A new analysis of age and life satisfaction | Hacker News Reader

A new analysis of age and life satisfaction

washingtonpost.com

63 pointsrafaelc25 comments

I suspect that there's some survivorship bias at play. Maybe people who are happier, and/or have more reason to be happy, are more likely to survive.

When I was young, I didn't worry about much because I could get serious later. Now I don't worry about much because I've learned to be happy with what I have. The middle, however, was hell at times.

I find it amusing when scientists spend years of research validating some common knowledge.

I wish they titled the article 'mid-life crisis: it's a thing!'

Often such studies invalidate what "everybody knows". Sometimes the corrections are major (heliocentrism, evolution), sometimes smaller.

Or investigate a common phenomenon and unlock something deeper. Some of the musings in this HN thread are of that nature.

I don't see any reason to sneer.

Yes, just like we all know it's bad air that gives you malaria. Good thing no one bothered researching that.

Well that sucks, my teenage years and twenties have been fairly miserable, I thought it was supposed to be that way only to get better as you mature, get to know yourself, and obtain some life experience and perspective as you get into your 30s (currently in late 20s).

Guess I'll have to wait another 30 years or so to not feel miserable every night.

>Guess I'll have to wait another 30 years or so to not feel miserable every night.

Or you know, take some other steps to change things around you and for you (including seeking some help if its a clinical issue).

Those are averages. Happiness and/or being miserable are not absolute functions of time, and they also don't have to be even relative functions of time.

I know it sounds trite, but if you haven't I really recommend taking up some kind of exercise. It's frankly amazing how fast my general attitude turned around when I started swimming a few hours a week. The malaise I'd been living in since I was a teenager evaporated in a few days, and I was like a completely new person. Every so often I'll get a little lazy and not go for a bit, and the stupefying brain fog of depression always serves as a pointed reminder.

+1 !

FWIW, my teens and early twenties were miserable, too, and from the end of my twenties until now (mid-late thirties) things have been getting better and better. I hope the same happens for you!

It's an interesting paper but several things have to be kept in mind:

1. This is about cross-sectional studies. They mention a longitudinal multi-sample study which came to slightly different conclusions, that peoples' happiness tends to increase in general with age.

It's so important to examine this longitudinally, because there's so many things that could be going on, and it's reasonable to hypothesize that there's some kind of cohort effects going on. In could be that people in their 40s-50s are being subject to some unique combination of issues due to societal problems and patterns (e.g., that people who are reaching professional maturity are bumping up against dysfunction that the older generations are unaware of because they benefited from different socioeconomic environments in a way they don't recognize, and the younger generations aren't quite subject to the same dysfunction because they haven't reached it). But it could be teenagers in the home, becoming disillusioned with life and then learning to cope with it, hormones, who knows.

2. Strangely enough, happiness and stress aren't really totally inverses of one another. So it's possible your stress / anxiety / etc. will decrease and your happiness might also a bit. Think of it this way: it's possible to not really feel angry or fearful or depressed, but also not entirely excited or fulfilled either.

Related to this are the fact that certain types of problems are definitely more likely in youth, especially those related to drugs, impulsive behavior, etc. The decline in those types of problems is much better documented and understood than these life satisfaction patterns (I actually think that a huge part of world conflicts can be accounted for by 15-25 year old males).

3. These are average curves; everyone's lives are different. I can't emphasize this enough, speaking as a researcher in this area, roughly speaking.

>I thought it was supposed to be that way only to get better as you mature, get to know yourself, and obtain some life experience and perspective as you get into your 30s (currently in late 20s).

Relax, you are not an aggregate curve.

My life experience so far has been exactly as you imagined (currently mid thirties).

Happiness curve seems to inversely correlate with the work curve. The more hours per day we work, the less happy we are.

Seems like the nadir of happiness might track when a lot of people have teenagers in the house. I wish they had adjusted for that factor, in addition to income and health.

It was funny to me to read about the people at fifty, at the peak of their carrier and with teenagers in their house. I am 36 and have both. The first one is debatable, but the second one is 15 years old. :) I hope it'll get better from now on.

Both children to look after and ageing parents.

The curve for divorce takes the same U shape, though it's steeper. It peaks around 60. This might suggest that unhappiness in marriage plays a role in overall unhappiness. In their early 20s most people aren't yet married to wrong partners. By their 60s most people who ever married have either divorced wrong partners or are living in bearable marriages.

It's when they are trying to get rid of you (of your salary).

what a pretentious article title, it's like depression / mental illness doesn't even exist

What does "pretentious" even mean in this context?

And what does depression / mental illness even have to do with the survey and what the article discusses?

The article is about how happy/satisfied with their life people IN GENERAL are at various stages. It explicitly says "1.3 million randomly sampled people from 51 countries". All kinds of people, not just depressed or non-depressed alone.

It was a crappy title, but please don't rush to the thread just to rant about one of those. We usually replace them with a better phrase from the article; occasionally we don't get to them in time. If you notice a particularly bad one you can always alert us at hn@ycombinator.com.

What about people with illnesses (physical and mental) or simply genuine misfortune who have overcome it? The author apparently doesn't care about them. Flagged.

>What about people with illnesses (physical and mental) or simply genuine misfortune who have overcome it?

What about them?

>The author apparently doesn't care about them.

Why should they? They report on a specific survey/study, they don't try to pander on some every set of people that did X or Y.

Second, their subject is totally different -- how people in general, and statistically, feel about their lives at various ages. Not about what happened to some people and what they did about it.

Why downvote this comment? Genuinely curious. The article poorly is written and makes all sorts of potentially offensive assumptions. Why have it on the front page?

>Why downvote this comment? Genuinely curious.

Because it raised a complaint that had nothing to do with the article. That's an article describing the results from a study on self-reported happiness level through people's lives from 1.3 million sample respondents. The question about "misfortune" is a non sequitur -- out of the scope of the study, and irrelevant to it. Those 1.3 million random samples will still have the same distribution of misfortunes as the general population in their countries.

Second, because it didn't seem to differentiate between a journalist reporting on the results of a survey, and those that did the survey.

Third, because I don't find the article poorly written, and I don't particularly care whether someone "flagged" it or not -- reminded me of those who bring up "cancelling their subscription" in their letters to the editor.

I don't think a scientific study loses any merit if it doesn't make people reading it happier.

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