The U-Bend of Life
Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older.
This famous article from The Economist is as valid today as it was when written in 2010
ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world's careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.
When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.
This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.
These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.
There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America's General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people's assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious?
The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.
Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?
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.
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.
The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.
Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.
Happier, no matter what
There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and
was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years' worth of data.
Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?
The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.
People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can't please all the people all the time.”
There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”
Death of ambition, birth of acceptance
There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete.
“Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”
Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn't just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King's College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.
Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists' experiment rather than the psychologists' or psychiatrists'. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.
The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).
Avan, Aval Adhu 441
Mostly, you have these...
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words. Sometimes all a person wants is an empathetic ear; all he or she needs is to talk it out. Just offering a listening ear and an understanding heart for his or her suffering can be a big comfort.
Then again, you have them...
This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.
Ravi was in a bit of a quandary for he knew that the conversation that he was having with Madhu was not the typical one. In fact, she had described it better when she had said it was a sort of confession, an unburdening of the pain and the memories that were causing it.
He knew that at some point in any conversation, no matter how long it went on or regardless of how painful it was, there came a moment when the talker looked at the listener for a way out and in that way signalled for him to step in and speak their thoughts on the matter that they were conversing about.
Remembering Madhu's words, ' Master, you are one of the most intelligent people that I know of, or maybe the most intelligent person that the whole world is not aware of and it is sad that you are not connecting the dots here.' he spoke in a soft and calming tone, ' So, your prayers worked and you did not become pregnant. It is the same as thinking about me when you gave in to him. It is over now. He is gone and you said it yourself that he wanted you to come in search of me and now you are here.'
' Exactly and that is what I thought and felt in my heart as I flew from Mumbai to reach you and to save you ' and looking down at her saree, she caressed it lovingly and said, ' Here I am standing before you, my Jaanu, my Ravi who has not changed one bit and has remained resolute and strong like these mountains that surround your village after all these years. While I...'
Ravi grabbed her shoulders a bit roughly and shook her gently, ' Don't do that. Please don't do that to yourself and to us. Not now. Not after all these years and not after all the suffering and pain that we have experienced. Let it go. Let it be in the past and let it lie with your late husband.'
Madhurima's eyes were red and full of tears as she asked, ' I have done that and I have lived my life all these years doing that but something feels different now. Why, Ravi? Why am I feeling..?'
Ravi looked at her with bewilderment and asked, ' Feeling.. What are you feeling, Madhu? Talk to me. Say it. Maybe then we can try and make sense of it together.'
' I feel guilty ' she said it and looked at him with surprise as if she had surprised herself with her confession.
Her eyes opened wide in realization and clarity, ' Yes. Guilt. This is the cross that I have been carrying on my shoulders all these years.'
She looked at Ravi, ' And here I was trying to justify my guilt and my sins by weighing it against my love. Our love.'
Totally lost and confused at this sudden and unexpected development, Ravi was at his wits end to say something. The right thing. But he held back for he knew that the situation was volatile and the wrong word however innocent in intent could explode in his face.
' What can I do? What do you want me to do, Madhu? Tell me, how can I help you to make things better for you and for us?'
Madhu smiled, ' Jaanu, there is nothing you can do to help me. This is something that I need to do for myself.'
' Okay. Fair enough. But, please, at least tell me what you plan to do?'
Her big brown eyes fluttered like the wings of a tiny bird as she spoke her mind and her plans.
' I have to reach out to my stepdaughter and talk to her. I have to confess to her and tell her everything that I told you and then I have to get her wishes and blessings. I mean both of us need to get her blessings before we get married and if possible, ask her to be here for our wedding.'
Ravi cupped her face and kissed her eyes and her lips and said, ' Okay. If that's what you want to do, then that is what we will do.'
He smiled and asked, ' Any idea where she is right now and how we go about contacting her?'
Avan, Aval Adhu 442
In the hall outside the room in which Ravi and Madhu were dissecting and conducting an autopsy on their past lives that seemed to have gained life from the current and present stage, Daksha caught her husband Parthiban fidgetting and constantly looking at his watch and at the curtain that was the only thing that guarded the room and shielded the door that separated him and his friend.
' Partha, if you keep doing that you are going to strain your neck muscle.'
He looked at her with incomprehension in his eyes, ' Doing what, ducks? I have been doing nothing but sit and stare at this magazine for the past half an hour or so. You have been here all this time and yet...'
Daksha placed a finger on her lips that indicated that he shut up and Partha nodded and watched his wife imitate and mimic exactly what he had been doing for the past 30 minutes.
She lowered the magazine, twisted her left wrist to see the time on her watch, and then turned her neck slightly to the right to see the door of the room in which Ravi and Madhu were and mimicked the actions several times and looked at Parthiban who smiling goofily, mumbled, ' What do you want me to do, ducks? I cannot help but worry about him and now her.'
Daksha smiled and said, ' Baby, all I said was not to strain your neck.'
