Tag: life satisfaction

Originally published at Forbes.com on November 1, 2018.

 

Readers, have you heard this nugget of wisdom before?  There’s something innate in us as humans that hardwires us to be comparatively satisfied with life as young adults, lose some of that satisfaction as we wend our way through adulthood, bottoming out during the “mid-life crisis,” but then experience renewed satisfaction as we reach retirement years.

Here’s the Washington Post, in 2017, citing a new scholarly analysis:

Happiness, those surveys show, follow a generalized U-shape over the course of a life: People report high degrees of happiness in their late teens and early 20s. But as the years roll by, people become more and more miserable, hitting a nadir in life satisfaction sometime around the early 50s. Happiness rebounds from there into old age and retirement. . . .

These similarities [among various studies] are even more remarkable given the differences in the underlying surveys, which were administered in different countries. They include the General Social Survey (54,000 American respondents), the European Social Survey (316,000 respondents in 32 European countries), the Understanding Society survey (416,000 respondents in Great Britain) and others. . . .

“There is much evidence,” the paper’s authors conclude, “that humans experience a midlife psychological ‘low.'”

There’s even a new book out, The Happiness Curve, by Jonathan Rauch, which cites extensive studies and shares individual stories of people reaching midlife and feeling a vague sense of dissatisfaction, offering readers in that midlife slump hope that they aren’t alone, that it’s a natural stage of life, and that their perception will just as naturally improve over time.

What’s more, this curve extends to a multitude of countries, though the curve itself is curve-ier in some countries, and comparatively flatter in others, according to Rauch’s book and according to an analysis from 2016 which looks at a total of 46 countries, in the form of (smoothed) curves of happiness levels and the age at which happiness bottoms out before growing again.  In some countries, such as Australia, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Serbia, Slovenia, and Spain, and the U.S., curve is very pronounced, with a bottoming-out age generally in the 40s or early 50s.  In others, the “curve” is so flat or simply just downward-sloping, and the bottoming-out age so late, that it seems a bit of a stretch to call it a “U”; these include Austria (age 63.29), Finland (58.09), India (54.27), and Russia (81.57!).

But what’s noteworthy is that this study, in order to create these charts, does not simply take the raw data but rather adjusts it, controlling for “age, marital status, gender, employment, education and household income in international dollars.”  The aim, as Rauch discusses in his book as well, is to somehow derive a “pure” impact of aging alone.

But what happens when you don’t apply this analysis based on controlling for these factors but look at real people in their real lives?  The results look quite different.

Here’s a comparison of men in four regions:  the Anglosphere (the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), Western/Southern Europe, the former Warsaw Pact countries (Central/Eastern Europe and the former USSR), and Latin America.

And here are the women in those countries:

in both cases based on data downloaded from the 2015 edition of the World Happiness Report.

Here’s the same data updated to 2018 — that is, using data from 2015 – 2017, from the working paper “Happiness at Different Ages: The Social Context Matters,” by John F. Helliwell, Max B. Norton, Haifang Huang, and Shun Wang (used with permission).

The data in all these cases is based on the “Cantril ladder,” a question which very simply asks poll participants to imagine “the best possible life for you” and the “worst possible life for you” and rank how they view their current life situation on a scale of 0 to 10.

(The report also provides data for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, for a total of 9 regions, though I’m focusing on Europe, the Anglosphere, and the Americas as regions with some possible cultural similarity.  Among the Asian regions, East Asia has a similar, and actually more pronounced uptick, but I presume their strong value of revering elders is a factor.)

It is immediately clear that even in this three year span, patterns have changed in such places as NA/ANZ (perhaps due to reactions to Trump, Black Lives Matter, etc., in the U.S.?) and Western Europe (perhaps due to the impact of the mass influx of migrants starting in summer 2015?).  But what’s noteworthy is that, of these regions, only the Anglosphere region shows a pronounced U, with Western Europe and Latin America only showing a very small upward rise at the very oldest ages, hardly enough to qualify as U-shaped according to the definitions.

What’s going on here?

What happened to the U shape?  This is the puzzle.

