LATE 40s: IS THIS THE MOST MISERABLE TIME OF OUR LIVES?
A recent study found that happiness reaches a low at 47.2 years old. Does the claim stand up to scrutiny?
What’s the unhappiest age? According to a recent study, it’s our late 40s. Our happiness, it seems, tends to decrease towards this midlife nadir, before steadily increasing through our 50s and 60s. In the study, Dr David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, compared 109 data files of happiness statistics from around the world, plotting the relationships between wellbeing and age for hundreds of thousands of people. He found the ‘happiness curve’ in data from 132 countries, controlling for factors that affect wellbeing, such as education, marital status and employment status. For
developing countries, happiness was lowest at 48.2 years old; in developed countries it was 47.2.
“No ifs, no buts, wellbeing is U-shaped in age,” writes Blanchflower. “I found it in Europe, Asia, North and South America, in Australasia and Africa ... There were very few countries I did not find it for, and that happened mostly where there were small samples or I had no data.”
Previous studies have found this happiness curve, too. Some of the best evidence comes from longitudinal studies, which track the same group of people over a number of years. For example, a 2015 study led by health economist Dr Terence Cheng, looked at individual changes in wellbeing in longitudinal data from Britain, Australia and Germany, finding “powerful support for a U-shape”.
However, some experts question whether the curve is a true phenomenon, or a result of the data analysis. One possibility, says Dr Dean Burnett – author of The Happy Brain and honorary research associate at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology – is that the curve at least partly results from unhappier people dying younger, which would skew the data towards higher happiness for the older ages. That said, there are reasons why happiness might follow this trajectory when averaged over a population.
“Around the late 40s and early 50s is a time when many people have less autonomy and less financial security,” he says. “When you’re younger, you’re not tied down with responsibilities, and there are more possibilities. In midlife, people might have mortgages to pay and adolescent children to look after. Your body might be starting to get aches and pains, and there’s less novelty in life. All of the things you were looking forward to when you were younger have either happened, or are looking less likely to happen.” So why might happiness increase in later life? “When you’re older, autonomy usually increases,” says Burnett. “Your children are grown up, you have less responsibility, you might be retired – you have more control over your life again. You’ve also had some time to make peace with any challenges that you began to encounter in your 40s and 50s.”
Another benefit of being older, says Burnett, is that you’ve built up life experience, and that can help you to deal better with any negative life events. “You also become more grateful for the things that you do have,” he adds. “You come to terms with the things you aren’t going to get, and can concentrate on other things, such as friendships or hobbies.”
The studies that have found the happiness curve include some broad definitions of happiness. In the Blanchflower analysis, for example, the UK data came from the Annual Population Survey, which asks participants to rate, on a scale of 0 to 10: “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” and “How happy did you feel yesterday?”.
Individual differences will vary greatly from the statistical average, and everyone will have their own personal happiness trajectory. So to what extent can we affect our own happiness? “We have a lot more control than we realise,” says Burnett. “We have the autonomy to do things and make decisions that’ll improve our wellbeing. But we also don’t realise how much of our happiness is influenced by others.” He says that a lot of the things that we think will make us happy – like marriage or a particular job – come from our culture, not from any real need.
Burnett recommends being aware of this when setting goals for the future. “How many of these are things that you actually want, and how many are things that you feel you should want?” he says.
Ultimately, it seems that people can be unhappy at any age. But they can be happy at any age, too. “There are plenty of people in their late 40s who are having the time of their life,” says Burnett.
“There are plenty of people in their late 40s who are having the time of their life”
On our overheating planet, wildfire is now one of the most terrifying and costly of all natural disasters. From California to Russia, Australia to the UK and Greenland to the Amazon, record temperatures and tinder box conditions have, in recent years, driven conflagrations that have taken hundreds of lives and immolated many thousands of properties – in some cases entire communities.
