Current economists like the simple notion that you can measure a person's overall happiness on a simple scale, such as a 3-point rating: "How happy are you?" The answers they receive, if you trust them, show certain trends in the huge aggregate but really don't say much about one individual's particular happiness and what affects it. The answers are even less accurate if you try to use these numbers to discuss how aging and happiness are related.
Blanchflower and Oswald published a paper in early 2008 showing the "definitive" U-shaped pattern of happiness over the adult years. This paper received a lot of publicity, supposedly demonstrating with great certainty that the mid-life crisis is alive and well (or not well, as the case may be). However, their argument was based on an artefact of cross-sectional data. They did not study the same people over time-- they compared different cohorts (10-year age groups). Their measure of happiness was brutally simple, and they had such a large sample that almost anything would have emerged as statistically significant in the data analyses. Yet, the findings were accepted as fact. No one questioned the fact that those findings amounted to very small if not infintesmial blips.
My research on fulfillment in midlife baby boomers, published in my book The Search for Fulfillment, shows midlife is not a time of despair. Just because you're 40 doesn't mean your happiness is at the bottom of life's "U." The 180 plus participants in my study followed from college through
The next time you hear that someone's unhappy because they are a certain age, remember that people are not victims of their life's decade markers. You can take control of your happiness, whether you're 40, 50, 60 or beyond. And remember that though you may be unhappy today, you can still get on a path to maximize your fulfillment.
Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily news on psychology, health, and aging. Visit my website at www.searchforfulfillment.com for more resources.
Susan is the author of 15 books including her most recent book, "The Search for Fulfillment."
Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 2009, 2011
References:
Blanchflower, D. G., & Oswald, A. J. (2008). Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle? Social Science & Medicine, 66, 1733-1749.
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.
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