I was happy to tell him that the odds are in his favor.

My friend K. is a 54-year-old woman whose trajectory somewhat resembles S.’s. She had an exciting launch in her 20s (working “my dream job”), a sense of continuing achievement but slowing momentum in her 30s (“sort of a slog”), and an ambush in her 40s, when her father died, her mother had a stroke, her husband left her after their daughter was born, and she was laid off. Despite coping with all of that and doing well professionally, even with her layoff (“I did better in my career; I made more money”), she developed what she describes as a dark sense of humor about her life, ruefully telling herself that at least she had so many troubles that she couldn’t dwell on all of them at once.

In the past few years, things have turned upward, markedly so. K.’s 50s have brought not only less external turbulence but less on the inside, too. “On a day-to-day basis, I probably do the same things, but I feel different,” she says. Her values have shifted away from work: “I could see that was not going to be a big source of achievement. I measure my worth now by how I can help others and contribute to the community. I enjoy the relationships that I’ve been able to nurture over these years—longer-term friends, growing with those friends. It was always striving and looking ahead, as opposed to being in the now and feeling grateful for the now. I think I feel a great gratitude. When I am in a situation when I can moan a little bit or feel bad about some of the difficult things that have happened, the balance sheet is hugely on the side of all the great things that have happened. And I think that gratitude has helped me be both more satisfied and more giving.” She describes her 50s, so far, as good and improving.

The same has been true for me. Though I still have my share of gloomy days, I find it far easier than I did in my 40s to appreciate what I have, even without writing down lists of good things, as I had to resort to doing a decade ago. It certainly helps that my pet cause, gay marriage, has met with success, and that I myself achieved legal marriage at age 50. But something has changed inside, too, because in my 40s, I had plenty of success and none of it seemed adequate, which was why I felt so churlish. For me, after a period when gratitude seemed to have abandoned me, its return feels like a gift.

It turns out that there is good science about this gift: studies show quite strongly that people’s satisfaction with their life increases, on average, from their early 50s on through their 60s and 70s and even beyond—for many until disability and final illness exact their toll toward the very end (at which point it’s hard to generalize). In a 2011 study, for example, the Stanford University psychologist Laura Carstensen and seven colleagues found that “the peak of emotional life may not occur until well into the seventh decade”—a finding that is “often met with disbelief in both the general population and the research community,” despite its strength. Carstensen described to me this pattern in her own life. “Forties were, for me, the worst,” she said. “You’re never good enough professionally. I think you’re coming out of the fog in the 50s.” Now, at 60, she said, “I feel so privileged. I feel it now.” Elaine Wethington, a professor of human development and sociology at Cornell, whose research likewise finds that people become more satisfied and more optimistic later in life, is in her early 60s and reports her own turning point at about age 50. “I feel like I’ve reached a kind of flow in my work and career,” she told me. No guarantees, of course, but reporting this article has led me to think that the upturn I’ve felt in my 50s is likely to continue. As Andrew Oswald exclaimed to me when I mentioned my own post-40s upswing: “Just wait until you’re 60!”