It all goes downhill after 30 — at least when it comes to happiness.
“Adults over 30 are less happy than their predecessors,” concludes a study published online Thursday in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, which examined happiness data from more than 50,000 adults, gleaned from the General Social Survey, carried out by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan, independent research organization, which has collected information about American adults since 1972.
From 2010 to 2014, adults over 30 had an average happiness score of just 2.18, compared with 2.24 a decade ago. That’s significant considering happiness scores were measured on a tiny scale from just 1 to 3, with 1 being “not too happy” and 3 being “very happy.” (The data used five-year cohort periods so that single year fluctuations were smoothed out.)
What’s perhaps even more interesting is that, for the first time ever, adults ages 18 to 29 were happier than adults over 30. “The happiness advantage of mature adults over adolescents has dwindled,” write the authors of the study, entitled “More Happiness for Young People and Less for Mature Adults: Time Period Differences in Subjective Well-Being in the United States, 1972 – 2014.”
While the authors don’t know for sure why younger adults are happier than older ones for the first time in at least 40 years, they do have some theories. First, rising inequality may have more of an impact on the well-being of older adults than on younger ones, who are more apt to think they can overcome such things given that they have more time. And older adults may be more disappointed by the “increasingly unrealistic expectations for educational attainment, jobs, material goods and relationships,” the authors write, while younger adults still have hope for these things.
That said, there are plenty of studies that show we get happier as we get older (including a study published in 2011 in the journal Psychology and Aging, which revealed that “emotional experience improves with age”).
In general, women are slightly happier than men, the authors found — a finding that’s backed up by other research, including a worldwide survey by Gallup, which found that 40% of women were very happy, compared with only 34% of men. Researchers aren’t quite sure why this is, but the differences between the genders in terms of happiness tend to be fairly small.
Must have been a Gov’t funded study. What about the happiness of rabbits or elk. We need a lot more similar studies which will surely create more jobs and strong growth for the economy.
The happiness of humans that were abducted by aliens and subjected to medical experiments would be my top choice for gov’t funding.
I wake up every morning at 100% happiness, according to Mr. Happy.
After reading TBP, by the end of day I’m considering suicide.
“Thirtysomething”, “Ally McBeal”, “St.Elsewhere”…all good TV in it’s day.
I guess it’s just a coincidence that the segment of this society that does the heavy lifting is the one becoming disillusioned.
Krugman Doesn’t Understand Why “Darkness Is Spreading Over Part Of Our Society”
Tyler Durden’s picture.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/09/2015 08:27 -0500
A rather surprising Op-Ed by none other than Paul Krugman, first posted in The New York Times,
Despair, American Style
A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are “down on America,” and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with reality.
Yet there is a darkness spreading over part of our society. And we don’t really understand why.
There has been a lot of comment, and rightly so, over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999. This deterioration took place while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.
Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.
Yet the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good old alcohol, it’s not really news that there’s a drug problem in the heartland.
But what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?
If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.
For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.
You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.
What about a materialist explanation? Is rising mortality a consequence of rising inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class?
Well, it’s not that simple. We are, after all, talking about the consequences of behavior, and culture clearly matters a great deal. Most notably, Hispanic Americans are considerably poorer than whites, but have much lower mortality. It’s probably worth noting, in this context, that international comparisons consistently find that Latin Americans have higher subjective well-being than you would expect, given their incomes.
So what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.” That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we’re looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
That sounds like a plausible hypothesis to me, but the truth is that we don’t really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society as a whole.
In particular, I know I’m not the only observer who sees a link between the despair reflected in those mortality numbers and the volatility of right-wing politics. Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them. No, deporting immigrants and wearing baseball caps bearing slogans won’t solve their problems, but neither will cutting taxes on capital gains. So you can understand why some voters have rallied around politicians who at least seem to feel their pain.
At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I’m not sure whether they’re enough to cure existential despair.
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My first reaction was who gives a flying fuck ?I’m sick and tired of hearing about other peoples misery.My dad ( God rest his soul ) used to tell me to just suck it up and take it when bad things happened .He resented people who complained about their lives but he was a Vietnam war veteran.He spent a whole year fighting in the jungle over there. He told me most people didn’t know the meaning of hardship.I miss my Father .
I’ll explain it to the Krugman types in two parts.
1. someone has to pay, one way or another, for all the goodies for everyone he referred to, and
2. It’s not inherently ingrained in some people to receive handouts without feeling a sense of degeneracy.
bb……………at least you were fortunate to have a ‘father’ – not referring to the biological side. Many others were/are not so fortunate.
Now let’s see: jobs exported to China, over $1 trillion in student debt, cradle to grave indebtedness: education / car / home / health insurance racket. You tax dollars going to fucking illegals, niggas pumpin’ out welfare tickets, queers in public bathrooms, endless lying by our government, endless cries of racism, fucking Somali’s, Mexicans, now MENA .
At 30 these ‘children’ are waking up and realizing what a shit hole the USA has become..
Krugman ignores HFCS, fast-food and similar corporate contributors to early mortality; but then, Krugman ignores anything which doesn’t fit his agenda. He can’t admit that even lower-educated white males can read ObamaCare premiums rising XXX%, lower wages due to illegal immigrants taking jobs, and lower / nonexistent interest rates which penalize those folks’ parents, causing higher poverty among the elderly.
Krugman lives in a fantasy world of the “Elites” he participates in. His awakening will be loud, abrupt and painful – probably at the hands of some feral savage looking for food in his apartment.
Do we call the Whaaaaambulance or do we wipe their backsides and hope their feewings improve? That is the question.
When I was starting adult life there was horrid stagflation and no jobs. I think interest rates were around 12% and banks were not loaning money. I was tickled shitless to get a 10 3/8% interest rate when I built my second home. That would prolly send these “kiddies” into mass suicide.
Our parents would have said STFU and do the best you can. We did, and we beat the odds to prosper and be successful.
Krugman is such disgusting filth. Constantly advocate for the printing of a whole bunch of money. Subsidize laziness and irresponsibility by giving said printed money to entitled trash in exchange for votes for more handouts. These welfare recipients statistically tend not to be caucasian people. And then he has the goddam nerve to wonder how and why “something” is tearing away the heartland of traditional america.
The real reason why these traditional old world people are drowning in their own sorrow is because they know there is only one solution to this mess, and it involves an escalation they are not willing to take. Yet.
That’s because they’re starting to realize that a lifetime of “living for today” is catching up with them. They’ve made every bad decision possible, good jobs are drying up all around them and the only option available is govt assistance and even that is looking shaky.
Suicide for the over 30 crowd got pretty high in Russia after the collapse. Gonna happen here too.
THIS won’t help things……..
The Fed is going to raise rates in December.