The U-Curve Of Happiness: Your Prime Working Years Are Breaking Ya
Can we do anything with this information?
This post is largely about adult happiness and its nadir and peaks. If you want to share it, do that right here:
If you’re a free subscriber and want to dive a little deeper and/or help me out in my own journey of self-actualization and realizing I’m not an utter failure, consider upgrading how you interact with this stuff.
I love weddings. Adore ’em. Almost always cry at them, because I’m good like that. I love all the small moments, from how the groom looks as the bride is being walked down the aisle all the way to how it feels when everyone is out there on the dance floor. Weddings are great. Flying to them is sometimes expensive, and renting things for them will periodically make you want to smash your first through a cement wall, but overall they’re great.
One of the only annoying things about weddings is that people in speeches often say this is the “greatest day” of the lives of both people. OK. I get the sentiment. But if you unpack that idea, that really sucks. Basically, you’re saying these two people are peaking at this moment. So everything that comes after — the jobs and the kids and the moments and the vacations and the homes — is all on a down-slope from this moment.
Now, I agree your wedding might be the most memorable day of your life. Yep. I agree it should be one of the greatest days of your life. With you there too. But when people say this at weddings — and I feel like I’ve heard the phrase “This is the greatest day of your life!” at every wedding I’ve ever attended, my own included — they fundamentally show that they don’t understand the notion of happiness.
Firstly, happiness isn’t a destination, per se. You can’t “reach” it. It’s not like an island just off-shore you can swim to. In fact, most of what we know about the idea of “happiness” is actually genetic. You can’t always control genetics. You can control actions.
Secondly, in capitalist societies, we tend to associate happy with money. That’s actually not right. Money does afford you a certain degree of freedom with your time, yes — and that’s great — but there’s no real correlation between “oodles of money” and “happiness” beyond about $76K a year, give or take. My parents and my in-laws both made/make more than that (often by a good deal) in the past 20 years. All four of those people go through long bouts of unhappiness.
Third: very few people can truly balance “being busy” (the go-go-go of daily life) with “being happy.” By some estimates, it’s only 1 in 10.
I read a recent Atlantic cover story, “The Roots of Midlife Crisis,” on a plane on Saturday. It’s good, albeit long, but it talks about the shifting definition of happiness as you go through life. That only makes logical sense to me — you want/need/focus on different things in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. How could the definition of happiness possibly be the same for a 22 year-old and a 52 year-old? They’re in radically different contextual places.
One of the major tenets of the article is this idea of a Happiness U-Curve, seen here:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to What Is Even Happening? to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.