The Happiest People on the Planet

It appears that we older people are the happiest generation in history. Study after study says that we are. Our aging faces may not reflect this, but it’s true—we older people are considerably happier than younger people and certainly happier than people who are middle-aged. It seems that when it comes to the feel good chemicals like serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins, we are practically junkies.

This is well documented.  Meg Selig, in a report for Psychology Today (2015) writes,

“Here’s the most surprising part: As they aged, older adults rated their life satisfaction much higher, with happiness ratings rising gradually and steadily from age 50 through the decade of the 90s. Researchers are calling this process the “U-curve” of happiness.”

The results of a study by the National Academy of Sciences, documented this “U-curve” of happiness. It concluded that at age 18, people start out feeling happy and optimistic about their lives, but as they enter the middle years, when they develop careers and establish homes and families, they begin to feel stress and anxiety. These feelings dominate until they reach 50. A sharp reversal emerges at this point, and people begin to feel better, becoming even happier than they were at 18.

This has become a popular topic of study in the world of social science research. Even the famous Gallup Poll weighs in. In 2010 Gallup conducted a large poll, asking participants about the negative emotions they had experienced the previous day. Stress, worry, anger, they found, all decreased with age.

It’s not all rosy, there can be many are problems as we age—we older people have our share of disappointments, diseases, sadness, even deaths of friends and loved ones. It’s not surprising that society might see our lives in a downward spiral as we age. But that’s not what happens.

Instead, it seems, some aspects of our lives make us dramatically happier. Laura Carstensen,  professor of psychology at Stanford University, spent years finding out why. In a recent TED talk, this is what she says,

“In our research, we’ve found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time — not just clock time and calendar time, but lifetime. And if there’s a paradox of aging, it’s that recognizing that we won’t live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways. When time horizons are long and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, people are constantly preparing, trying to soak up all the information they possibly can, taking risks, exploring. As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. When we recognize that we don’t have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly.”

It makes sense that our increased appreciation of life occurs as we become acutely aware of having fewer days left, of finally being able focus on the more important things, of being able to savor the moment, a skill which it has taken a lifetime to learn.

It’s also more important than ever to recognize something else—the fact that we are the longest living group ever, doubling our years within the generation we have lived. The astounding knowledge that more years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all prior years is sobering.

And that’s the kicker. We are the happiest group ever, and we are living the longest ever. Soon, people will be asking what we are doing with our good fortune.

Are we letting all of our happy days go by at the golf club, on cruises or at the luncheon table? Or are we giving something of ourselves to solving the big issues that face our society today? The answer lies somewhere in the middle. Given our level of education, our talents, and our emotional stability, some social scientists are observing our generation carefully, cataloguing our engagement with our culture as we decide how to spend our valuable years of retirement.