Is There Happiness After the 40s?

From Scientific American:

Closing in on 40? 50? Feel like life is passing, er, has passed you by? Maybe even left you in the dust? You're not alone. In fact, new research shows that fellow midlifers throughout the world--or at least a significant chunk of it--share your pain. But fear not: if you endure, the study shows, things will begin looking up again, once you get over that speed bump in the road of life called (gasp!) middle age. Researchers from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, after scouring 35 years worth of data on two million people from 80 nations, have concluded that there is, indeed, a consistent pattern in depression and happiness levels that is age-related and leaves us most blue during midlife.

According to the study, set to be published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, happiness follows a U-shaped curve: It is highest at the beginning and end of our lives and lowest in-between. The researchers found that the peak of depression for both men and women in the U.K. is around 44 years of age; in the U.S., women on average are most miserable at age 40 whereas men are when they hit 50. They found a similar pattern in 70 other countries. So what's at the root of this depressing dip? Not sure, say authors Andrew Oswald of Warwick University and Dartmouth's David Blanchflower, both economists. But they speculate, as Oswald put it, that "something happens deep inside humans" to bring us down rather than shattering events (such as divorce or job loss), because it tends to creep up on us over time.

More here.

Comments

[Jim]

Past Prime

Knowing I once (with ease) could whip
Two 2 by 10 by 12s to shoulder height
from a ground-level stack
without risk of ripping a ligament;

or haul two sheets of drywall
at a time across a room alone
without reaching for the liniment,

I’m pissed at being humbled
by a mere rock-salt sack
I strain to raise and lug
and spread so as not to slip
and be laid up with a broken hip.

Let me add to that, there are up-sides to decline. Give me a few days and I might come up with one.

[Jim]

I thought of one: no longer worrying about being cool.

[Jared]

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer, "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,"
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

Sonnet 2, William Shakespeare

[Chris Schoen]

I'm really kicking myself that I didn't get into science journalism, so I could draw paychecks for announcing the impressive discovery that people in many cultures have mid-life crises, and that this represents happenings "deep inside" them.

[Marriage and Happiness]

Marriage probably has a lot to do with happiness after 44.

Without it, it may be lonely. Ive written some extensive stuff on the link between happiness and marriage.

http://www.scribblesheet.co.uk/article/not_happy_then_try_getting_married