and find yourself feeling risk averse these days, you’re not alone. When given a choice between larger potential gains with substantial risk, or smaller potential gains with smaller risk, seniors almost always choose the smaller gain. In fact, risk aversion is always largest if there’s a threat of losing a potential reward, however small that reward might seem. Why? Seniors prefer the higher probability of experiencing a positive emotion. Like with operating the penny slots, reward size doesn’t matter to seniors, as long as they can play. This finding is so common, researchers call it the certainty effect.
Contrast this easy satisfaction with our younger selves. In youth, the altitude of happiness we experience is consistently stratospheric, and we want more. We crave a dance, a rave, loud music, louder friends. After all, we might find a lifelong mate in these vigorous activities or, later, potential connections for work advancement. It’s a risky way to play at life, given the stakes, and aggressively self-serving. But it’s also understandable. In our youth, our emphasis is on the future, not the past—perhaps because we haven’t made one yet. Which is why staying home and watching reruns of I Love Lucy is not exactly our idea of a good time. The researchers who quantified this preference named it “promotion motivation.”
Reaping the consequences of promotion motivation, we then swear fealty to the iron thrones of mortgages and parenting and saving for retirement. We turn into efficiency experts, seeking ways to preserve success and prevent failures as both begin accumulating in larger numbers. We become concerned with what we can keep as much as what we can create. Eventually, the vaguely disturbing illusion that we’ll live forever vanishes. Heading into retirement, we try to protect what we’ve worked so hard to gain, shifting from promotion motivation to prevention motivation.
It’s a good name, goaded by the ultimate irony of life: death. Now we see ourselves in terms of preservation because time is short. Present happiness becomes more important than future reward. With creaking joints, friends dying, and loved ones moving away, a night with Lucille Ball might just be the ticket.
In a nutshell, that’s the relationship these shifting feelings have with risk taking. We become eager to shun potential hazards and embrace smaller rewards simply because we may not have many rewards left to enjoy. After the twelve thousandth time on a roller coaster, you realize that it’s not going to harm you and there’s still plenty of joy to wring from the experience. What, then, is the harm in making it 12,001?
Smell a rat?
As I mentioned, I have not told you the whole story about seniors and happiness, and there’s a reason for my cowardice: it’s not all razzleberry dressing and theme-park rides. Here’s a true example of how sad this not-good-news can be.
A widowed seventy-four-year-old physician from Southern California found the loneliness excruciating; he eventually signed up for a dating website. The good doctor quickly found an anesthetic in the form of a forty-year-old British divorcée. She was broke, with a daughter in college. In a few weeks, they were cyber-buddies, and weeks after that, long-distance lovers, the digital equivalent of a winter/summer relationship. You probably already smell a rat, and we might wish the doctor had, too.
The woman contacted him in a panic one day. Her daughter had been killed in a car wreck. She didn’t have the money to pay for the funeral, nor her daughter’s student loans, and could he wire her $45,000 to cover the costs because she just didn’t know where to turn? He sent her the funds—which, of course, opened up a spigot of other requests. A fortnight later it was $10,000 for a new roof, $75,000 for a new Mercedes (yes, Mercedes), and finally, a first-class ticket from London, so she could meet the love of her life at LAX and thank him in person. Sadly, he granted every financial request. The woman never showed up at the airport, though he had readied a limousine, Cristal champagne, flowers, and a room at the Four Seasons. The doctor never heard from her again.
This stuff happens to the elderly all the time. Figures are hard to come by, but MetLife estimates the elderly get bilked out of nearly $3 billion every year. Men and women are equally vulnerable, and successful Beverly Hills family doctors are not immune. It’s proof that older people should be less concerned about running out of life than running out of money.
There’s an obvious reason the elderly become a target: solo seniors sometimes have obese bank accounts. The less obvious reason has to do with the dark side of focusing on the positive all the time. As you age, you also become more trusting, or better to say, more gullible. We even think we know why.
There’s an area of the brain called the insula, a slightly hidden clot of neurons just above your ears. You can think of it as an “ability to know when you’re being taken for a ride” detector. Like so many brain regions, the insula has other subfunctions, ranging from assessing risks to reacting to betrayals to feeling disgusted. It even helps forecast whether a given action will be safe. As you age, the anterior insula (front area, nearest your eyes) becomes less reactive to potentially untrustworthy, even threatening, situations. Scientists can show the effects of this decline in many ways, including the capacity to detect untrustworthiness in people’s faces. Or in fake British lovers.
This vulnerability is part of a general collapse of an extremely important behavior: the ability to know when you’re making a mistake about something—especially if rewards are involved. It’s part of a general suite of behaviors called reward prediction, which is the ability to forecast when a reward is most likely to happen (or not). Reward prediction abilities decline more than 20 percent with age, which means reward prediction errors increase. (A reward prediction error is where you anticipate that a reward will occur, based on prior experience, but it doesn’t, so you are wrong.) And just to complete the circle, the aging brain gets worse not only at predicting rewards but also at assessing risks.
There’s more bad news. As if a flickering insula wasn’t enough, there is an area in the brain I sometimes call the AC/DC network (the “Highway to Hell” circuit) that changes as we age. The Highway to Hell is a ridiculously powerful series of linked circuits deeply embedded in your brain, close to the insula. The circuits are responsible for many things, including nearly all addictive behaviors. Hence the name. They are also involved in reward prediction errors, mediating what we call “probabilistic learning,” a skill at which you get increasingly bad with old age. Researchers believe these two regions, the insula and the Highway to Hell, are the reasons why older people become more gullible. And why people who love us need to take special precautions if they take care of us. An aging insula and accompanying circuitry are as dangerous as a broke lover.
A darker shade of gray
I still remember the first time I heard these lyrics over the car radio: “Ooh, what a lucky man he was.” I got goose bumps. I was amazed as the song ended with one of the strangest keyboard sound clusters I’d then encountered. I didn’t normally listen to rock in those days—still don’t (I prefer Stravinsky to the Stones), but I wanted to know more about this group. It was a trio, sporting a name more like a law firm than one of the great prog-rock groups of the ’70s: Emerson, Lake & Palmer. When I discovered they also did electronic covers of classical pieces, it was love at first toccata. I was especially enamored of the virtuosity of the group’s legendary keyboardist, Keith Emerson. Thus it was with sadness that I read about Emerson’s suicide, in 2016, at age seventy-one. Though he kept the dogs of depression at bay for years, his resistance ended when he developed career-threatening nerve damage to his fingers. Gun in hand, he became not such a lucky man after all.
Depression and suicide go hand in hand, as Emerson’s life illustrates. Depression and old age go hand in hand, too, which his life also illustrates, and this represents the deepest shade in the dark side of our chapter on happiness. It also seems to contradict virtually everything I’ve been discussing so far. I obviously have some explaining to do. And with help from two quotes in the research literature, I intend to do just that.
First,
