OK, guys, don't worry about being happy -- just hang on until you are 74 THEN see how you feel...
"It's often said that your school days are your happiest. Others reckon that life begins at 40.
But it seems they're all wrong - because according to scientists, we are most content only when we hit 74.
A combination of fewer responsibilities and financial worries and having more time to yourself produces a contentment unknown earlier in life, they say.
The researchers have found that happiness starts to dip in the teenage years and continues on a downward spiral until the age of 40. It then levels off until about
46, before rising to a peak more than 30 years later.
German and American scientists analysed the results of a long-term British survey in which more than 21,000 men and women were regularly asked how happy they were with their lives."
6 comments:
They're only happy because they realise that life's grim struggle is almost at an end...
I'm glad YOU said that, and not me. I was thinking it though.
Life is NOT what it's advertised to be. someone should tell you that upfront. :)
Yes, but I'm a grumpy old englishman so I'm expected to be dour and cynical... you're a young, bouncy American so what's your excuse. Living in the UK for too long I guess.
Now call me a cock-eyed optimist, or a shallow stupid American, but I've always seen life as a basically fun and happy proposition, an adventure, and I want more of it (within reason).
Every time I think I've had the best of it, and fear that the rest will be all downhill, something nice and interesting happens, and I reconsider.
Do I want to end up as King Lear's vision of old age, a "poor, bare, forked animal"? HELL NO. Who wants to live long enough to be a burden to relatives, or the state?
But I think life is lovely and fun, and absolutely everything it was advertised to be. Life really is "what you make it," as the cliche' goes. And as e.e. cummings said,
"god damn everything that isn't the circus."
That's the great thing about getting older - your asapirations fallaway one by one and you're no longer disgruntled about what you don't have.
Well, Mel, yes, but all aspirations need not fall away. I've made peace with the fact that I'll never be a concert pianist or play Sally Bowles in a revival of *Cabaret* on Broadway:):) but I could (in theory) write and publish a novel, or get my master points in bridge. Not likely, but...possible.
As one ages, that burning urge to achieve mellows, doesn't it? At some point we just look back at the very good things that have gone before, and kind of relax. Que sera, sera.
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