The book is called The Happiness Curve. It fits Tyler Cowen’s old definition of self-recommending, in that it is an interesting topic (the influence of stage of life on happiness) by an interesting author (Rauch). Note that Tyler himself recommends the book.
Rauch looks at the paradox that in your forties you may doing well objectively but feel unhappy. And after age 50 you tend to feel happier, even if you are not doing so well. My hypothesis is that one’s comparative references change. At age 40, it is easy to look at people of a similar age or younger who seem to be achieving more than you are. As you get older, you start to notice people your age who are physically deteriorating or whose lives are troubled in some way, and so it is easier to feel good about what you have. Rauch does not suggest a single cause, but this change in comparative references does seem to play a role.
As long-time readers know, I think that one should take a very skeptical view of happiness research. I think that some subjective measures are necessary, but I prefer measures that are more specific: how is your health? your job? etc. I think that happiness surveys are much harder to do well and can easily produce deceptive results.
I would rather read a book like this from someone who is as skeptical as I am. For example, Rauch looks at studies that instead of showing a sharp mid-life crisis show a gradual decline in life satisfaction followed by a gradual rise. But I found myself thinking: Suppose that everyone had a sharp mid-life crisis that took place at somewhat different ages, with the average age of crisis at, say, 45. If you looked at aggregate data, the crises would be smoothed away, and you would see a curve.
My personal perspective is that stage of life may have affected me a bit in the way Rauch describes. I remember in my mid-forties putting a list on the wall of my office of things I thought I should have been happy about. I called it my “serenity list.” In hindsight, had I been really serene, I would not have needed such a list. I have no need for one now. The Happiness Curve would have predicted this.
But overall, I believe that my outlook tends to fluctuate at higher frequencies. I think of myself as having a personal Minsky cycle. In the “hedge” phase, my energy level is low. I don’t have much emotion, and what little I have I distrust. I waste a lot of time. I don’t start any risky projects or come up with creative ideas. In the “speculative” phase, my energy level is high. I romanticize the world, and I listen to my emotions. I use my time fully, I am creative, and I am willing to take risks. In the “Ponzi” phase, my creativity takes a more dangerous turn. My connection to reality weakens, and some of my thoughts become very dark. On a couple of occasions I had difficulty recognizing and pulling out of this phase, and some bad experiences resulted.
It is plausible that I am bipolar, but even if that were the case I do not seek treatment. Sort of like people who don’t want to move to San Diego because they would miss the seasons.
Friends have told me that it was hard for them to know the difference between my “speculative” phase and my “Ponzi” phase. In fact, hardly anybody knows which of the three phases I am in at any one time. If you guess, you are likely to be wrong.
My workplace has a lot of age diversity. I don’t know if Rauch talks about it, but here is something I notice in terms of career-induced stress from bureaucrats who tend to like a lot of employment (and employer) stability, but who are still ambitious about rising in the ranks.
From about 22-40, for people of average or above-average talent, the timing and milestones of career progression tends to happen easily, automatically, and more or less on similar schedules for everyone. (There are a few superstars who buzz past everybody, and for below-average people, there are early off-ramps to stable plateaus, but neither of those cases are what I’m talking about here.)
Then at about that age and stage in a career, say O-5 in the military or GS-13 in the bureaucracy, things suddenly become much more competitive. The pyramid gets much steeper, and is driven more by selection than attrition. And different skills that one could have skated by without having previously in ones career – like leadership or savvy at manipulating the corporate soap opera and leveraging social networks – now become very important distinctions.
There are also stage-of-the-life-script issues (usually financial and family matters) that tend to exacerbate the feeling of increased burden. All of this – especially the uncertainty for marginal types with regards to their future social status – seems to be really, really stressful for many people. Prolonged status anxiety is miserable.
After passing through the gauntlet of these years, in the nature of things, most people don’t keep climbing up the ladder of senior executive positions, and eventually become reconciled to their reality and “position in life” and start looking forward to retirement and slip into strategic “take it as easy as possible” tenure mode. The opposite of those life-script events – getting another decade of mortgage payments behind them, watching remaining debt decline fast, and maybe getting the kid out of the house – also seems to play a role. The people in this category – who are most of the 50’s crowd – seem much less stressed out.
