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.”
Continue reading “Americans over 30 are more miserable than they’ve ever been”
