First sample summary

The U-bend of Life

Summary

The main idea the article conveys to the reader is as follows: ‘Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.’ This statement is based on evidence that behavioral scientists and psychiatrists gathered in the studies carried out all over the world within the last few decades. The U-bend trend shows the changes in global and emotional (hedonic) well-being.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. As people age, they lose their treasured qualities – vitality, mental sharpness and looks.  However, they also gain in what most people spend their lives pursuing, namely happiness.

Some scientists have decided to measure happiness itself. Along this line, Great Britain and France have started collecting data on well-being. Figures are mainly collected using surveys which ask two main questions. One of them concerns people’s assessment of their own lives to measure their global well-being, and the other, how they feel at any particular time to measure hedonic or emotional well-being. Following these studies, the analyses based on the perennial question of what makes people happy identified the following four key factors:

1. Gender: women are slightly happier than men, even though the former are more susceptible to depression.
2. Personality: neurotic people – those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety – tend to be unhappy, as they are mainly prone to having negative feelings, while extroverts tend to be the opposite.
3. External circumstances: This includes all sorts of variables in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, which shape the way they feel; happiness increases as these circumstances improve. Concerning income, conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility – the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. Nonetheless, one study examining data from around the world revealed the ‘Easterlin paradox’ – well-being depends not on absolute, but on relative, income: people feel miserable not because they are poor, but because they are at the bottom of the particular pile in which they find themselves. While the evidence for a correlation between income and happiness over time remains weak possibly due to the lack of data, the one for a correlation between counties is strong. Richer countries are clearly happier, but presumably cultural factors are at work, as well. E.g., Asians tend to be somewhat less happy than their income would suggest, and Scandinavians a little more so. Latin Americans are cheerful, while the republics of the former-Soviet Union are spectacularly miserable. Last but not least, Bulgaria is the saddest place in the world relative to its income.
4. Age: Both 30-year-olds and 70-year-olds generally think that the former are likely to be happier, but if you ask them to rate their own well-being, it seems that the 70-year-olds are the happier ones. Studies have shown that the global average at which people are the most unhappy is 46, i.e., the lowest point of the U-bend. Studies refute that the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances, such as employment status or children. Indeed,  this trend is most likely due to internal changes in one’s personality towards maturity: older people have fewer rows, come up with better solutions for conflicts, are better at controlling their emotions and misfortunes, and are less prone to anger. They come to focus on things that matter now, such as feelings, and less on long-term goals. They also come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps, acceptance of aging itself is a source of relief that brings happiness. Moreover, happiness makes people healthier and more productive, and this applies to all age groups.