You rarely hear about anybody enthusiastically anticipating hitting late middle age and beyond. Midlife is so deeply synonymous with nonspecific irrelevance — especially for women — that entire industries describe a demographic as being "over fifty," as if the second part of life was one big swan dive off a cliff.
But author Jonathan Rauch disputes the trope of inevitable, miserable decline. As the last of the boomers and the first wave of genxers muscle their way into their AARP years, Rauch says they have plenty to look forward to — and that research bears it out. Salon spoke recently to Rauch about his new book, "The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50."
I am a middle-aged woman. I am a mother of two. In my hero's journey, I would put myself in the abyss, Jonathan. What is your elevator pitch for how it gets better?
My book is about the fact that the whole way we think of aging and happiness in America in wrong, and because we think about it wrong, we make ourselves miserable. We waste huge human potential. How do we think about aging wrong? And why do we assume that as we get older we're going to get less and less happy, and that the prime of life — when we're at our maximum of mastery and competence — is when we should feel most satisfied with our lives? We've succeeded, hopefully, at our achievements. We have a lot to be grateful for, and then we decline and we become disabled and old and miserable. That's what we think. The result of that is we expect middle aged people to be invulnerable and emotionally just great. When we see that they're not, we call it a midlife crisis and we mock them for that, or we tell them to go see a doctor because, it's abnormal to be middle-aged and dissatisfied with your life. . . . Why aren't you more content with life and shouldn't you feel terrible that you're not?
My book says, the story I just told — the conventional wisdom — is almost entirely wrong. First of all, aging works against contentment until about age 50, and then it flips sides and actually works toward contentment and helps you be contented and grateful for the entire rest of your life. That's number one. Number two is as a result of that, there's this long patch in the middle where people are not as satisfied with their accomplishments as they expect to be. Their dissatisfaction makes them think there's something wrong with them, which makes them feel even worse and then they don't tell anyone because they're embarrassed. Or they're isolated and that makes them feel even worse. Lots of people are in this trap, and I was too when I was in my forties.
One of the things that is consistent throughout the book is that the things that we think are going to give us satisfaction and the things that we think are going to make us happy are not necessarily in the places that we, particularly in our western culture, think that they are.
Yes, and particularly in our younger years. When we’re 25, we're wired to be ambitious and to want to do great things. The motivator for that is that evolution tells us, "If I meet my goals, I'll be incredibly happy." But in fact ambition wires us to always want the next goal, to not be satisfied. After 20 years of meeting our goals and not being satisfied, we get pretty demoralized. "Why am I not happy? I guess nothing will ever make me happy. I guess I'm doomed to being a malcontent." Now you're disappointed in how happy you been in your path. You're pessimistic about how happy you could ever be in the future and you're sitting there at age 45, being disappointed and pessimistic. That is not a fun place to be. People say, "Well, this is a first world problem. You're not entitled to it, or get over it." First of all, it's not a first world problem. This pattern, the happiness curve, is found in countries and cultures all over the world. It's even found in chimps and orangutans.
But second, it is true that midlife malaise is often literally about nothing. It's happening because of changes in the brain and changes in our values, not necessarily changes in our lives. That doesn't make it any easier to cope with. In fact, it makes it harder. At least if you've got a health issue, you know what to try to go out and do about that.
One of the things that is also true is that this is a time in life where there are a lot of stressors coming down at once in a different way than we have at other points in our lives.
It's important to remember that the happiness curve is just the effect of aging all by itself. It's independent of income, education, employment, health, children, marital status and everything else. It's actually something time is doing all by itself. One of the things that happens to successful people who are having a smooth journey on the river of life, is they're the ones who are feeling this undercurrent because there's not a lot of other things going on.
