A telephone survey conducted in 2008 asked more than 340,000 people nationwide from ages 18 to 85 questions that had them rank overall life satisfaction on several questions covering enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger and sadness.The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 17, were surprising.
While most people would have expected young people to be high on life, that wasn’t how the survey came out. In fact, it turned out that people start out feeling pretty good about themselves at about age 18, but then life throws them “curveballs,” and they feel worse and worse until they hit about age 50.
But then things turn around, and people start getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18, according to the study.
I was very happy to read that, because too often we get negative information about what happens as people live into their 80s or 90s.
In “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age” (Pantheon Books), author Susan Jacoby claims that “extreme old age can be nasty, brutish and long,” according to reviewer Ted C. Fishman in The New York Times.
But other professionals see aging quite differently. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England, who has done several studies on human happiness, called the telephone survey findings “important and, in some ways, heartening.”
Back in the late 1970s, when I was a health sciences professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, N.Y., I proposed that we explore the question: “What do we really know about aging?” asking it of the best medical professionals from around the nation and inviting them to take part in a discussion series.
This idea was supported, and it was an astounding series. I compiled the wisdom of participants in a book that was published by the university.
I will always remember Eric Pfeiffer, then professor of psychiatry at Duke University, who told me: “It has struck me that the successfully aging person was someone who somewhere along the way had decided to stay in training … physically, intellectually, emotionally and socially.”
When I added, “Spiritually, too?” he smiled.
This belief has been reinforced for me over and over.
Franciscan Father Richard Rohr, the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, N.M., just published a book on this very subject, “Falling Upward, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”(Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint).
Father Rohr acknowledges that “the language of the first half of life and the language of the second half of life are almost two different vocabularies,” and that “more calm and contemplative seeing does not appear suddenly, but grows almost unconsciously over many years of conflict, confusion, healing, broadening, loving, and forgiving reality. … The big difference is that your small and petty self is out of the way, and if God wants to use you, which God always does, God’s chances are far better now!”
When millions of people in their 70s, 80s and even 90s are vital, healthy and alert, what kind of continuing progress will this signal for humanity? Will we advance “in grace and wisdom,” as philosophers have indicated should be the path of the old? Or will we retreat into the more self-centered pleasures, opting for leisure time over productive time, leaving the evolution of society the responsibility of youth?
Noted Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that the afternoon of life must have significance; it cannot be a pitiful appendage to morning. This becomes ever truer as we live longer and healthier, facing an era that is historically unprecedented.
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