Better Than Average!

How random is this - globally, people trend downward on the happiness scale until the age of 44, then trend upward again. (Excluding old folks with bad health problems.) The general life-pattern of happiness looks like a U-shaped curve, with the age of 44 at the bottom.

What the flip?!?!

According to a current article in Time magazine, this is exactly the case. Survey data representing 2 million people in more than 70 countries shows that: "Across the world, people in their 40s generally claim to be less happy than those who are younger or older, and the global happiness nadir appears to hit somewhere around 44."

What accounts for this? I'm at a loss, and so are the researchers. The article continues:

"It's not anxiety from the kids, for starters. Even among the childless, those in midlife reported lower life satisfaction than the young or old, says study co-author Andrew Oswald, an economics professor at the University of Warwick in Britain. Other things that didn't alter the happiness curve: income, marital status or education. "You can adjust for 100 things and it doesn't go away," Oswald says. He and co-author David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, also adjusted their results for cohort effects: their data spanned more than 30 years, making them confident that whatever makes people miserable about being middle-aged, it isn't related, say, to being born in the year 1960 and growing up with that generation's particular set of experiences."

So what are we to make of this? The article even makes the point that the findings are cross-generational, so Xers are no more or less likely to fall into this pattern than Boomers or Millenials. Hmm...

As for me - I'm having a 40th b-day party in a few weeks and counting my blessings. I don't know that I'm happier now than I was at 20 or 30 (OK, I was having a pretty darn good time at 20!) but I don't feel less happy now than I was before. Go figure!