Now, it may be that a lot of this could be derived from the life-cycle features of any sector with a stable, bureaucracy or union-like, seniority-based pay and promotion environment. Maybe it’s less accurately descriptive of people working in different types of pathways, where the crunch-phase comes much earlier, or maybe never comes at all.
Which makes me wonder whether some of Rauch’s results might be artifacts of recent US history in which those employment life cycles were more commonly experienced. One used to hear about midlife crises and nervous breakdowns a lot more often when all the Baby Boomers were around a certain age, but use of those terms has declined in the last 25 years (e.g.)
As that kind of employment life-cycle becomes less common, I would guess that Rauch’s thesis would start to look less accurate for subsequent generations.
This is a good comment. However, I think the “easy off ramp to a plateau” is being eliminated. So…more anxiety incoming.
Up or out. Yeah, I chose out at a certain point amd probably am as happy (content?) as I have ever been
I wonder if there is also a survivorship issue. Some people slip out of being happy enough to even take a survey…
In terms of creativity, I’ll mention a book (again): _The creating brain_ by Nancy Andreasen, published by Dana Press. She links creativity to bipolar (not schizophrenia).
In terms of mental illness and leadership, I rather liked Ghaemi Nassir’s book _A first rate madness_.
In terms of success, it’s pretty obvious that if you have a serious war or a plague, everything changes. Grant and Sherman were both seen as failures and near-nobodies when the civil war broke out.
Peter Drucker commented that as a young man, the people who were supposed to be in his way as he moved up had mostly all be wiped out by World War One.
The happiness research is interesting–it’s so tough to get measures. I have found Csiksentmihalyi and Seligman among the best people to read.
I wonder if people who have depressive tendencies can benefit from a different sort of advice than the sort that is designed more for the”worried well.”
Up thru the 40s or so, one has a lot of “future” and lots of dreams.
The struggle of most folks to realize their dreams, without as much success as expected, leads to understandable frustration and unhappiness and stress.
As Handle points out, acceptance of your non-executive place in company hierarchy is necessary for most folks in the rat race to be happy; such acceptance also means trying less hard, and being less stressed about less success, or a lack of success. (The successful exec workaholics are too busy to be so unhappy. They’re doing the networking for success, and are living their materialistic dreams, or possibly their family / emotional dreams, but at least are confident that they’re among the Big Winners.)
Rauch looks at the paradox that in your forties you may doing well objectively but feel unhappy.
Isn’t this the truth of vacations as well? They start off very happy but somwhere in the middle is where everybody gets cranky and unhappy? And then as the vacation ends they enjoy more?
I put two main things:
1) People are the busiest in their forties and don’t get to enjoy enough free time.
2) People realize this is their life and certain dreams are not coming true.
“As you get older, you start to notice people your age who are physically deteriorating or whose lives are troubled in some way, and so it is easier to feel good about what you have”—unless you yourself are physically deteriorating and troubled! But really, as you get older, even if your life is not so great, you *should* be noticing your contemporaries who are *dead*: almost certainly, you are better off than they are! (But I do not think this actually explains older people’s increase in *relative life-satisfaction*, because dead people, being absent, are not much noticed.)
Thank you for your blog. I read about the mid forties being a low point for happiness as I was approaching that age and couldn’t relate to it at all. About 6 months later, I could completely relate. I do wonder if everyone reading about this research wouldn’t actually induce depression in many people. This knowledge wasn’t particular helpful to me. Anyway, what I notice in my late forties is that many things, politics, sports and pop culture just don’t excite me that much anymore. Trump has been helpful in that regard. Time to develop new habits and hobbies but the transition can be rough.
I have nothing to do so I actually simulated the aggregate effect you mentioned in the post
https://ibb.co/euf3WT
Assume that the distribution of the crisis is normal with mean 45 and standard deviation 5, the aggregate curve (over 1000 samples) indeed smooths out the drop in the individual profile.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the happiness shift from your 40s to 50s didn’t have a lot to do with the age of their children. People who do ‘objectively’ well in their 40s typically means they are financially well off which often means significant sacrifices at home in terms of time with your family. Teenagers aren’t as cute or enjoyable to be around as your typical toddler or young child and so the opportunity cost of working more as you age decreases. On the other hand teenagers can bring a lot more satisfaction with things that they have done, as you can be proud of them getting into college, getting their first job, winning awards, etc. Then in the your late 50s you start hitting the grandchildren years, which seem to bring the most happiness per hour spent for human beings not doing drugs.