Photo by steve p2008

Everybody’s life is filled with ups and downs, but new research suggests everyone’s life follows a particular pattern when it comes to our general contentedness. Around mid-life, we all seem to be pretty bummed.



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According a new analysis of life satisfaction from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which encompasses seven massive surveys and 1.3 million randomly sampled people from 51 countries, rock bottom is somewhere around the early 50s for most folks. On the other hand, people report being pretty happy in their early 20s and their 60s once retirement kicks in. All in all, our life seems to follow a specific parabola of satisfaction (the Washington Post has a great chart you can check out).

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What’s interesting is not all surveys used the same framing when asking people in different parts of the Western world how they felt at different points in their lives—some of them asked for ratings of general satisfaction, others were asked in terms of being happy or unhappy—but they all still roughly followed the same U-shaped pattern. Life starts out great, gets worse some time in your late 40s and early 50s, then gets better again. The concept of the “U-shaped happiness curve” isn’t a new concept, and it’s something that’s even been observed with apes, but this new analysis shows how consistent the the curve is across a wide variety of different data sources.

Why are our 50s the low point? For one, the researchers point out that middle-aged people are often at the peak of their careers, which causes a great deal of stress. Alternatively, people are at the point where they feel like they should be at the peak of their career and they’re not even close. Also, by your 40s and 50s parents have children coming of age to worry about. It seems the oft-joked-about “midlife crisis” is a reaction to a very real low point.


If you want to mitigate the effects of this seemingly natural happiness curve throughout your own life, here are a few suggestions:


Wherever you are in life, remember, more happiness doesn’t necessarily mean a better life. There’s more to your overall well-being than how happy you feel all the time. You need the bad to have the good, and lasting happiness is something you build within yourself by showing gratitude for the big and little things in life.