That was my story. I had a great life, I was knocking all my goals out of the park, but I still wasn't happy. That was time's effect, but I didn't realize that. Yes, there are a lot of stressors at midlife, but even if you don't have a lot of major stresses, even if things are going really well — in fact, often especially if things are going really well — you will feel this undertone of discontent that time itself is causing. Just remember, it's not your fault. It's not abnormal, there's nothing wrong with you. This is just a natural transition through this portion of life.
You use the example in the book of your friend who was out there killing it. It turned out he had really gotten into this great crisis in his life and had bottomed out with his substance abuse at a moment when he was achieving a great deal.
He's in the book because he's kind of in some ways the exception. Some people have a quote-unquote "midlife crisis," a big disruption in their lives, and that happened to him. . . . That happens because humans are not very good at attributing the causes of our happiness and unhappiness. If I'm sitting here at age 43 or 44 and I'm not content with my life and I can't figure out why, I might lose control of the situation like my friend did. I might think I must need to change up my whole life and make some kind of disruptive move, like leaving a marriage and quitting a job. What I tell people is most of the time for most people, it's not a crisis. It's a persistent dissatisfaction. If you go on with your life, you soldier through it. The thing is people need more help with it, but usually it's not a crisis. It feels like the new normal and that's what's upsetting about it. It's like, man, is this going to last forever?
This gets to where you start explaining why it gets better. When you're 20, when you get your heartbroken for the first time, it feels like death. When you're 50 and you have a few heartbreaks under your belt, you have the lesson of time that you will survive this. The things that make it better when we get older have a lot to do with experience.
They are partly to do with experience. I was more interested in the things that we have less control over. Why does this thing happen to us and why does it end the turnaround? What accounts for this strange new shape, the effect of time on happiness? It seems like three things are going on at once, because humans are always complicated.
The first is that our expectations change as we age. When we're young, we overestimate how satisfied we’ll be by achieving status in life and becoming a big deal. In fact that's not something that really makes you all that happy; that just primes us to want even more. Once we get to about middle age, we begin to readjust our expectations and it become more realistic. We're less disappointed going forward.
Another thing is it our values change. As we get older, our values tend to shift. When we're young, we tend to look for achievement, status. The things you get from social competition, because, evolution. That would give you mating opportunities. This is true by the way of men and women.
As we age, our values naturally shift toward cooperation and community and ways that we can give back. There are evolutionary reasons why that might be the case as well. We age long past our reproductive years. The value of that seems to be a kind of the grandmother effect. We can contribute to society in another way. We become more directed to other people as we get older and that turns out to be good for our emotional well being and good for other people too. Our values change and our priorities change. We invest more in the key relationships that we really care about
The third thing that happens is our brains change. This is neuroscience. We're getting into the hard wiring. Older people are less prone to regret. They have a more positive outlook. If you show them happy faces and sad faces in an fMRI machine, their brains will respond more way to happy faces than younger brains do. They're not more prone to depression. They're better at regulating their emotions. They have strong emotions, but they're better at regulating them and the storms don't last as long when they do. There are all kinds of ways in which it turns out that aging is good for us emotionally.
None of what I mentioned has to do with whether there are kids in the house or how your marriages are, your stresses. What I'm talking about is stuff that seems to be ticking along in the background because we're human.
One of the things you talk about that is so important is being able to cultivate gratitude within all of these changes and that's a very good indicator of satisfaction.
I played at one point with actually calling the book not "The Happiness Curve" but "The Gratitude Curve." It seemed so hard to feel grateful when I was in middle age. I had so much to be grateful for and I didn't want to be an ungrateful person, but it turns out this was time playing tricks on me. In my 50s, I founded it steadily easier to feel grateful and savor the more important things in life. The relationships, the little things that you can do from what day to the next, those take on added meaning and depth.
In my case, I found that reminding myself, of all the reasons I should be grateful, counting my blessings did not help. It might've made it worse because the more I counted my blessings and carried on all the great things in my life, the more it made me think about how insufficiently grateful I was for those things. I think counting one’s blessings is a good thing on moral principle, because we should understand our blessings. But to deal with this trap that we're in emotionally, it's not enough just to know intellectually that we should be grateful. You might not be able to feel as grateful as you know you should be. That’s to the nature of this period of life. What the book is about is how to deal with these cognitive issues that are going on.
