We are all happier in many ways when we are old than when we are young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.
—Winston Churchill

When I’m in other peoples’ homes, I’m automatically drawn to their bookshelves. Books reveal a good deal about a person. Shelves full of Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, James Patterson, and John Grisham logically suggest that their owners enjoy action, intrigue, murders, car bombings, and the challenge of solving crimes. We read for entertainment, information, and enlightenment. We read to learn what we need to learn about ourselves and our world.

Who has not wandered over to their own bookshelves and run their fingers across the spines, looking for just the right one—perhaps a volume remembered to hold epiphanies, comfort, lessons on the importance of forgiveness or the components of happiness? I can easily locate passages in my books that were important to me because I vandalized the pages with underlining and notes in the margins. I even record the details of where I was when I read the book—maybe on a sailboat anchored in Pirate’s Cove on the Tred Avon River off the Chesapeake Bay or simply in the screened porch that my husband and I named The Snuggery.

My books also serve as a diary of those times in my life when I was in the grip of specific interests. Beginning in my forties, my bookshelves revealed that I was beginning to think about what it meant to be older. I read Dave Barry Turns Forty and a more serious tome by Michael Nichols, Turning Forty in the Eighties: Personal Crisis, Time for Change. Nichols’ chapter headings sounded the alarm of “The Midlife Crisis,” “The Pain of Crisis,” “The Mind in Conflict,” “The Empty Self” and, towards the end, “Psychotherapeutic Solutions.” All those frightening chapters, yet I remember my forties as wonderful years.

By the time I turned fifty, I found that I had read only half of Sadler and Krefft’s book, Changing Course: Navigating Life After Fifty, but I read all of Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey and Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. When I approached seventy, I giggled over Judith Viorst’s I’m Too Young To Be Seventy and Other Delusions. I wasn’t sure if I would later read her Unexpectedly Eighty and Other Adaptations.

I also devoured journals by the novelist, poet, and memoirist May Sarton. I loved her poetry and devotion to her pets and gardens and to the wildlife in Maine. I was impressed with her candid discussions on aging and saddened by her declining health, a condition she meticulously chronicled. I found her need for solitude intriguing—especially the fact that when she had it, it wasn’t what she necessarily wanted. After I read George Vaillant’s remarkable book Aging Well, I was certain I had aging all figured out. I remember thinking, I can do that; I can be an older person.

My arrogance now makes me blush.

***

Today, my bookshelves groan under the weight of another topic—the scientific study of happiness or, as psychologists call it, positive psychology. The premise of the positive psychology movement, as explained in psychologist Martin Seligman’s book Authentic Happiness, is that psychology has done a fairly good job of measuring and comprehending the negative side of humanity—mental illnesses, emotional disorders, and deviance. What Seligman found missing was an examination of how we become happy.

The positive psychology movement’s big hook for me was that Seligman didn’t believe people should devote overly much effort in correcting personal weaknesses to build happiness; rather, we should augment what he called our signature strengths. It made sense to me that the process of correcting weaknesses is much more daunting than that of augmenting personal strengths. I was aboard the happiness train!

Later, I turned my attention to the literature on aging and found that just as psychologists’ early emphasis was on what seemed to go wrong with people, gerontologists focused on negative aspects of aging. According to Gary Kenyon, chair and professor in the Gerontology Department at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada, viewing aging as an inevitable decline involving loneliness, depression, sadness, pointlessness, and rigidity in thinking results in the common belief among the young and middle-aged that happiness diminishes as people grow old.

But research doesn’t support these fears; in fact, emotional well-being doesn’t appear to be compromised by the aging process at all. For example, compared with younger adults, older people have lower rates of anxiety disorders, subsyndromal depression (brief, recurring episodes of depression), dysthymia (low-grade depression, which is less severe but more chronic than major depression), and major depression (persistently depressed mood and long-term loss of pleasure or interest in life). There is, however, a limit to the quality of happiness experienced by people in their eighties and nineties (the old-old) because of the increased risk of physical and mental decline.

The New York Times complemented this research with a 2017 publication by John Leland titled “Want to be Happy? Think like an Old Person” and Jane Brody’s 2018 piece, “Finding Meaning and Happiness in Old Age.” And in 2008, the Washington Post weighed in with a piece by Shankar Vedantam titled “Older Americans May Be Happier than Younger Ones.”

The idea that people become happier as they get older seemed counterintuitive to me. I was skeptical that people got happier with age because I questioned whether a person’s level of happiness changed much over a lifetime—until I learned about the “happiness curve.”

The happiness curve, also referred to as a U curve, is a statistical projection from a collection of multicountry, big-data studies that revealed important generational implications for happiness.

