{"id":6288,"date":"2015-10-11T19:32:11","date_gmt":"2015-10-11T23:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newvinegrowing.wordpress.com\/?p=6288"},"modified":"2019-06-07T13:38:06","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T17:38:06","slug":"maybe-its-not-a-midlife-crisis-but-the-happiness-u-curve-instead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/newvinegrowing\/maybe-its-not-a-midlife-crisis-but-the-happiness-u-curve-instead\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe it's not a midlife crisis but the happiness U-curve instead"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cliche of the middle-aged guy buying a sports car and ditching his wife for a girl half his age always struck me as a desperate move\u00a0to avoid aging \u2014 when the pressures of parenting and career collide with the increasing aches and pains and wrinkles of a body in decline, hook up with someone who knows nothing of those woes.
\nThen I\u00a0went through it myself, sans sports car and underage fling.
\n

\"As<\/a>
As my 40th birthday approached, I felt lost and sad \u2014 what was I supposed to be doing with my life? A surprise party with a live band did help.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nWhen people ask what motivated me to start this\u00a0blog, my shorthand is often, “In something of a midlife crisis approaching 40, I started to think more about what makes life have meaning.” I felt lost as I realized I wasn’t interested in continuing to climb the career ladder I was on, and wondered if I’d feel more reason to get up in the morning if we’d had children. This blog gave me a reason to think about and write about what I should be when I grow up.
\nI wish I’d heard about the U-curve back then. I might have realized it’s not just me.
\nJonathan Rauch wrote a thoughtful article for the The Atlantic headlined, “The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis.”<\/a>\u00a0If you’re in the midst of a crisis — or perhaps even better, not yet there — let Rauch show you the body of research that points to\u00a0our happiness tanking in\u00a0our 40s and 50s, even adjusted for life conditions including\u00a0income, marital status and employment.
\nA few key points:<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. Research across countries and even across species show this tendency for a U-curve in happiness.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \n

    (Andrew) Oswald, Terence Cheng, and Nattavudh Powdthavee have found the U-curve in four longitudinal data sets from three countries: an important kind of evidence, because it traces the lived experiences of individuals over time, rather than comparing people of various ages in a statistical snapshot. Likewise, Blanchflower and Oswald, looking at samples from 27 European countries, have found a \u201cstrong hill-shaped pattern\u201d in the use of antidepressants, peaking in people\u2019s late 40s. Being middle-aged \u201cnearly doubles\u201d a person\u2019s likelihood of using antidepressants. The same pattern appears, they\u2019ve found, in the two U.S. states that collect the relevant data (New Hampshire and New Mexico).
    \nAnd a lot of eyebrows went up when Oswald and four other scholars, including two primatologists, found a U-shaped curve in chimpanzees\u2019 and orangutans\u2019 state of mind over time. Zookeepers, researchers, and other animal caretakers filled out a questionnaire rating the well-being of their primate charges (more than 500 captive chimps and orangutans in Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States). The apes\u2019 well-being bottomed out at ages comparable, in people, to between 45 and 50. \u201cOur results,\u201d the authors concluded in a 2012 paper, \u201cimply that human wellbeing\u2019s curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its origins may lie partly in the biology we share with closely related great apes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    2. Maybe we start to climb out of the happiness crater when we begin to shift what makes us happy \u2014 instead of striving for the outward trappings of success, which don’t bring us the satisfaction we hoped, we care more about family and friends.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    (Laura) Carstensen and her colleagues (wrote) in their 2011 paper: \u201cAs people age and time horizons grow shorter,\u201d they write, \u201cpeople invest in what is most important, typically meaningful relationships, and derive increasingly greater satisfaction from these investments.\u201d Midlife is, for many people, a time of recalibration, when they begin to evaluate their lives less in terms of social competition and more in terms of social connectedness. In my 40s, I found I was obsessively comparing my life with other people\u2019s: scoring and judging myself, and counting up the ways in which I had fallen behind in a race. Where was my best seller? My literary masterpiece? Barack Obama was younger than I, and look where he was! In my 50s, like my friend K., I find myself more inclined to prize and enjoy people and relationships, which mercifully seem to be pushing the unwinnable status competition into the background. Also, Carstensen told me, \u201cwhen the future becomes less distant, more constrained, people focus on the present, and we think that\u2019s better for emotional experience. The goals that are chronically activated in old age are ones about meaning and savoring and living for the moment.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    3. As we gain more perspective, we might cope with life better. I definitely feel I’ve mellowed since my 20s, and can only imagine the coming decades will bring more of the same.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    In recent years, Western psychiatry has generated a very small but scientifically legitimate body of research literature on wisdom. Surveying both modern research and ancient texts, (Dilip V.) Jeste found that the concept of wisdom has stayed \u201csurprisingly similar\u201d across centuries and across geographic regions: \u201cAll across the world, we have an implicit notion of what a wise person is.\u201d The traits of the wise tend to include compassion and empathy, good social reasoning and decision making, equanimity, tolerance of divergent values, comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity. And the whole package is more than the sum of the parts, because these traits work together to improve life not only for the wise but also for their communities. Wisdom is pro-social. (Has any society ever wanted less of it?) Humans, Jeste says, live for an unusually long time after their fertile years; perhaps wisdom provides benefits to our children or our social groups that make older people worth keeping around, from an evolutionary perspective.
    \n\u201cWisdom is useful at any age,\u201d he says. \u201cBut from an evolutionary point of view, younger people are fertile, so even if they\u2019re not wise, they\u2019re okay. But older people need to find some other way that they can contribute to the survival of the species.\u201d It\u2019s also possible, he says, that \u201ccompetitiveness may be more favored in the young, and more emotional regulation, more tolerance of diversity, more insight, in older people.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \"Facing<\/a>My friend Lauree Ostrofsky recently launched a life coaching program she calls Facing 40<\/a>. She writes:<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s time to get past the anxious shoulds rolling around in your head \u2014 the need to ask a third friend what\u00a0she thinks you should do \u2014 and to hear the voice inside that knows the answer already.
    \nIt\u2019s time to have the courage to go after your dreams.
    \nIt\u2019s time to Be The Woman You Admire, not just read her books, attend\u00a0her retreats, and tell\u00a0all of your friends about her. Be Her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Realizing your time on Earth is short can be a powerful motivator to do the things you’ve always wanted.
    \nI think the U-curve research also\u00a0suggests it’s OK if you’ve been chasing your dreams full throttle and you’re no happier. Maybe you need to give yourself a little permission to feel that dark time and to switch up what you think you’re chasing.
    \nI look forward to spending time with other women using a milestone birthday to recalibrate and re-evaluate, because now that 40 is safely in my rear view mirror, I’m eager to start climbing up the other side of the U.
    \nRelated blog posts:<\/strong><\/p>\n