BURNING ISSUE
Two years ago, major burns in California resulted in the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season ever recorded, with more than 80 deaths and 750,000 hectares scorched at a cost of $12bn (£9bn). In 2019, it was the Brazilian Amazon that burned, helped by fires started deliberately by farmers and loggers. This year, it is Australia’s turn, with the most widespread bushfires on record continuing to spread devastation.
As of mid-January, a staggering and unprecedented 8,500,000 hectares of bush and forest in Australia has been turned to ash – an area equal to the size of Austria – and the cost is set to rise above AU$5bn (£2.6bn), with months of the fire season still to go. There are other costs too. While the country’s bush and eucalyptus forest is particularly resilient to fire and will soon recover, its fauna is not. The blazes may already have taken the lives of more than one billion animals, which could have a long-term impact on populations of at-risk koalas and other vulnerable species.
Looking at images and film of the Australian fires, it is easy to believe that they are unstoppable; that nothing can be done to limit their scale and the destruction they bring, but this is not the case. While battling great conflagrations once they are in full spate is almost a lost cause, measures can be taken in advance to try and manage the occurrence of fires and to limit their potential to grow into colossal blazes that are nearly impossible to control. And such measures are nothing new. In fact, Australia’s indigenous population has a long history of successfully managing fire. For thousands of years, nomadic aboriginals played a key role in preventing conflagrations by burning surface vegetation to create firebreaks that constrained the scale of fires started naturally by lightning. The fires were set during the cooler months, so as to limit their reach, leaving behind stretches of land cleared of the dry plant debris that fuels much larger conflagrations. As the aboriginal populations dwindled and their lifestyle was destroyed, so too was this invaluable service.
Now, however, using traditional practices to start so-called controlled or hazard reduction burns are being taken seriously by stakeholders in the fire management business. There have already been some small-scale successes in managing bushfire activity, most notably where traditional methods have been combined with modern technologies like satellite mapping and controlled aerial ignition using helicopters or drones. And the ideas are catching on elsewhere too. In Venezuela, indigenous knowledge and modern techniques are
“For thousands of years, nomadic aboriginals played a key role in preventing conflagrations by burning surface vegetation to create firebreaks”
being used together to manage fires in the country's Canai ma National Park, while methods and strategies implemented in Australia are being exported to places as far afield as Botswana, Brazil and Canada.
DESERT COUNTRY
There are other things that can be done too, in order to clamp down on wildfires and their impacts. More sophisticated computer models are able to predict how a blaze will develop, allowing better planning of fire-fighting resources. As towns sprawl into wildland areas where fires are more c:ortinion, the interface between the two becomes a critical zone, where preventative strategies can help keep buildings safe. These include maintaining a wide vegetation-free zone around properties, using fire-resistant building materials and keeping gutters and decking free of burnable debris. Injury and loss of life can be minimised by planning multiple evacuation routes in advance, and by ensuring that there is always access for fire-fighting vehicles. Even taken together, however, such mitigation methods amount to little more than a sticking plaster. Looking ahead, prospects in countries prone to burning look bleak. Even armed with new models and methodologies, in the continuing war against wildfires, it is likely that stakeholders will be battling just to stay still. As global heating accelerates, unprecedented temperatures, extreme drought conditions and failing water supplies will conspire to bring ever more devastating conflagrations.
In Australia, 2019 was the hottest year on record and the driest for nearly 120 years. December saw more than three-quarters of the country experiencing the worst fire weather conditions on record. As the fires continue to rampage through fully grown forest as well as bush, it is worth noting that Australia is essentially a desert with a few green bits around the edge. It’s hardly surprising that as Hothouse Earth conditions start to become the norm, these bits become crisped and burned by heat and fire, leading to questions being asked about the country’s long-term future on an overheated world. Whisper it, but maybe – at long last – the recognition that the fate of Australia is at stake will cause climate change deniers involved in the country’s decision-making to rethink their views on emissions.