For the former East Bloc, various sources provide the explanation that the consistently downward slope is simply the result of the misery of Putinism, and the need to adjust to the dramatic changes, albeit several decades ago by now, of a postcommunist world, having a harsher impact on older vs. younger individuals (though note that the region includes such countries as Poland and Hungary, now part of the E.U.).  It’s certainly the case that in Russia, alcoholism heavily afflicts the older generation. Perhaps the economic crises that various Latin American countries have experienced impact those residents similarly.

But no such explanation seems to fit for Western Europe, especially based on pre-2015 data, where, if anything, reports are that older folk, with secure pensions, are better off than young people stymied by a high unemployment rate or working on a contract basis without the cushy job guarantees of older workers.  It’s younger people who are living at home, unable to start families, jealous of the older generations.

And if life satisfaction in Western Europe differed from the Anglsophere in that it was steady or climbing, there’d be an easy story to tell, and it’d go like this:  “Americans have an excessive degree of ambition and desire for achievement, so that the first part of their life is the story of the attempt to attain their life goals, midlife is when they realize that they will not attain these goals, and in their later adulthood years, they have acquired the wisdom to understand that that’s not how life works.  But Europeans don’t have the same drive towards achievement and recognition, so they don’t have the same crash when this doesn’t happen.  After all, the Germans don’t even have a word for ‘midlife crisis’ except the borrowed English word.”

But Western Europeans have the same drop; they simply don’t recover.

Why?  I don’t know, and the literature I’ve read doesn’t know.  But that’s not going to stop me from sharing a few theories.

Theory One:  what if the poor economy, despite secure pensions, is impacting older people because they are watching their children struggle?  This would suggest that life satisfaction at older ages is connected up with seeing the younger generation prosper, rather than just with one’s own personal well-being.

Theory Two:  what if it’s Europe’s low birth rates that make a difference?  After all, the birth rate has been low for years and years, peaking in the Eurozone at 2.733 in 1964, at which point it began dropping steadily, to 2.393 in 1970, 2.023 in 1975, 1.774 in 1980, 1.534 in 1990, and bottoming out at 1.383 in 1995.  And, yes, if you were in your prime childbearing years, say, age 30, in 1995, you’d be at that age now when, in the Anglosphere, on average, you’d be experiencing a rebound in your life satisfaction.  But if having children is both, in part, a driver of midlife stress, and a source of postmidlife satisfaction, then the low birth rate (in addition to such factors as are causing it in the first place) could be a clue, too.

Theory Three:  what if it’s differences in religiosity?  Pew polling reports that on multiple measures, Europeans report lower levels of religious practice.  11% of Western Europeans polled in 2017 said that “religion is very important in their lives,” compared to 53% of Americans.  22% vs. 50% “attend religious services at least monthly” and 11% vs. 55% say they pray daily.  Could a religious orientation make the difference in that uptick, all other things being equal?  (Note that sub-Saharan Africa has a low and declining life satisfaction, despite its greater religious practice, but that’s hardly apples-to-apples.)

And Theory Four:  what about different “locus of control” perceptions?  This refers to differences in attitudes about the degree to which your life is what you make of it, vs. your fate largely being out of your control.  For reference, I pulled out the results from an older book (1998) on cultural differences, Riding the Waves of Culture, by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner.  Survey data from 50-some countries asking people whether they “believe what happens to them is their own doing” showed a range from 33% in Venezuela to 88% in Israel and Uruguay.  The third-ranked country was Norway, even though the other Nordics were in the middle of the pack.  And countries #4 through #7 were exactly the grouping that has the “real-world” U-shape:  the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.  What’s more, the UK and Ireland (part of the Europe grouping) tie for #8 along with Switzerland.

If the uptick after midlife is at least in part a matter of being able to say, “yes, I made something of my life,” then it stands to reason that having a strong personal sense that one’s own decisions and actions have a real impact on one’s life is a necessary ingredient in feeling a sense of satisfaction afterwards.

This is all speculation, of course, but you’ll notice that none of these explanations have anything to do with the quality of state or private retirement systems, because “successful” aging is about much more than this.

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.