Happiness is tricky. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I turn 40 this year. (Buy me something nice!) Iām sort of OK with it, mainly because the Covid-19 situation means that I donāt feel obligated to organise some enormous party or stag-do-like Ladsā Weekend Away. On the big day itself weāll be in Center Parcs, because Iām a wild man. Still though: 40. It feels significant.
Hereās one reason why it feels significant. One of the most well-known findings in economics and psychology is the āU-shaped curveā of happiness. In short, it says that weāre happiest when weāre young, then thereās a decline, but later in life we cheer up again. The finding seems robust ā the economist David Blanchflower has found a happiness curve in nearly 200 different countries, so itās (probably) not just affluenza-induced mid-life crises in the rich West. And the point at which the average personās wellbeing is recorded as lowest ā male or female, developed world or developing ā is in their 40s.Ā
As I said, itās a well-known finding. And thereās a tendency ā which I share ā to ascribe a kind of destiny to it: as though we all sit on a great wellbeing rollercoaster, and go up and down in our cohorts, the 1980 babies all nearing the abyssal nadir at the same time, while their 1990 successors are just starting their downward run behind them.
Iām partly thinking about this because an interesting new study, by the Cambridge psychologist Dr Amy Orben and colleagues, finds something similar again: it suggests that ālife satisfactionā (not quite the same thing as wellbeing) begins declining earlier, as young as 10, and starts coming back up around age 50. Another slightly unexpected thing it found was that although we tend to think of adolescent girls as suffering particularly badly, boys have a similar drop in wellbeing, just a couple of years later on average: Orben wonders if this is about the onset of puberty, and related brain development.
I am fascinated by happiness research. It seems to me that it might be the most important subject in the world; and yet it is also an absolute nightmare to study, because youāre trying to find answers that philosophers have argued about for three millennia with a five-item questionnaire.
Hereās what I mean by important. If youāre trying to cure cancer, why are you doing it if not, in the end, to make people happier? If youāre trying to build a better smartphone, why are you doing it if not, in the end, to make people happier? When a politician says they got into politics to āimprove peopleās livesā, what does that mean if not, in the end, to make people happier?Ā
Obviously I have just waded knee-deep into about six separate philosophical controversies there: what does it mean to be happy; is āthe good lifeā about happiness, or about living a life of virtue, or a life that you are proud of, or what; is self-realisation and independence more important than happiness etc etc.Ā
But it seems to me that ā on some, quite important, level ā what matters is whether people are happy. If we cured all the worldās cancers, made the perfect smartphone and achieved the ideal form of representative government, but everyone was just as miserable after as they were before, then ā did any of it matter? I think it is at least plausible that happiness, in some nebulous and hard-to-define but nonetheless real sense, is the most important thing in the universe.
And I donāt think itās just me. The British government flirted with measuring wellbeing and using it as a national target, like GDP growth or inflation; the New Zealand government has actually gone further and done it. (At government level, everyoneās a utilitarian, I guess.)
Which means we have a problem. Or several problems, first of which is: what are we talking about? When psychologists use the term āhappinessā, they seem to use it relatively interchangeably (in my experience) with āsubjective wellbeingā, which is distinct from ālife satisfactionā.Ā
Subjective wellbeing is how youāre feeling right now, in the moment; psychologists might measure this by asking someone to agree or disagree with the statement āI feel good about myselfā or āI feel cheerfulā. Life satisfaction is how you rate your life when you are asked to take stock of it; psychologists might measure this by asking people to agree or disagree with the statement āIf I could live my life over, I would change almost nothingā or āI am satisfied with my lifeā.Ā
These measures are related, but distinct. To return to the U-shaped curve, most studies refer to wellbeing; the Orben et al paper is about life satisfaction. Dr Julia Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of Leipzig, gave me a couple of helpful examples of how theyāre distinct.
First, often when people have children, their subjective wellbeing goes down: being a parent is hard, and you feel tired and harried and donāt get any time to yourself. But their life satisfaction goes up: they feel proud of their kids, and they add meaning to life. Conversely, she says, people who are unemployed often report reduced life satisfaction; but sometimes their subjective wellbeing actually goes up, because work is hard and not always all that fun.
(This isnāt true for everyone, obviously. We are always talking about averages across population.)
So weāve defined it. But now the second problem is we have to measure it, and thatās difficult too. Itās not like measuring someoneās height, where thereās a clear and reliable system. Youāre using a questionnaire to assess something internal and subjective.
Thereās a quite deep philosophical assumption here, or two assumptions. First, that there is what Rohrer calls an āunobserved quantityā, something internal and real and true, that is our āhappinessā or our āwellbeingā. And second, that this unobserved quantity somehow relates, in a reliable, predictable way, to what is going on when we say āI would rate my subjective wellbeing three out of 10.ā
That doesnāt feel too implausible. But if youāre assessing someoneās happiness in Britain and someoneās happiness in China, are you getting at the same quantity? If you ask someone to rate from 0 to 10 how happy they are ā does that work? Do the English word āhappinessā and the Mandarin word āå¹øē¦ā (xingfĆŗ, apparently), which Google tells me is the translation, really address exactly the same concept?