With a slight and barely audible sound of exasperation, Partha threw the magazine on the table and cursed, ' They have been gone so long. What is keeping them in there? ' and then his eyes twinkled naughtily and he whispered, ' Do you think.. that they are doing it in there?'
The moment he said it, Daksha threw the book she was holding and it slammed right into Partha's face. The poor guy who had no time to react took the full impact of the book along with her anger on his face and wailed in pain and then whimpered, ' Why so serious? I was just kidding ' and then he squealed in pain and in fear as somebody boinked his head with their rock-hard knuckles.
Parthiban jumped up in fright and turned around in anger to see who had bounced his head, and seeing Rasaathi Ammal standing there blowing on her right-hand knuckles, smiled a huge smile that displayed his tonsils and thyroids in its vastness.
Pointing to the room, ' Do you really think that Ravi would do something like that in a space that he considers precious and holy?'
' Amma, I was just kidding. Nothing serious ' and looked in Daksha's direction in vain and she as expected stood up not for him, her hubby but herself.
' Mum, I just slammed him with a book for even thinking that ' and saying that smiled and purred like a cat that had just swallowed a whole rat.
Parthiban looked at both women and glaring at Daksha thought to himself, ' Adi paavi. What an evil creature! No wonder, Eve was cast out of Eden.'
Daksha smiled sweetly, ' Boss, Eve did not exit on her own but along with Adam in hot pursuit behind her ...'
Rasaathi Ammal chuckled and loudly observed, ' Man will always be a Man, I guess advocate?'
' Man, not Men ' Partha wailed painfully and both women pointed to him and said, ' You, man, and please stop comparing yourself with Ravi.'
Inside the room, Ravi and Madhu looked at each other and he said, ' I have waited all these years for you and I am willing to wait an eternity for you. Do what you have to do? ' and kissing her mouth, ' I place myself in your care. I surrender to your will. Do what you want with me and my soul?'
She looked at him with eyes that displayed amazement, wonder and joy and asked, ' I don't deserve you. I wonder if there is a woman who can say that she really deserves you?'
Ravi shook his head, ' My lady, you praise me too much. On the contrary, it is I who does not deserve you and moreover, I am not all that you think I am.'
The moment she had confessed about what had been plaguing her all this while, Ravi knew that it was time that he told her about the brief affair with Gayatri and how it had ended.
' There is something on your mind ' Madhu asked him and Ravi nodded sadly, ' yes, there is something that I need to talk to you about and it has....'
He stopped and both turned hearing the knocks on the door and then it opened and Ravi's mother Rasaathi Ammal entered and looked at them and seeing both of them hurriedly wiping their eyes, enquired, ' How much longer are you love-birds going to be here? ' and informed her son, ' Master sir, the Major wants to talk to you about something important? So, can you please step out into the real world?'
Avan, Aval Adhu 443
Love is a powerful emotion that can bring great happiness, but it can also bring great pain. When we love someone, we invest a lot of ourselves in that relationship, which can be devastating when that relationship ends. Some people believe it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved.
Love is painful because love brings growth. Love makes demands, transforms, and is painful because love gives you a new birth. Love brings your heart into a relationship and when the heart is in a relationship there is always pain.
Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality, love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.
A mother knows her child very well and maybe better than she knows herself and better than he knows himself. She knows him so well that it is ingrained in her senses and even a slight misstep in speech, look or walk will alert her to his or her state of mind.
Just from the very slight and subtle slump in his shoulders and from the way he dragged his left foot as he walked towards the entrance to meet Major Param Singh, Rasaathi Ammal knew that Ravi was hurting badly.
The moment, she had entered the room and had seen their wet eyes that they had both tried to wipe and clear up, she knew that they had been talking about something that was very serious and very personal.
Rasaathi Ammal was tired and had been mentally and physically tired for many a year now and had nothing left to lose and nothing else left to play with the game of life.
Her voice failed her as she looked at Madhu who herself was staring at the entrance in despair and asked, ' Why do you look so sad, child? Why are there tears in your eyes?'
Instinctively, her hands went to her eyes to wipe them clear, and doing so, she looked at Ravi's mother and said, ' Things got a bit emotional and complicated, mother. When that happens, there is nothing anyone can do but cry and so I did and....'
' But, why were there tears in my son's eyes? Why? ' Rasaathi Ammal asked, begged, and answered her own question.
' My son feels connected to everything. He feels empathy for even the tiniest plant and insect around him. Imagine what his heart and soul must feel for the person he loves more than anything else in this world ' and crying and smiling at the same time, ' more than his own mother'.
Madhu, Partha, and Daksha looked at her not knowing how to react and Rasaathi looked at them with surprised eyes, ' Why does that shock you? You don't believe me. Okay. Then answer me this question as to how a man can stay a bachelor for all these years like Ravi has done and in spite of having a mother like me.'
