Our levels of happiness are not constant throughout our life
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The usually held belief that happiness follows the U-shaped curve with peaks at the beginning and at the end of life, can be incorrect.
The pattern was popularized in Original paper researchers David Blanchflauer And Andrew Oswald In 2008, based on data from half a million people. Since then, this has been considered a general conviction and was even the subject The main booksField
But Fabian Krats And Joseph Brusterl – Both at the University of Munich Ludwig Munich in Germany – claims that this faith may be wrong.
Crac says that he was motivated to return to the statement “because [the U-curve] I did not reflect my personal experience with older people. ” Thus, the couple considered the statistics of happiness for self -esteem for 70,922 adults who took part in the annual Socio-economic panel review In Germany between 1984 and 2017. Then they simulated how happiness changed in the life of every person.
Instead of forming a U-shaped curve, they found that happiness usually slowly decreases throughout the adulthood until the end of the 50s, when it begins to tick up to 64, and then drops sharply.
One of the reasons why Kraats believes that previous studies came to the fact that he considers incorrect conclusions is that they simplify the trajectory of happiness, partly by ignoring deaths caused by suicide or poor health. “You got the impression that after a certain age, happiness will increase only because the unfortunate people are already dead,” says Crac.
“There were many disputes in the social sciences about irrevocable conclusions, which disappear when new data gather,” says Julia Roorer At the University of Leipzig. “But there is another, less valuable problem: researchers sometimes systematically analyze their data.
Others say that the results make a new set of questions. “This article is great for thinking about what we are really trying to find out in research,” says Philip Cohen At the University of Maryland, but he indicates that now we must try to find out why happiness is changing throughout life, and if the hollows can be avoided. Shortz and Brusterl themselves strive to avoid speculation about why the changes observed by them occur.
Oswald says that the article “has interesting results, and all studies should be welcomed”, but he adds that the couple did not control factors such as marriage and income that can affect happiness.
He also notes that the study has considered only one country, so we do not know whether the results are applied in another place. Shortz says that this will be an interesting way for future research, especially due to the fact that the results may be important for politics. “Previous scientists claimed that we need a policy of positive actions to help people cope with a crisis in the middle age,” says Crac. “I do not want to say that this is not urgent, but our results show that the most urgent problem is to solve a decrease in happiness in old age.”
Need to listen to the ear? Great Britain Samaritans: 116123 (Samaritan.org); USA Suicide and Lifeline crisis: 988 (988Lifeline.org) Visit Bit.ly/suicidehehelplines for services in other countries.
