Happiness dips in the middle – but it’s alright in the long run
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The bad news, on top of no good news, for those over the age of 25 is that you’ll never be as happy again – although you’ll go close to that peak if you stay fit and healthy until you’re 70.
On the other hand, commiserations if you’re hitting 48 – because for the first third of this next year, you have bottoming out at the lowest point on your happiness scale.
Of course you could solve it all with a soft-top sports car or a small yacht; perhaps a hair weave if you need it and have the money, or a leather biker jacket if you’re less flush – and yet you’ll only have to look in the mirror or a passing shop window to know that you look utterly ridiculous.
Because you can disguise the ageing process in whatever way you choose, but they’ve yet to find a way of stemming the sands of time.
The consolation is that this swinging pendulum of contentment isn’t confined to humans; our cousins, the chimpanzees, are equally familiar with the u-bend of life’s highs and lows.
Indeed the existence of a mid-life crisis among great apes was discovered in a 2012 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The study of 508 apes involved people familiar with the individual animals, which consisted of chimpanzees and orangutans, assessing their ward’s wellbeing at different ages.
The study of human happiness was carried out by a man called David Blanchflower, a British-born economics professor, teaching at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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