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Old and young people are happier
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
http://www.economist.com/node/17722567
COR version: around the world, people are unhappiest toward the middle of their lives, and happiest in youth and old age. The global average for lowest happiness is age 46. Article speculates a lot about why this trend exists.
Excerpt:
| quote: | Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.
Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.
Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.
Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).
The view from winter
Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.
Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”
Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46. |
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| Domesticated |
| I don't dispute the results, but I think this kind of thing is too complex to examine the causes on a global level. |
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| Meat187 |
Fixed for childhood. |
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| Domesticated |
| I hope you're being sarcastic. Teenagers are the mopiest group of people alive. In fact, every time I'm forced to go to a shopping centre, the only joy I get is watching all the privileged, middle-class teenagers looking all sad and tortured. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Domesticated
I hope you're being sarcastic. Teenagers are the mopiest group of people alive. In fact, every time I'm forced to go to a shopping centre, the only joy I get is watching all the privileged, middle-class teenagers looking all sad and tortured. |
You don't understand me! No one does!!
IT HURTS SO BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!! |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Domesticated
I hope you're being sarcastic. Teenagers are the mopiest group of people alive. In fact, every time I'm forced to go to a shopping centre, the only joy I get is watching all the privileged, middle-class teenagers looking all sad and tortured. |
I think that was exactly Meat's point: puberty hits and then people go all emo. :p |
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| Lira |
| Meh, happiness is overrated. Unfortunately, you can't be happy for too long; fortunately, however, you can't be miserable for too long either. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
You don't understand me! No one does!!
IT HURTS SO BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!! |
CRAWWWWWLING IN MY SKIIIIIIIIIIIN!
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| Domesticated |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
I think that was exactly Meat's point: puberty hits and then people go all emo. :p |
Ah, of course. Apologies, I misjudged where the line was drawn. |
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| Domesticated |
My girlfriend's mother claims she's never had a genuine moment of happiness in her life. My girlfriend then asked: "what about when Charles [her brother] and I were born?"
"I was content...but not happy."
:wtf:
Granted, her mother grew up with abusive, alcoholic parents, but still. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
CRAWWWWWLING IN MY SKIIIIIIIIIIIN!
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IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'VE BECOME SO NUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMB, I CAN'T FEEEEEEEEEL YOU THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERE!!!
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Domesticated
My girlfriend's mother claims she's never had a genuine moment of happiness in her life. My girlfriend then asked: "what about when Charles [her brother] and I were born?"
"I was content...but not happy."
:wtf:
Granted, her mother grew up with abusive, alcoholic parents, but still. |
Plenty such people exist:
| quote: | My name is Sarah. I'm 32 and I live in Los Angeles. Since I was a small child, I have wanted to die. But here I am.
I keep two bottles labeled "Poison" on the shelf next to my bed. They are filled with an alcohol extract of several pounds of macerated immature Conium maculatum seed pods, the part of the plant that is highest in toxic alkaloids. I feel much better having it there. My hope is that someday I'll get drunk and upset and drink it down without even thinking about it. I think it will work; my only worry is a couple of papers that point to extreme pain while dying and possible kidney problems if one survives. (Also, the stuff smells like the Grim Reaper's boiled turd smeared on a rat with gangrene.) Still, here I am.
...
Life is quite unbearable, for a human, without the "risk and adventure" of a story-bound life. What we are looking for when we look for the "meaning of life" is the greater story. The unfortunate truth, suggested by science and vehemently denied by religion, is that there is no greater story. We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality, or rather worse, because there never was a story. For many of us, our personal stories have run out - and it's extremely difficult to push oneself into a new story once you see that all stories are vanity. It is like the difficulty of staying in a dream once one realizes one is dreaming.
The Cheery and the Damned
Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this cheery social policy.
The fundamental problem with this sort of cheeriness is the assumption that a good life - a pleasant life - is relatively easy to achieve. Cheery people are able to hold such a belief because they are able to ignore - and perhaps can't even conceive of - the suffering of a significant minority of the population. A good life is not easily achieved for many of us.
There is a majority belief that we need not use extraordinary means to achieve a happy and meaningful life. Behaviors that deviants engage in, perhaps in pursuit of a tolerable life - weird sex with lots of people, say, or using steroids or marijuana or LSD or benzodiazepines - strike cheery people as perplexing and frightening. For a cheery person, these behaviors are wholly unnecessary - life is perfectly tolerable without them. And they increase the risk of harm! Who wants harm?
What the cheery cannot imagine is the importance, the function of these behaviors, and others like them - the pursuit of the interesting, and the temporary suspension of the intolerability of existence, which intolerability (for many) the cheery do not even perceive, and therefore do not properly weight as a problem. |
http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com...-policy-as.html
Basically, this woman thinks life is such a terrible thing that nobody should have kids (and that it is even immoral to have them).
There is actually a circle of these people, "anti-natalists," who all comment on one another's blogs. You can find a lot of them from this page:
http://antinatalism.blogspot.com/
Not exactly light reading. |
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