to human subjects. Apparently our apish close cousins also show a similar experience. This data is sketchier because apes can’t take surveys to rate their happiness but there are other observations that experienced zookeepers can make. The data set is much smaller, though.

All that being said, correlation is not causation. Three big questions you might be thinking about after seeing the data: (1) Why is there a mid-age malaise? (2) Why the upturn after fifty? (3) Why the pessimism even though the data show a U? Rauch pieces together tentative answers to these questions through multiple interviews. While they have a U.S.-centric flavor, the conclusions he draws are interesting – I won’t give the game away and encourage you to read his book if you’re interested. These are not Cliff-notes.

The U shape has not been my personal experience thus far. I’m not quite fifty yet, and by average rights I should be in the trough. Turns out I’m very happy at the moment. Maybe I passed a trough some years back and didn’t notice. Or maybe I’m not the average person having lived in one country the first half of my life, and in a very different country the second half of my life. Furthermore, my sunny outlook has been increasing despite minor health-related aging issues. Rauch also addresses this. There seems to be an increasing gratefulness despite declining health among the aging population. Today, being Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., I’m feeling very thankful about many things in my life. And maybe I have something to look forward to in a few years. Life after fifty!