Middle age can be a miserable time, particularly for a certain cohort of Gen Xers who are struggling through divorce, a dead-end career, insufficient savings or overwhelming debt.
But David Blanchflower, a professor at Dartmouth College and former BoE policy maker, examined data across 132 countries to measure the relationship between wellbeing and age.
And what he found surprised him, according to Bloomberg.
He concluded that every country has a “happiness curve” that’s U-shaped over a typical lifetime.
“The curve’s trajectory holds true in countries where the median wage is high and where it is not and where people tend to live longer and where they don’t,” Blanchflower wrote in a study that was published Monday by the NBER.
For most of the developed world, the age of peak unhappiness is 47.2 years old.
Most of a person’s middle years are miserable, according to the study. But oddly enough, as we approach the golden years, we start to appreciate life a little bit more.
Perhaps that has something to do with approaching retirement age (something millennials might never reach). Or maybe it’s simply the wisdom of age.
But for most of life, expect the misery to get worse before it gets better. Just one more reason why Americans are seeking mental health advice in droves.
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It’s because substantial portions of the population start to self select themselves out of the polling data via suicide, heart attacks, overdose, etc.
If I might proffer to all gentle readers a small bit of mental health advice, to perhaps make those miserable years a wee less miserable, garnered from a previous career in said mental health and a six decade long experience here in the open air lunatic asylum called planet Earth:
Don’t sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.
I swear, you always make me laugh and at the same time appreciate subtle plays on language. You had to have been a shrink. Remind me never to make you angry! 🙂
Is that your admission we need 5 year renewable marriage licenses?
The older I get, the less I give a sh** about.
By 40 most have figured out that everything is fucked. By 50 most have finally given up on changing that fact.
I don’t give a fuck! No more fucks to give ! Shit, did I just give away my age?
Or it could be, we just can’t remember as much as we get older.
Stay out of debt and you can job hop to your hearts (And minds) content.
It’s harder than ever to make it to age 50 in the system because it’s all about extracting everything that can be extracted out of the individual by tricking them into believing they have a better future in the system. I am speaking about those that are not in the protected classes of peoples.
When a targeted individual in the system reaches the mid forties, they will have realized that their future in the system is locked in. There is much more to be extracted from them due to their own folly in believing in their future. Once an individual in the targeted classes reaches the age of 50, certain rules kick in and the extractions slow down.
It’s the Boomers fault. God knows GenXers can’t be held responsible for misery brought about by divorce, debt and dead-end jobs. Who will they blame for advanced age misery, we’ll all be dead?
Mid life coffee shop conversations.
My heart attack aces your cancer because I’m on more meds.
Freud did say when he landed on American shores in 1906 “don’t they realise we are bringing them the plague”. Don’t you think the psych industry has done enough damage to the people it’s part of the problem and more boob suckling.
There is a direct correlation between your level of stress and your financial security as you age. By your mid 40’s you begin to realize that you will not be able to tolerate your wage slave job forever, and that your time to achieve financial independence is growing short.
If you have achieved your financial goals by you mid 40’s your stress levels are much lower than those who have not. This is because you realize you do not have to take the crap off your employer that your less successful counterparts do. I realized at an early age that most people who seek positions of power usually had psychopathic tendencies, and this seems particularly true in the corporate world.
By my 40’s I achieved enough success to not need any job enough to take any crap off anyone. It gave me confidence and an attitude that my employers realized I would tell them to kiss my backside and walk at any time.
It made all the sacrifices I made in my 20’s and 30’s to get to that point worth it 10 times over….