Surprising Joys of Old Age

Why You Can Look Forward to Being Happier in Old Age

If life wanted to mess with you, it couldn’t have come up with a better way than death. Especially the lead-up. Your strength flags; your world narrows; much of what once gave you pleasure and satisfaction is now gone. But as it turns out, happiness is still very much with you—often even more so than before.

In some ways, our youth and middle years are really a sort of training period for the unanticipated pleasure of being an elder adult, psychologist Alan D. Castel of the University of California, Los Angeles, argues in his new book, Better With Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging. In one 2006 study -Castel cites, a group of 30-year-olds and 70-year-olds were asked which of the two age cohorts was likely to be happier. Both of them chose the 30-year-olds. But when those groups were asked about their own subjective happiness, the 70-year-olds came out on top.

Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and other social investigators have long been intrigued by similar findings—that old age is often a time defined not by sorrow, dread and regret but rather by equanimity, tranquility,  peace, gratitude and fulfillment. Investigators looking into the happy senescence phenpomenon attribute it to a lot of things: seniors become masters of “terror management theory” or “constructive distraction” or “voluntary affirmation of the obligatory.” In other words, they figure: I’m gonna die? What the hell. What else is new? Meantime, I’ve got my grandkids here.

Just as surprising as the happy oldster is the miserable middle-ager, Jonathan Rauch reports in his book The Happiness Curve, published in May. Life satisfaction appears to follow a U-turn shaped course, with its twin peaks in childhood, when the world is one great theme park, and in old age, when we’ve been on all the rides a thousand times and are perfectly content just to watch. It’s in the middle—our 40s and 50s, when our strategy is persistence, persuasion, perseverance, power, potential, productivity and encyclopedic knowledge of our caucus -- life's trials and tribulations, its pomp, circumstance and situational awareness are the greatest -- we should be feeling our happiest—that life satisfaction may bottom out.

This thee U-turn is true across nations, cultures and income levels, research shows. It makes a lot of sense. For one thing, all that perseverance, power and productivity require a lot of work to maintain, and it comes at the very moment when other pressures are the greatest with the sandwich generatiin—raising kids, paying the mortgage, student loans and those kids’ tuition bills and then simultaeneously, taking care of and/ or making your parents at least comfortable in their elder years. Your evaluative happiness (how your life would appear if measured in terms of wealth, achievements and a stable family) can be very different from your affective happiness (how you actually feel). A life that looks happy is not necessarily experienced, as being happy.

In the later decades, this changes in a lot of ways. For one thing, that business of realizing that you may never achieve a long-desired goal can actually be a positive experience. After banging your head against the wall for 40 years to make partner, finally succeeding in business or become department chair, either you've frozen out , stymied or simply outlasted younger members, the day you accept you’re free to quit trying comes as a relief.

Hey you're a Seenager -- Sr. Teenager you have everything you wanted when you were in you teens, except its decades later.

Yes, I have everything that I wanted as a teenager, only 60 years later.

I don’t have to go to school or work.

I get an an allowance every month.

I have my own pad.

I don’t have a curfew.

I have a driving licence and my own car.

I have ID that gets me into bars and off-licences. I like the off-licences best.

The people I hang around with are not scared of getting pregnant. They aren’t scared of anything. They have been blessed to live this long, so why be scared?

And I don’t have acne.

Life is Good!.

You just can't get over this president. He is so beneath the dignity of the office.

Loathed by the right, under fire from the left. He just, " isn't going anywhere." He says.

If he weren't effective, he wouldn't be a target.

He stopped caring about what people think of him along time ago, so he has no qualms about doing as he pleases.

There is, similarly, what Rauch describes as an older person’s ability to normalize crises. Life can be a series of experiential typhoons and cyclones, both good and bad —falling in love, falling out of love, marriage, divorce, new job, lost job... —and every one of them feels overwhelming at first. But there are only so many Category 5/6s that can be thrown at you before you realize that the clouds will eventually part and you’ll probably be left wet, wind burned but standing.

Then, too, there is the business of wisdom. Evolutionarily, any species that hopes to stay alive has to manage its resources carefully. That means that first call on food and other goodies goes to the breeders and warriors and hunters and planters and builders and, certainly, the children, with not much left over for the seniors, who may be seen as consuming more than they’re contributing. But even before modern medicine extended life expectancies, ordinary extended families were including grandparents and even great-grandparents. That’s because what old folk consume materially, they give back behaviorally—providing a leveling, reasoning center to the tumult that often swirls around them.

In another study cited in Better With Age, a group of successful CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—all 50 to 70 years old—scored lower on lab-based tests of reasoning and processing speed than younger people, yet all the CEOs nonetheless were running huge, stable and exceedingly profitable companies. Clearly, something more than the ability to crunch a lot of data was contributing to their success.

Earlier in life, wisdom can seem out of reach. But for those who have attained it, Castel writes, “often wisdom allows people to see the obvious, or to use common sense without second-guessing themselves or the outcomes.”

Yes, death is nonnegotiable—something that can only be delayed, never avoided. It’s a mercy, then, that when we reach the end, so many of us arrive there smarter, calmer and even smiling.