Why happiness is U-shaped throughout the life cycle

In the 1990s, large data sets had been collected in the United States and Europe, generated by asking thousands of randomly selected people, each year for more than two decades, how happy or satisfied they were.

And while perhaps not the sort of issues one would expect economists to deal with, A group was interested in the relationship between work and happiness.

Among them was Andrew Oswald, professor of economics and behavioral sciences at the University of Warwick, UK, who persuaded David Blanchflower, a labor economist and academic at Dartmouth College, US, to take a look at the data. of happiness.

“It caught my attention because unique patterns emerge,” Blanchflower told the BBC.

Some are already familiar, like countries like Denmark and Sweden and others seemed to be the happiest.

But “the biggest result that emerges is that unemployed people are incredibly unhappy,” no matter how rich or poor they are, the expert noted.

They wondered if there would be other interesting and solid patterns to discover.

Blanchflower and Oswald analyzed the data further.

“We were trying to understand patterns of human happiness in the US and UK, and in particular, because we were very focused on the economy, we wanted to know if money really makes people happier,” explains Oswald.

They began by trying to eliminate the effect of age on happiness, to see the influence of other factors more clearly.

But in the process, they discovered something curious, hidden in those data from thousands of different individual lives: age seemed to have a close relationship with happiness.

“There was a very powerful phenomenon that seems to indicate that Humans slide down this giant U-shape of mental well-being throughout their lives.reaching a low generally in the late 40s and then rising again into the mid-70s.

Blanchflower and Oswald had stumbled upon the U-curve of happiness, a single line on a graph containing a dizzying multitude of stories of triumphs and failures, a choir that speaks in unison about times of greater and lesser well-being.

“The starting point is that people are very happy when they are 16, and then that measure of happiness steadily declines and reaches a low point around age 48-50,” explains Blanchflower.

They tested this U-curve in several ways: first using data from 500,000 people in the US and Western Europe. More data confirmed it in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe, and eventually surveys of people in 72 other countries showed the same pattern: happiness seemed to have a defined shape.

The trend also turned out to be remarkably consistent across different races, lifestyles, cultures and even across different genders.

Of course, the U is not omnipresent; In fact, it would be suspicious if a single pattern appeared in an immensely varied landscape of surveys, countries, generations and analyses.

Even so, appears too often to ignore.

Several researchers found the same thing, including development economist Carol Graham, who now works at the Brookings Institution, USA.

The author of “Happiness in the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires” (2010) had been observing Peruvians who had quickly emerged from poverty and wanted to know how they felt.

He was surprised to discover that objective circumstances did not determine subjective life satisfaction; In Peru, as in other countries, many people who had escaped poverty felt worse than those who remained poor.

He dove into survey data and found the same U-shaped pattern, first in Latin America and then in the rest of the world.

It was a statistical regularity, which said something about the human condition.

What is it about middle age—which extends from the mid-40s to the early 50s—that leads people to be, on average, less happy?

It is still not known with certainty.

Surveys generate data but are less suitable for obtaining explanations.

“There are several theories,” says Oswald.

“A popular one had to do with the notion that when you reach middle age you realize whether or not you are going to be a great scientist, or win the Nobel Prize, or be a CEO.

“The argument was that at that time most people are living up to the aspirations they had in their youth, and that is psychologically painful.”

Whatever the explanation, the bottom of the U expresses itself in more than disappointment.

In the late ’40s It is the time when various forms of acute distress reach their peak.

“If I ask you in my lectures, what age group do you think is most prone to suicide? They almost always answer: ‘Young people.’ And that is totally wrong.

“A 46-year-old man is approximately three times more likely to take his own life than an 18-year-old.”

It is also when the diagnosis of depression is most common and when death from drug overdose is at its highest.

The midlife crisis, economists say, is real and matters.

And in the search for plausible explanations, you probably have to take into account aspects such as children leaving home, divorce or frustration with work.

But what if you consider a group for which none of those factors are in play?

In 2010 Oswald He became interested in an aspect whose study aroused astonishment, for better and for worse..

“I discovered that there were researchers in the world who were collecting data on what we might call great ape mental well-being in chimpanzees and orangutans.”

Orangutans have different personalities, the full range of human emotions and are very intelligent. And that includes emotional intelligence.

Just like us, they throw tantrums, seek cuddles for comfort, and get cranky when they’re hungry.

Those similarities led some researchers to wonder if they were also suffering from a midlife crisis.

“One day I called a distinguished psychologist named Alex Weiss at the University of Edinburgh and said, ‘You don’t know who I am, and this may sound crazy, but I wonder if we could check the animal data,'” Oswald recalls.

It turns out that those responsible for caring for orangutans and chimpanzees must keep records of their animals’ well-being.

“One of the questions they are asked is: ‘If you were that animal, how happy would you feel?

“For some reason, I can never forget the simplicity, perhaps the strangeness, of that question.”

Working with zookeepers and primatologists around the world, Oswald collected happiness scores for more than 500 chimpanzees and orangutans throughout their lives… and guess what?

If the same pattern was found in chimpanzees and orangutans, have we been imagining causal links that do not actually exist?

For now, we can only speculate, but Oswald senses “something very profound, an underlying pattern about human nature and the structure of aging.”

A structure that has a happy ending, well The good news is that once you pass the bottom, the trend is bullish..

The curves that Oswald, Blackflower and others have found around the world show that happiness levels tend to increase from ages 50 to 70, reaching almost as high as in our 20s.

Perhaps those most opposed to the idea, supported mostly by economists, are psychologists, arguing that the U-shaped curve is a statistical illusion that arises from large data sets.

In their view, that’s nowhere near as valuable as detailed studies of real people.

There are also academics who do not welcome the fact that this U curve arises only after researchers adjust variables such as income, marital status, employment, etc., to analyze the effect of age alone.

Still, others point out, filtering circumstances indicates that there may be an underlying pattern to life satisfaction that is independent of any situation, something that is at least intriguing.

In other words, all else being equal, it seems to be harder to feel satisfied with your life in middle age.

But the hopeful thing would be that this feeling is normal and temporary; A few years later it will be easier to be happy again.