What Shape Does Happiness Really Take Over the Lifespan?

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Alive for decades in the public’s imagination, the midlife crisis was an idea floated by a popular writer in the late 1970s that quickly became entrenched as fact. One after another, dozens of researchers who study development in adulthood peered through their data sets to try to validate the idea, only to conclude that it’s a myth. It might be entertaining to think about going out and having a wild time in your 40s due to midlife malaise, but there’s never been evidence to support this as a universal phenomenon.

The U-Shaped Curve Has Gone Missing

One exception in the hunt for proof of the midlife crisis came from the work of economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald (2008), who claimed to have discovered a worldwide “U” shape of happiness across the adult years. Not long after this paper was circulated, adult development researchers began to poke holes in the original dataset used by the authors. The U shape was specific to certain countries (Western, industrialized) and so small in magnitude, though “statistically significant,” to be more like a wobble than a U. The happiness scale went from 0 to 10, but the “U” covered only a tiny portion of somewhere in the low 7s.

After over a decade of defending the U shape, Dartmouth College’s Blanchflower, along with University College London colleague Alex Bryon (2025), released a paper declaring the U-shape at last to have “vanished.” Critics in the field never believed in its existence, so its disappearance didn’t seem like much of a shock. In fact, one of the pillars of the argument against its supposed universality was the fact that there are variations by world region in overall patterns of happiness.

Where Did It Go?

In presenting their latest data on the evaporation of the U, Blanchflower and Bryon acknowledge that countries are all over the place when it comes to showing any kind of universal trend. Their search began by wondering whether maybe happiness levels changed in young adults, meaning that they began adulthood with a pessimistic outlook to life, only to grow over time. The U would have to go away because it didn’t start out high to begin with.

This lower happiness of the young only occurred in certain countries, though, as documented in this paper. Then, at the opposite end of the scale, happiness scores were higher later in life, meaning that the trend was toward a straight-up increase.

All of this begs the question of what it means to base the hefty weight of any conclusions about age and well-being on a single question. How happy are you at the moment? Maybe you’re feeling great now, but half an hour ago, you stubbed your toe and were miserable. These surveys catch people at a single pinpoint in time, so they can’t possibly capture the entire spectrum of someone’s adaptation to life.

Add to this the fact that none of the surveys given by the Blanchflower et al. group have ever been anything but cross-sectional, meaning that different age groups are compared. In another, related paper (Blanchflower et al., 2025), we see these age group data on “ill-being” for the period 2020-25, “confirming” that “ill-being is no longer hump shaped in age but now decreases in age.”

This latter paper does use more than a single survey question to assess mental health, including single-scale measures of anxiety, a question about how many of the past 30 days you felt in poor mental health, and several items assessing distress, sadness, and anxiety.

The study covers 44 countries and millions of people, which is a plus from the standpoint of sample size, but a problem in that with something like 2 million people’s data in the analyses, a statistically significant finding can boil down to a hundredth of a point between age groups. That this period coincides with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic probably didn’t escape you. However, the authors conclude that “the mental health of the young has deteriorated compared to that of older people” and the pandemic had nothing to do with it.

With this new “universal” data (as compared to the now-discarded prior universal data), the authors suggest that, of several possible explanations, smartphone use might be to blame. Supporting this argument are “causal” links between social media use and mental health (based on population trends), leading the authors to conclude that the matter is now “settled.” Whatever your opinions are on the matter, you probably raised an eyebrow at this talk of causality from what could be nothing other than correlational data.

U or Not-U? Why Does This Matter?

All of these messy problems in the scientific literature on age and well- (or ill-) being can seem a bit distant and maybe not that relevant to your life. However, consider what happens when such findings hit the popular press, which they inevitably do. It’s up to you to read between the lines.

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In terms of your own feelings of contentment and/or despair, it can be helpful to know that you’re not fated to an up or down or something in between when it comes to your own progress through life. It’s also helpful to know that the way you’re feeling at one point in time, if not optimal, could have more to do with the world around you than your own inner challenges. The Blanchflower research is useful in providing links between mental health and historical time in the case of COVID’s impact.

Put those questions used in the surveys to your own test if you want to gain insight into how your life is shaping up. Maybe you’re feeling a general sense of discomfort or unease, but you haven’t put those feelings into words. By acknowledging them, you can then look for your own possible causes. That stubbed toe could be one of them, but so could the news you’re reading about the labor market. Maybe you are doing too much doomscrolling online. Take a beat and try to look for the positives in your life.

To sum up, there is no simple way to sketch out the course of a person’s adaptation to life in a set of statistics. Looking for fulfillment beyond your age, or even place and time, can help you chart a path that takes its own uniquely you shape.