« More conservative investing | Main | Smiles »
October 09, 2005
Miserable in the middle
That company Granddad didn't understand, Yahoo, was running an article about people in midlife being unhappy despite their doing financially fairly well. The writer says studies have found people's happiness is U-shaped over their lifetimes:
It isn't clear why we become grumpy in middle age. It could be that we become increasingly disenchanted through our 20s and 30s as we realize our lives won't be everything we hoped. Eventually, however, we adapt, which is why our happiness rises as we grow older.Alternatively, it could be that midlife unhappiness reflects the pressure of time, with folks in their 40s caught between family demands and long hours at work.
That sounds simplistic, but looks essentially right. A couple of mechanisms account for much of the drop in midlife. One is aging. The other is disillusion.
Sometime after 30, you notice that you're aging. It's not that you weren't aging before. But you weren't forced to recognize it. You could still feel immortal, and now you cannot. It is clear that you are going to die at some point. This is perhaps tougher to handle these days emotionally speaking than it has been in the past, since we are more alone than people have probably ever been. So the end of the self you spend so much of your time absorbed in may seem like a bigger deal than it necessarily is in the grand scheme of things.
Anyway, the visible aging, confronting your mortality, helps you get the full effect of the second mechanism, which is disillusion. This is not your adolescent or young adult disillusion, however. This freeing from false belief releases you from more than the realization that "Our lives won't be everything we hoped." Unless your standards were pretty low, you realized that before you got out of high school.
You used to think you could fix some things or at least end up doing more good than harm. Yet in your mid-30s, you realize not only that you're now closer than ever before to being able to do something about it, but that also you won't manage to do anything about it, and moreover as you grow older and weaker, your mind will end up letting you think it was all right -- "We adapt" -- that you did about as well as you could under the circumstances. So you can see that your children will grow into roughly this same realization, probably under similar or perhaps slightly worse circumstances, that you'll have done nothing to make those circumstances better, and that you'll be diminished into job-well-done contentedness at that point.
Posted by Mark at October 9, 2005 05:16 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mcraig.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/889