We donāt even need to go to China. Would the answer that a 16-year-old gives be directly comparable to the answer a 40-year-old gives? Or a 70-year-old? Are they reading those numbers off the same internal scoreboard? Whatever this āunobserved quantityā is, can we be sure that it is the same when you ask a child as when you ask her grandmother? āIt canāt be the same construct across the life course,ā is Rohrerās answer. āGoing from age 10 to age 80, it must be a completely different type of assessment.ā
(Orben is entirely aware of this, I should say: āMeasuring happiness and life satisfaction is extremely difficult and we interpret it differently throughout our lives,ā she says. Her research is carried out in the full knowledge that it is difficult and uncertain and needs to be approached with caution. Psychology is the hardest science.)
So those are the problems with researching it. But thereās another layer of difficulty, which is that presumably we want to know about happiness in order to create more of it; but it seems that it is quite hard to make. Somewhere between 50% and 80% of the variation in happiness in the population is inherited with your genes; for many, if not most, of us, there is quite a hard limit to how much you can improve your happiness.Ā
That doesnāt mean that 50% of āyour happinessā is in your genes (what would that mean?), rather that the differences between peopleās reported happiness scores in a given society are at least 50% down to their different genetic make-up. The rest is traditionally divided between our ācircumstancesā ā our material wealth, our upbringing, our social environment ā and our decisions.
You can see what I mean when you look at the impact of life eventsĀ ā childbirth, divorce, marriage, unemployment, loss of a spouse ā on reported life satisfaction. In many cases (not all; unemployment is the obvious exception), peopleās scores change dramatically, but relatively quickly return to where they were. There really does seem to be a set point, and while you can be shifted from it, you have a sort of inertia which tends to bring you back to it. (That said, in the case of widowhood, both men and women seem to end up happier a few years after the death of their partner, which is frankly disturbing.)
It may not be that there is literally a happiness gene, says Rohrer: āThe heritability estimates donāt tell you why happiness is heritable,ā she says. āIt could be because happiness is innate, but we know cognitive ability is highly heritable, which would affect your achievement, which would affect your income, which would affect your wellbeing. It could just be that youāre blessed with skills that society happens to value.ā
On which point, itās worth noting that although the one thing that everyone knows about happiness psychology is that money doesnāt make you happy, money does, in fact, make you happy. Dr Nick Brown, another psychologist, points out that there is in fact a strong correlation between GDP and happiness, and (on a personal level) between income and happiness. āThereās an old joke I saw on an office wall,ā he says. āāMoney doesnāt make you happy. People with $10 million are no happier than people with $9 million.ā Once you get above the middle-class income in a median area of the US [probably around $75,000] it might not make much difference, but actually the intuitive feeling, that people with more money are happier, is right.āĀ
(Again, on average. For some people this will be more true; for others, less so.)
This all has quite profound implications, or so it seems to me, for government policy. If we take the position (as many do) that government should improve happiness, and it turns out that material wealth and genes account for most of the variation in happiness, then the policies that would imply might be very different from if individual decisions are especially important for happiness. This stuff is hard to research, but the findings that come out of it seem to plug directly into the very core of what we want policy to do.
The Orben paper, incidentally, found an impressively large decline in wellbeing in early adolescence. Orben herself wondered whether that was to do with how our brains develop: that happiness, or life satisfaction, is heavily linked to comparisons with others ā if youāre saying youāre not satisfied with how your life is, presumably youāre thinking it could have gone otherwise; and the only comparisons you have are other peopleās. And the ability to make those comparisons doesnāt turn up fully formed with your milk teeth.
In adolescence, she says, āyou have intense social development, a theory of mind develops, youāre thinking about how people are thinking, your perspective develops; you can compare yourself to people around the worldā ā you go from being an unreflective child to a reasoning, reflecting young adult, and suddenly the question āare you satisfied with your lifeā has a meaning beyond where the next ice cream is coming from. She is interested in how much of a role social media plays in it all, although her previous work shows that most of the more doomy claims about social media and wellbeing are overstated.
What interests me, of course, is why the average person gets happier as they get older. Thereās some suggestion that itās a cognitive processĀ ā our brains start focusing on the good things that have happened, not the bad. Rohrer, though, says āI donāt think thereās a single explanation for the observed pattern. One possibility is that midlife is worst because of many obligations ā careers tend to peak with the associated workload, kids still need to be taken care of, parents may suddenly require care as their health declines.ā (Basically, whatās going on in this cartoon.) As you get older, those responsibilities tend to decline.
Also, she says, midlife is where you have to face up to the reality of what youāve achieved: āaspirations and expectations are compared to the actual outcomesā, with time for significant change running out. As you get older again, she says, some research suggests āthat people realise whatās important: they focus more on positive emotions, and on close relationships that are particularly satisfying, rather than meeting new people.ā Itās also important to remember, she says, that the U-shape is an average, āonly visible in aggregateā, and while large compared to a lot of psychological findings, is still only a small effect in terms of overall happiness.
To return to where we started: researching happiness is hard, but it does seem that the U-shaped curve describes some real phenomenon. So I approach my fifth decade with a certain trepidation. But itās not destiny, not some vast fairground ride of joy and gloom: itās not that everyone follows the same path: some people get happier, some people get sadder, peopleās happiness jumps around. Itās all about averages.Ā
And, at least, I donāt have to have a party.
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