Happiness is one of the great themes of humanity and reflection on it has always been a great topic of debate. In ancient Greece, Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus defended different postulates about what it means to be happy, and since then philosophers and thinkers have presented their theories. Today, psychology and also the social sciences investigate the question. Multiple studies and specialists have stated that happiness, in a life graph, is U-shaped: in childhood and adolescence it would be at its highest point, in adulthood it would drop to lower levels, and later, towards maturity and old age, would increase again. Is this theory true? What is this evolution due to?
“The hardest stage of life is adulthood, from the end of adolescence to entering the world of work and parenting. The happiness curve increases again as responsibilities lose strength: the children leave, you know what the couple is about, work loses meaning, and you recover your self,” psychologist and researcher Anna Freixas tells La Vanguardia. . “At the end of life, as you approach retirement, you become yourself again, you recover time for yourself, you take stock of what you have experienced and what you can live from now on,” adds the author of books such as Old Me or Our Menopause (Captain Swing).
Carme is 57 years old, her two children are adults – they are in their twenties – and have already left home. Her husband is retired early and although her parents are getting older and have more and more ailments, she is now very satisfied with her life. “I find life now much more satisfying than when I was young. Over the years she learns to relativize things that previously seemed very important to you, you see that perhaps they were not so important. You assimilate that the most relevant of all is you, your physical and emotional well-being. Personal knowledge increases with age, and we learn to manage emotions and discern what is good for us. You also learn to be alone without feeling alone and to appreciate small pleasures,” she tells La Vanguardia. “Over time you learn to adapt to circumstances, that resilience, a word we learned a few years ago. The key is resilience and self-acceptance, with the good and bad that this entails,” she adds.
Carme is precisely close to the baby-boomer generation, who, according to Ipsos data from March 2024, are the happiest people in Spain, with 71% declaring this, compared to 61% of Generation Z (born between 1996 and 2012), which is the unhappiest according to these figures. Baby boomers are the most satisfied with their finances (64%), and also the most pleased with their mental health (85%, certainly a high number).
Alejandro Cencerrado is a physicist, expert in Statistics, big data analyst at the Happiness Research Institute of Copenhagen (Denmark) and author of In defense of unhappiness (Ediciones Destino). “In Spain the U shape (in the graph of life happiness) always appears, unlike countries like Denmark. I think that happiness mostly increases in the final stage of life, although it depends on the social system. In poorer countries, where there is no strong welfare state, reaching old age does not imply economic stability. It is conditioned by several factors, but according to the data I have seen, in Europe there is more happiness in old age,” he tells La Vanguardia.
In the organization where Cencerrado investigates, the reasons for increasing happiness in adulthood are currently a topic of research. Although there are still no conclusions, the physicist ventures to provide some reflections. “We see that the fact of retiring is key: when a person retires, his or her life satisfaction increases a lot, and on the other hand, having less money does not seem to lower happiness. Furthermore, both in old age and in youth, contrary to what one might think, most people adapt very well to health problems,” he comments. This specialist in measuring happiness also influences the United Nations Happiness Report 2024, according to which older people tend to “remember the good and forget the bad.”
Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical, director of the Center for Psychodynamic Therapy and Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and also director of the university's Adult Development study, which is the largest investigation of happiness ever done in the world. world. For 85 years, it has studied the lives of thousands of people (work, family life, social relationships...) and their levels of well-being to find out what influences physical and emotional well-being, and ultimately, happiness. .
“Human beings become happier with age, with old age, when we understand that we will all die, the understanding and comprehension of death makes us happier. When we understand death, we choose to live life differently: we stop doing things out of obligation, activities that we don't like, meetings that don't bring us anything... As we age, we prioritize well-being and the moment. In English we say we stop and smell roses, we take advantage of the small moments so that we give more value to life," Waldinger told us in an interview on the occasion of the presentation of his best-seller in Spanish. .
It is precisely what Pilar feels: the enjoyment - deeper than in other stages - of the small moments. She is 64 years old, she is dedicated to a liberal and vocational profession, and is preparing for her retirement. She has no elders or children in her care, and she enjoys her grandchildren, ages two and nine, whenever she can. “What maturity and age gives me, as well as time, is calm. It is a feeling of going with more calm and pause. It is contradictory because you are on the way to having less vital time, but deep down you have time to enjoy, and for me that is a synonym for happiness.”
But not all researchers, data or personal experiences (logically) are in line with these arguments. In contrast to the aforementioned data from Ipsos, according to the 2022 INE (Spanish Institute of Statistics) Living Conditions Survey, the percentage of people who say they feel happy always or almost always in Spain reduces as age increases. The minimum in this percentage is 62.5% of those surveyed, and it occurs in people 65 years of age or older.
For Cencerrado, “it is important to know how the survey was done, what questions are asked before asking about happiness… If you ask about health just beforehand, the person immediately conditions their answer a lot. You have to be very careful with surveys, but in serious jobs, that U appears in the vital graph.”
David Bartram, Associate Professor and Director of Research at the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester, analyzed data from the European Social Survey. According to his conclusions, “for many people, happiness decreases during old age as we face difficulties related to the passing of the years, such as deterioration in health and family grief.”
Grief is precisely what has marked Himerio's old age. He is 76 years old and has been retired for 11 years, he is in a higher age group than Pilar or Carme. The loss of his wife when she was 69 and he was 71, along with another nearby death in the family, was a hard blow that forced him to rethink and redo everything he had built. “My happy years were those of my marriage, and the time when I saw my daughters grow up and get on track in life, see my grandchildren born... In these years I was well, and I had better purchasing power than now. I can't say that I am happier now than before, I am missing something as important as my lifelong partner. There are times when you have a good time, with your family, but something key is always missing. Loneliness is difficult to bear.”
Widowhood and loneliness in old age due to the fact of having lost a partner is, according to Cencerrado, “what most affects happiness at this stage of life. But even so, in the end in the samples there are not enough people in this situation to lower happiness levels.”
In the case of Florencio, at 64 years old, his health problems and the prospect of retirement next year, without a partner and with few economic resources, cloud his life satisfaction at this moment. He also believes that “there were much better times.”
According to Bartram, his study corrected an error in the interpretation of previous methods. “The U-shaped pattern was not evident in almost half of the 30 countries I investigated,” he notes in an article in The Conversation. “The idea of the U shape comes from statistical analyzes that adjust data to compare people of similar wealth and health in middle age and old age. This adjustment aims to isolate the effect of age from other factors that influence happiness. But since people tend to be poorer and less healthy in old age, the adjustment can be misleading. When we omit the adjustment, an age-related decline in happiness becomes evident in many countries,” he notes.
As the British specialist explains, “there is no universal pattern of happiness, but rather a wide range of patterns in different countries (…). Whether happiness increases or decreases depends on the balance of these competing forces (great challenges and mental adaptation), and a positive outcome is not guaranteed.