Smiling sadly, ' Stop and think as to how much pressure I and his father must have put on him to get married and add to that, his uncle Dharmalingam who loves Ravi more than his own daughter. Yet..' she stopped and wiped her eyes, ' Yet, he persisted, persists, and will continue to do so in the future.'
Daksha threw a glance at Madhu and finding no answers in her face, turned to Rasaathi Ammal, ' But, they are getting married tomorrow. So, why talk about the future or the past when the present is going to get better and is going to be good.'
' Advocate ponnu, you think so? Rasaathi Ammal asked her and Parthiban shook his head and said, ' I don't think so.'
' Partha ' Daksha said his name in anger and glared at him, ' Why do you say that?'
Parthiban looked at her and then let his eyes linger on Madhu and said, ' I don't know why but from the way Ravi walked and just the way he held his shoulders, I kind of realized something was wrong.'
' From the way he walked and the way he talked? What next, from the way he jumped? Silly man. You and your ideas.'
Parthiban smiled and placing a gentle hand on Daksha's head, patted it lovingly and said, ' I don't know what goes on in my head or body most of the time. But, somehow I seem to know what is going on in my friend's head or more importantly, in his heart.'
A friend knows as much as a mother knows and sometimes more than a mother knows. For what is a friend but a word that is a collection of emotions? A friend is not just your companion, but a guide, guardian, and protector. A friend is like family and much more than that and the moment you step out into the world, a friend is your home, sky, and earth, and yes, sometimes heaven and hell.
Avan, Aval Adhu 444
She needed space. A private space in which she could unwind her coiled, knotted-up thoughts and breathe in quiet and on her own.
Feeling a gentle hand gripping her shoulder, she quickly turned and saw it was Parthiban and heard him say ' Madhu ' and saw him pointing to a room and saying, ' That is Ravi's bedroom. In case, you need to use the bathroom to wash your face or your hands. '
She knew that Parthiban had somehow sensed her despair and her desperate need to be on her own. Her eyes were full of gratitude and tenderness as she nodded and thanked him and went towards Ravi's bedroom. She slowly opened the door and entered it, shut it behind her, and leaning against it, closed her eyes and whispered to the spirit of her long-gone granddad, ' Dada, I am lost. I don't know why but my whole body feels overwhelmed with some strange sort of guilt.'
A soft sob of helplessness escaped her soul and she whispered to herself and to all those who could hear her but could not be seen by her, ' I lied to Ravi. I lied to the one person who I thought I would not be able to lie.'
Tears of guilt and sorrow ran down from her eyes and like a flooded river overcoming their banks they poured themselves out as Madhu slowly sank into the bed and began to cry and wear herself out.
' I did not want to tell him that I did become pregnant once but lost the child due to a miscarriage. How could I tell him that my own stepdaughter was the reason for me losing the child when she kicked at me in anger and hate and when her mind was fully in the control of drugs and booze?'
She shook her head, ' I don't want him to know. I don't want anyone to know. Why tell him that secret that I did not share with my own husband and the father of my child? I don't want anyone to judge my Gayatri in anger and form some kind of hatred against her. Not Ravi and not anybody else. It will destroy the fragile bond between me and Gayatri and if that happens then my promise to Premji will have been broken.'
Tiredly she slowly laid her head on the pillow and laid her body and soul in the bed that was his and felt the bed with her hands, ' Just a little more time Jaanu, and then we will be one and once and for all. Then no force here and up there will be able to tear us apart from each other again. Let me heal old wounds before we begin our new life with each other.'
She did not know when sleep took her in its arms and lulled her into a stupor-like state and then time took her back in time.
Madhu sat by the side of her late husband Prem and was asking him something.
' Premji, why are you staring at me like that? You have been doing that for the past few days? Why?'
' I am staring at you because I find you simply unbelievable. I am staring at you because I know now why some of us are called God's special creations.'
She had looked at him with guarded eyes for she had not told him about suffering the miscarriage and had hidden it away. No one but Nirmal Gupta knew what had happened and she wanted it to remain like that. Forever.'
' Every creation is God's special creature, Premji ' she had replied and he had looked at her cryptically and had said, ' No, Madhu. Some are born angels. Some are meant for a higher purpose.'
' Higher purpose?' she had said with a smile and had asked him, ' In what way?'
' Some are meant to suffer more pain than the rest of us. They are created for the sole purpose of carrying the burdens of those who are weak in mind and body and for caring for others who need to be carried because they cannot do so themselves.'
A Treasury of Classical Japanese Verse
Should I live longer
I could not bear this secret love.
Jewelled thread of life,
since you must break –
let it be now.
Since I now recall fondly
the painful days of the
if I live long, I may look back
on these harsh days, too,
and find them sweet and good.
In this makeshift hut
in the autumn field
gaps in the thatch
let dewdrops in,
moistening my sleeves.
How the night deepens.
A ribbon of the whitest frost
is stretched across
the bridge of magpie wings
the lovers will cross.
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