and an increase in cognitive abilities.
brain rule
Cultivate an attitude of gratitude
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
—Mark Twain
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
—Albert Schweitzer
A BIRTHDAY CARD RECENTLY caught my eye: “Grumpy Old Man To-Do List.”
1. Tell kids to get off MY lawn.
2. Scowl at the neighbor.
3. Write SCATHING letter.
4. Disinherit somebody.
5. Go for a long SLOW drive in the passing lane and keep signal on the whole time.
6. Tell kids to get off my lawn AGAIN!
7. Buy more NO TRESPASSING signs!
8. Tell some punk that in my day we had it tough.
9. Grumble grumpily for a while.
You open the card and it says:
10. Have a Happy Birthday!
As this card suggests, with many all-capped letters, older people have a reputation for being grumpy. Is this reputation warranted? Seniors also have a reputation for being kindly, patient, and wise—words not usually associated with grumpiness. That was certainly my experience with my grandparents. From a research point of view, these questions have serious definitional issues. What does happiness even mean? While researchers don’t unanimously agree on definitions, I am going to go with research psychologist Ed Diener, who defines happiness as “subjective well-being.” And with legendary researcher Martin Seligman, who defines optimism as knowing that bad things don’t last forever, that good will return. One is a condition of the present, and the other is an attitude about the future; both perspectives seem useful. As we’ll see, our thirst for optimistic experiences—and our ability to recall them—grow more robust as the years go by.
Onward, mostly upward
Confusion reigned for the longest time about whether people got grumpier or happier or just stayed themselves as they aged. Some studies found that people really fit Beatrix Potter’s classic “grumpy gardener Mr. McGregor” stereotype: they got crankier as they got older. Perhaps this was because the seniors studied lived in an environment of unrelenting arthritis, unrelenting funerals, and unrelenting loneliness. Other studies seemed to show the opposite. People became happier and better adjusted as they aged, becoming the type of sage that actor Morgan Freeman often plays in shows like The Story of God. Perhaps this was because they lived in a world of increasing wisdom, found a way to avoid more heartaches, and became more socially enriched as they shared their insights. Which is it, folks, Beatrix Potter or The Story of God?
Happily, further research provided a clearer picture, and much of it is positive. People really do become happier as they age, but with one important caveat about depression, as I’ll explain shortly. They develop more emotional stability, become more agreeable, are more conscientious. The difference is not small. To take just one psychometric measure, people in their sixties score 69 percent higher than people in their twenties on emotional stability assessments. Seniors score even higher on agreeableness tests.
Why the historical discrepancy? It’s a classic error. Most of the older studies did not take into account the environmental life experiences of those they examined. This includes controlling for what we now call the usual socioeconomic suspects: wealth, gender, race, mood, education, job stability—even year of birth. Seniors born in the Great Depression, for example, don’t have the same happiness profiles (a chart of the years they tended to be most and least happy) as baby boomers, and both have profiles different from millennials’. Whether you have children is a factor, too. Marital satisfaction, which profoundly influences happiness assessments, ebbs and flows depending on the age of the kids you are raising. Marital happiness is highest when the kids are gone, by the way—in the stretch of life between empty nest and retirement. It’s lowest when the kids are teens.
When you wade into the deep end of the statistical pool and take some of these factors into account (as was done in one National Institute on Aging study, which looked at several thousand people born between 1885 and 1980), a clear upward trend toward happiness emerges. As one journal put it, “Well-being increases over everyone’s lifetime” (emphasis mine). Another study taking into account similar variables—this one involving more than fifteen hundred people ages twenty-one to ninety-nine—also found that people aged on a positive note. And if that were the end of the story, we could just whistle a happy tune, pack up our bags, and end this chapter. Turns out not everything about mood improves, and the boost does not last forever—or for everybody. Before we get to that, however, we have to figure out why, for so many, it lasts so long.
What Satchmo says
One of the most relentlessly upbeat songs of the late 1960s and early ’70s rock era was performed not by a rock group but by a jazz legend. It was Louis Armstrong’s interpretation of “What a Wonderful World”:
I hear babies crying,
I watch them grow;
they’ll learn much more
than I’ll ever know.
Armstrong then marvels at what a wonderful world it is. Some people took exception to this half-full glass of rosy-colored water. With the Cold War in full flower and the Vietnam War in hideous bloom, the world could hardly be called wonderful, right? Armstrong heard about these criticisms, of course, and before graveling it out at a concert one night, he announced this to the audience:
Some of you young folks been saying to me: “Hey, Pops—what do you mean, what a wonderful world? How about all them wars all over the place, you call them wonderful?” But how about listening to old Pops for a minute? Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby—love. That’s the secret.
Remarkable, coming from a man whose greatness endured large helpings of Jim Crow, using bathrooms and drinking fountains marked “Colored Only.”
It is Life 101: we’ll experience both positive and negative events over time. The same generation that witnessed the My Lai massacre also watched a man land on the moon. As the years roll by, however, our brains don’t process positive and negative information in a balanced way. Our desire for (and memory of) optimistic input gets more intense as we age, and we begin to experience life more as a wonderful world.
How do we know? The surprising initial finding of scientists was that older people experienced fewer negative emotions than their younger counterparts. Researchers such as Mara Mather, gerontologist at USC, and Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, decided to investigate. Consistently, they found that older people’s brains paid
