Creative Aging: The Best Years

“Don’t worry. These are the worst years of your lives.” — Wendy Lustbader, to a busload of 18- to 24-year-olds.

Photo by Jason Thompson on Unsplash

On average, who is happier, a 30-year-old or a 70-year-old?

In 2006, researchers at the Veterans Administration in Ann Arbor, Michigan, asked two groups of people a pair of questions. The average age of the first group was 31. The average age of the second group was 68. Questions researchers asked were:

- Estimate the average person’s happiness at 30 and at 70.

- Estimate your own happiness at your current age.

Both the younger and older group thought when evaluating others that younger people have a greater sense of well-being than older people. But when asked about their own happiness, younger people ranked their own happiness lower than older people did.

The study confirmed two facts:

- Our culture believes older people are less happy than younger people.

- Actually older people are generally happier than younger people.

Dr. Laura Carstensen and her team of researchers at the Stanford Center on Longevity, who have spent the past 30 years researching aging, found similar results. But Carstensen says happiness is a vague term which can refer either to a life satisfaction or a set of emotions.

According to Carstensen, life satisfaction questions are cognitive questions. They call for a deliberative judgment, a measure of one’s life. When Carstensen and her team studied happiness as life satisfaction, they found a U-shaped curve. Life satisfaction is high at age 20, declines until roughly age 50, and then rises again through age 80.

Happiness as an emotion can be viewed as both the presence of positive emotions (e.g., excitement, calm, joy) and the absence of negative emotions (e.g., sadness, fear, anger). To study this, Carstensen’s team sampled positive and negative emotions of people aged 18 though 94. She found positive emotions remained stable or rose slightly over the decades. But negative emotions declined significantly as people grew older. So, asked about how they felt “on balance,” taking both positive and negative emotions into account, happiness increased in a linear pattern, rising from age 18 through age 94.

In a podcast interview with Wes Moss, Carstensen said her team of scientists hardly believed their own results at first. They thought perhaps the results could be explained by masked depression, cognitive decline, or brain atrophy. Further studies revealed none of these theories could be supported by evidence.

Whether life satisfaction or emotions are being measured, older people become happier as the years go by. Some call this the paradox of aging. It is a paradox that despite physical declines of aging, happiness rises.

Carstensen wondered whether older people had the resilience to respond positively to inescapable, prolonged stressors. Might they do worse under these circumstances than younger people? With the advent of COVID-19, Carstensen and her team had the opportunity to study both younger and older people under the prolonged stress of COVID conditions. With social distancing and stay-at-home conditions, COVID created a sort of stress lab. During COVID restrictions, Carstensen’s team asked older people and younger people the same emotion questions they had asked in previous studies. Contrary to news stories at the time, they found older people were enduring COVID conditions much better than younger people, even though older people’s risk factor was higher than younger people’s.

Carstensen and her team think the mechanism for this happiness increase is the shrinking amount of time remaining for aging people. “For older people, the future is more constrained,” she explained. “As people run out of time, it becomes more valuable.”

She said older people have been relieved of the burden of the future. They are able to live in the moment, to notice the rose, the singing bird, the blue sky. Life feels better.

In a TED Talk, Carstensen listed behaviors of older people that benefit their well-being. They:

- Live in the moment

- Know what’s important

- Invest in sure things

- Deepen relationships

- Savor life.

Carstensen’s research invigorates me as I face the later years of life. I’m putting her list of beneficial behaviors on my bulletin board. I will read it every day until it is embedded deep within my mind and heart.