At What Age Are We Happiest?

Human happiness is an amalgam of many influences, ranging from good and bad personal events, to positive, or negative emotions. If you live in Finland, for example, you appear to have an advantage. When it comes to age, though, who is likely to be happiest?

The U-shaped Function for Happiness

Most people experience youth as a carefree period of relative happiness, although this certainly depends on where one grows up, whether it is Scandinavia or a war zone. However, happiness researchers often question whether the well of happiness runs dry as we age. Elderly people in some societies turned out to be remarkably happy. This is particularly true of places where older people play a key role in the community and interact with those of all ages, such as Sardinia, Singapore, and Okinawa, Japan – all places where life expectancy is unusually high.

Evidence has long suggested that both young and old are happier than the middle-aged. This idea is referred to as the inverted U-shaped relationship between happiness and age. Long controversial, the inverted U was confirmed in a recent large-scale, high-quality study incorporating many researchers and data from around the globe. The U-shaped function is real: Younger people are generally happier, followed by the elderly — and people in their early fifties report themselves to be the least happy.

Middle-Aged Blues

Happiness declines from youth to middle age. So, people are unhappiest at around age 50, at which point their life satisfaction begins to improve. What changes between youth and middle age? Evidently, not very much changes in terms of life circumstances. A person who is successful and healthy at age 50 will likely be successful and healthy at age 55.

Apparently what changes is not so much people's practical circumstances but how they feel about their lives.

Happiness researchers document a variety of changes in how people feel about life as they pass middle age. Older people change how they feel about their lives. They experience less regret and disappointment about how their lives have gone. They get better at regulating their emotions and dwell less on negative emotions. Status competition becomes less important and older people care less about what others think of them.

Evolutionary psychologists recognize that status competition is emphasized more in young adulthood because this is the time of life when people select a mate and get married. Of course, they are also in their prime physically and are most attractive to potential partners. The loss of condition in middle age is a challenge for some.

Old Versus Young

Whatever the reasons that middle age is blue, the age of greatest happiness divides between the young and the old with the young having a marked advantage, suggesting optimism for the future.

While this pattern can be applied to the global population, not all countries are the same. During the past decade, the happiness of younger generations in many regions has declined relative to older people. Why? This may be no great mystery given research in clinical psychology that finds substantial increases in anxiety and depression (1). We do not know what is causing these swings but many scholars point to problems with social media, including increased loneliness for those who spend a lot of time online. Apart from contemporary problems with social media and Internet communications, there are many reasons that young people are feeling more despondent about the future.

Why Younger People Feel Gloomy About the Future

Many feel that the planet is doomed by climate change, by microplastic pollution, by nuclear war, or by injustice and inequality. They feel crushed by loneliness despite constantly connecting with others.

Apart from all this, younger generations find it increasingly hard to make a living due to soaring costs and wages that do not keep up. They are the first generation in recent history who expect to be worse off than their parents. Many are forced to live with their parents and do not expect their living conditions to improve materially.

So, it is hardly surprising that older people are now happier than the young. Can we expect that as they age, that they too will assume the mantle of greatest happiness? This does not seem very likely.