Jason Carpenter was one of those Red Sox fans—determined, passionate, and absolutely convinced that a World Series win would be a life-changing event. The baseball team famously botched an easy win during the 1986 championships, and Carpenter, 13 at the time, broke down in sobs. Yet he never gave up on his dream: that the Red Sox would one day prove they deserved his unwavering devotion. "I imagined crying with happiness," he says. In 2004, Carpenter, who was now living in New York City, saw his dream come true when his team beat the Yankees—their blood rivals—in the league championships, after the biggest comeback in baseball history. Carpenter was over the moon. "I went nuts with 200 of my closest 'strangers,' all displaced Boston fans, partying in the streets deep in the heart of enemy territory until 4 a.m."
With the next morning, though, came the darker side of triumph. Carpenter's elation had worn off. "I was wondering what to do with myself. I was depressed." Years of longing for a win had boiled down to a fleeting moment of bliss. What Carpenter had believed his whole life would make him happy actually happened—and then he faced... nothingness.
The things we expect will bring us lasting joy rarely do. Whether it's losing 25 pounds, getting a major promotion or watching a troupe of perennial losers finally win the big one, long-anticipated events give us a swell of glee... and then we settle back into being just about as happy as we've always been. Most of us have a happiness "set point," fixed by temperament and early life experience, which is very difficult to shift. Whether you win the lottery or wind up in a wheelchair, within a year or two you generally end up just about as happy (or unhappy) as you started out.
Yet the quest for happiness isn't futile. Psychologists now believe that many of us can turn the well-being thermostat up or down a few notches by changing how we think about anticipation, memory, and the present moment. Our sense of well-being is intimately tied into our perception of time. The problem is that we usually get it wrong. Memory tricks us—we don't remember our experiences properly, and that leaves us unable to accurately imagine the way we'll feel in the future. At the same time, expectations mislead us: We never learn to predict what will make us happy, or how to anticipate the impact of major life experiences.
Focusing on the moment may help us understand how to be happy. Besides, we have a built-in tendency to grow more cheerful as we get older: Aging helps us ignore the negative and shift our attention toward the positive. Finding happiness isn't hopeless—it seems to be just a question of time.
Youth is a downer, it turns out. Young people naturally pay more attention to the negative. Older people are faster than younger people to orient to smiling faces rather than scowling ones in advertisements, finds Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford who studies how age influences time perception and goals. Similarly, young people are quicker to pick up on negative stimuli. This youthful attention to the bad may be a necessary part of growing up—a cognitive mechanism that helps with survival. Since the young are focused on new (and therefore possibly dangerous) experiences and acquaintances, they may be more likely to put themselves in harm's way. "Young people need to take risks, and as such, they need to pay attention to the potentially negative, to recognize the lion or bear that is going to jump out at them," Carstensen explains. As we grow older, though, we are increasingly drawn to the familiar, like close friends and relatives. If given a chance to meet either their favorite author or a close friend for lunch, younger people chose the former, while older people preferred the latter.
Carstensen's findings shatter the stereotype of seniors as a crabby bunch. When she spent one week frequently monitoring the moods of 184 adults, aged 18 to 94, she saw that older people experienced highly positive emotional experiences for longer periods of time than younger people, and their highly negative emotional experiences subsided more quickly. In other research, she showed that their memories were in general more positive. The sunny habit of revising history may explain why seniors tend not to wallow in bad moods: Pleasant memories are always invading their thoughts, and these fond recollections may "wash away" anger or sadness. "There is no empirical evidence that older people are grouchy," she says, although personality studies have revealed that they do tend to care less about what other people think of them.
Carstensen thinks this shift toward the positive occurs because as we age, we become aware, consciously or not, that time is running out. The awareness of life's fragility turns our attention to the present moment, so we worry less. The potential missteps and possible catastrophes that cloud a young person's vision of the future fade away. "If you think about the things you worry about—getting a job, finding a mate or an apartment—they are almost always concerns about the future," she says. The gap between ambition and achievement, a major source of stress and unhappiness for young people, also narrows with age. As we get older, we either achieve our goals or replace them with more reachable aims.