It seems that for both men and women between twenty and thirty-four years of age, life satisfaction (happiness) is on the rise—the graphic ascent of the beginning of the U curve. Those in this age group are generally excited about their future. They are falling in love, marrying, planning families, immersed in building careers—there is an abundance of confidence and high hopes. However, on average, happiness begins its descent around thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, reaching the low point, or the trough of the U curve, around age forty-nine or fifty. The speculation for the cause of this descent is that disenchantment has set in: stress in the workplace, financial burdens, the contradictions of the rewarding yet challenging activity of raising children who are now mostly in their teenage years. In other words, living a life.

But after forty-nine or fifty, there’s a steady increase in happiness, indicated by the ascending line of the U curve as it climbs out of the bottom of the trough, peaking in the mid-sixties and beyond, where people find that they are very satisfied with life. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, explained this later-life happiness in the following way: “As time horizons shrink, as they typically do with age, people become increasingly selective, investing greater resources in emotionally meaningful goals and activities.” In other words, older people understand that they have a limited amount of time left, and they direct their focus and energy on things that bring them pleasure—things that make them happy.

The U curve does a good job of explaining generational implications for happiness, but there is also a significant individual indicator of happiness: the heritable trait of optimism. Optimism is encased within a person’s temperament. Daniel Kahnenman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in psychology and contributor to the field of positive psychology, described optimists in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow as “blessed with behavior that is likely to be cheerful, a resilience in adapting to failures and adversity, a reduced likelihood to suffer from depression, a strong immune system, consciousness about their health, and resilient in adapting to failures and adversity.”

Optimistic people tend to interpret their troubles as fleeting and manageable. They see the bright side of most everything. They’re happy!

***

Four years ago, a dear friend of mine died at age seventy-one. We had enjoyed a close forty-year friendship that we both felt especially proud of because only two of those years were lived in close proximity. Time has a way of weakening ties with those “friends from the road,” but we did a good job of staying in touch.

One day we were talking about what it felt like to have known each other since our early thirties and what it meant to be older. The conversation turned to mutual older friends and their health challenges. I finally said, “As far as I can see, there’s no good news about getting older.” My friend’s eyebrows shot up, and her mouth dropped open. She was obviously horrified by my remark and said, “That’s just not true; there is good news.” The good news, she said, is that older people become “wise.”

I responded, “But if someone isn’t particularly wise to begin with, how does getting older make them wise? Does an age fairy automatically sprinkle ‘wisdom dust’ on us for our sixty-fifth birthday?”

Later, the more I thought about my reply, the more I realized that I was attributing the trait of intelligence to that of being wise, yet wisdom is so much more. I concluded that it would have been better on my part to explore with my friend what she thought wisdom meant to her before I unwisely popped off.

The biologist E. O. Wilson believed that the smartest people aren’t necessarily the wisest; in fact, intelligence and wisdom are located in different regions of the brain. When Wilson referred to wisdom in the practical sense, he meant that it was “more akin to making good decisions—doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons.”

Scientists have generally defined wisdom as a complex human characteristic or trait with specific components that involve social decision-making, prosocial behavior (such as empathy and compassion), self-reflection, acceptance of uncertainty, decisiveness, spirituality, and emotional regulation.

In her book Positivity, Barbara Fredrickson, another leader in the positive psychology movement, spoke specifically to the importance of many older persons’ ability to regulate emotions. According to Fredrickson, older adults are better than younger adults at positivity, which is a range of positive emotions, positive meanings, and optimistic attitudes. Her research found that older adults recall positive images better than negative images, and under magnetic resonance imaging, their brains respond more mildly to stressful images than the brains of younger people. Many older people have learned, through the experience of long-lived lives, to be specialists at managing their lives and regulating their emotions. On a second reading of Vaillant’s book Aging Well, I was reminded that although he concluded no one can prove that wisdom is greater in old age, he conceded that coping strategies improve with age. Perhaps this is what is meant by the wisdom of aging—a unique sense of well-being, life satisfaction, resilience, and happiness. And it’s happiness that brings us back full circle to the U curve’s demonstration that older people report higher levels of contentment or well-being than teenagers and younger adults.  

***

I’ve gone back to my early books on aging to reread those pages I had found important enough to underline. It felt like an archeological dig, and what I found surprised me. The two books I read when I was turning forty, Dave Barry Turns Forty and Michael Nichols’ Turning Forty in the Eighties (the one featuring the frightening midlife crisis and the empty self) didn’t have one bit of text underlined! Was nothing about the text important to me, or could it be that even then, I knew I was still just a child?

Conversely, I had ruthlessly defaced Pogrebin’s Getting Over Getting Older. As founding editor of Ms. Magazine, Pogrebin had fed into my feminist sensibility, adding the dimension of her sage reflections on aging and the idea that living well is the best revenge. And while I again giggled over Viorst’s I’m Too Young to be Seventy and Other Delusions, I decided to read her book Unexpectedly Eighty: And Other Adaptations because I’m seventy-five—still on the sunny side of eighty, but the storm clouds are rolling in.

– Jane Hegstrom