Nov 25, 2014 – 10:35 am
by Ashton Applewhite
Last month the Atlantic magazine’s cover story described living past 75 as pretty darn inadvisable. Now, in quite the about-face, the December cover story champions the Happiness U-Curve (or “U-shaped Happiness Curve,” as I’ve been calling it, or “U-bend” in Britspeak): : thegrowing body of research showing, in writer Jonathan Rausch’s words, that “we reliably grow happier, regardless of circumstances, after our 40s.”
Caption: An analysis by the Brookings scholars Carol Graham and Milena Nikolova, drawing on Gallup polls, shows a clear relationship between age and well-being in the United States. Respondents rated their life satisfaction relative to the “best possible life” for them, with 0 being worst and 10 being best.
As Rausch explains, this curve emerges only after researchers have filtered out significant variables like income and marital and employment status to reveal the effect of age alone. People don’t reach 80 without facing adversity and loss, often crushing. They have more health problems too. But they also report far fewer of the kind of financial and personal issues that anger and worry younger people. In other words, this increased sense of well-being is not predominantly conferred by things that happen in life. It’s not reserved for Bodhisattvas or billionaires. It is deeply human, and rooted in biology.
The big takeaway for Rausch is the scientific fact that it’s hard to be happy when you’re middle aged. Titled “The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis,” the article is sprinkled with anecdotes about acquaintances whose trajectories mirrored Rauch’s own. During their 40’s, despite having achieved all kinds of material and professional successes, they were bushwhacked by upheavals and feelings of disappointment and discontent. Almost as bewilderingly, and also independent of circumstance, simply entering their 50’s conveyed increased feelings of calm and gratitude.
Perhaps the shift towards conscious contentment is based in endocrine changes or brain chemistry. German neuroscientists have found that healthy older people are less prone than younger ones to unhappiness about things they couldn’t change. Rausch describes becoming more accepting of his limitations and revising his expectations—and thus his measures of success and failure—accordingly. He labels this an “expectations gap,” and quotes Princeton economist Hannes Schwandt on the finding that the gap narrows with age. “[It] supports the hypothesis,” Schwandt writes, “that the age U-shape in life satisfaction is driven by unmet aspirations that are painfully felt during midlife but beneficially abandoned and felt with less regret during old age.”
Drawing on emerging cognitive science, Rausch calls this wisdom—and fervently wishes he’d found out about it in time to help him through his midlife doldrums. “What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom.” I didn’t encountered the U-curve until my mid-fifties, at which point I figured they’d cornered two octogenarians, offered them fresh-baked cookies, then asked how they were feeling. Skepticism remains widespread even as corroborating evidence mounts. A 2011 study conducted by Laura Carstensen and colleagues at the Stanford Longevity Center found that “the peak of emotional life may not occur until well into the seventh decade”—and also that the finding is “often met with disbelief in both the general population and the research community.”
I’d recast the big story from one about dissatisfaction in midlife to one about happiness towards the end of life. That’s the message that American culture drowns out most loudly, although ageism shadows the whole life course. Messages about being “over the hill” at 40 are everywhere you look: greeting cards, advertisements, sitcoms. Internalized and unexamined, the notion that it’s all downhill after 40 makes it all the harder to weather that midlife trough. How much better, indeed, to challenge that absurd notion while we’re still young, and to be sustained from then on by the knowledge that with age comes happiness.
Author and journalist Ashton Applewhite has been writing about aging and ageism since 2007 in blog form at This Chair Rocks. During this period she’s become a Knight Fellow, a New York Times Fellow, and a Columbia Journalism School Age Boom Fellow. The voice of Yo, Is This Ageist?, Ashton has been recognized by the New York Times as an expert on ageism. In 2013 eminent cultural critic Margaret Gullette described her as “a public intellectual with a fresh voice in age studies.” Risa Breckman, Executive Director of the NYC Elder Abuse Center, says, “Applewhite’s thinking is deep, her passion infectious, and her cogent message is spot on: we urgently need to have a national conversation about ageism to raise awareness about it and to stop it.”
The Radical Age Movement 