An earlier version of this article was published in January 2018.
A few years ago, Kieran Setiya, a philosophy professor at MIT who has devoted much of his career to studying the midlife crisis, wrote: “My future is a bewildering mix of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear.” Put this way, one would say that our 40 years is the worst time of our lives.
And it is so.
The crisis of the 40s is not a joke, it is not a myth, it is not a joke. It is a fact statistician and scientist. Most studies agree that happiness is shaped like a “U”. We are happy during adolescence and late youth, but as the years go by we become more and more miserable. At some point, in our late 40s to early 50s, we hit rock bottom. And once there everything tends to improve. The last thing we lose is hope.
Blanchflower and Oswald (2017) plotted seven different surveys on the same graph to see how strong this U-shaped trend was. Neither the original graph nor the data is available at this time, but in the Wonkblog version the lines they speak for themselves. Happiness is a slippery slope until we hit the bottom of the well at some indeterminate point in middle age. From there, it climbs back up to youth levels.
It is important to note that, strictly speaking, the seven surveys are not exactly equivalent. Some ask about directly perceived happiness, but others inquire about “satisfaction” or “emotional well-being” and that makes it difficult to compare them. We also have to keep in mind that we are speaking in relative terms: the fall of 40 and 50 does not represent a malaise in absolute terms.
On the contrary, the mean scores are good (7 out of 10, 3.5 out of 5), but significantly worse than in youth and old age. We may always be happy, or we may not be unhappy at all, but we are certainly less happy than before. To give us an idea, according to the data, the difference between youth and adulthood in terms of happiness is the same as there is between a person’s happiness before and after divorcing or before and after being fired.
“There is a lot of evidence on how we humans experience a bassoon in midlife,” explains Peter Warr, professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield. And it’s true that the evidence is strong (Blanchflower & Oswald, 2007; Steptoe, Deaton, & Stone, 2015; Graham & Pettinato, 2002), but not as much as we would like to think. It is not clear that the form is exactly the same in all the countries of the world and we do not know if it is related to the economic system, or if it affects all people equally. In other words, much remains to be studied .
Even so, the sum of the surveys adds up to more than a million people and the “U” shape is still there. We don’t really know why. There are some theories that point to that age when people are at the peak of their careers (with the work commitments that come with it) and family burdens get heavier and heavier. However, the “U” shape has been found even in chimpanzees and orangutans.
That makes it difficult for us to draw any kind of conclusion. This curve could explain ideological and personality evolution, but little else. There are few occasions when modern science, as allergic as ever to teleology, tells us about the “future”: but it seems that we are about to see what happens to the millennials when they become unhappy. Quiet. In about twenty years we clear up all the unknowns.