I wanted to ask you about the way that these happiness curves shake out between genders, because being a woman over 50 in our culture does mean something different than being a man over 50. It's different to be George Clooney than a comparable 50-year-old woman. At the same time that women are entering their fifties, as you pointed out, they are going through changes in their reproductive lives. They are dealing with enormous physical changes around that. What do you think the differences in the happiness curve are for men and women?
I can give you a firm and clear answer to that. There are no differences by gender in the happiness curve. You would think there would be. Everyone looks for it. We now have literally millions and millions of data points from a hundred fifty countries around the world. Gender does not show up as different between men and women. Now remember if you get the happiness curve, you’re factoring out all these other things in life that aren't gendered like education, income and so forth. A lot of the gender things are going away. All we're talking about with the happiness curve is the effect of aging by itself and that is not gendered.
That leads us of this interesting question. Then why do we assume culturally that's say midlife crisis is a bigger problem for men? If you look at the culture around midlife crisis, it's disproportionately about men leaving their marriages, buying a sports car, connecting with seemingly inappropriately younger people, whatever. I think the reason for that is probably the culturally men have just had a lot more freedom and resources to act out. We see it more. I think a lot more women have had to suffer in silence, you know, be a good mom and have not been in that position. I think that's a question of how people express the happiness curve.
There is this time in life where we see ourselves approaching physical limitations. You talk about your skier friend who says, "I get older but the mountain stays the same." We reached these, these moments where we are frustrated with these limitations that we find. We have to find other outlets, other things, other alternatives, things to fill that space in our lives. How do you address that?
In terms of the fact that we get older and we begin to see things getting worse for us physically. Fifty is typically about when it turns around the age effect in your life, your mileage will vary. At 50 we start to figure, well, I can start to sense my body's not going to be able to let me do the things I used to do and I see a future of decline and I'm probably at my career peak right now. I've probably achieved most of what I'm going to and probably don't have that much more growth potential. Isn't it all downhill from here? Here's the thing — that turns out to be wrong.
People way underestimate the power of this emotional turnaround. It typically begins in the 50s. It turns out that the positivity effect I mentioned actually helps protect us emotionally from the physical downside of aging. People who are like giving up lots of physical stuff that they used to do in their 60s and 70s on into their 80s. They say, "You know what? I would not trade. This is better."
It becomes easier to be content as you get older and you begin to find more richness in these small things that you can do. You begin to feel more gratitude. People experienced that not as like settling or diminution of life or giving things up. The experience as actually acquiring a new ability to save her life. It's really a very cool thing.
We can think of this time or the time before this in almost the same way that we do adolescence. We understand this is a discrete time in life and we all are somewhat on the same page about recognizing it and giving it visibility. What happens is our youth-obsessed culture is there is this feeling that we're going to diminish. We're going to go away and become invisible and we can't talk about the things that we're going through. But there is this community of people who are all sharing the same experiences and as you point out, sharing our experiences is a huge component of satisfaction.
One takeaway from my book is it's not a midlife crisis. It’s a midlife transition, and it's totally normal. It's not fun to go through, but it's in some ways analogous to adolescence. OK, adolescence hard for some people, not so hard for others, but we don't run around saying, "Wow you're having adolescence crisis." People are just having an ordinary transition, which is challenging for a lot of people.
Then the second takeaway is the one you just said: We have got to take midlife transition out of the closet. People are dealing with it in shame and isolation. I'm gay — I went through this with being gay. I don't need it again with being middle aged. People are keeping it inside and people are not getting the support they need.
Takeaway number three is, retire the stereotypes about aging late adulthood being a time of kind of loss, diminution, sadness. Our generation has the miraculous gift of 15 or more additional years of healthy life in what turns out to be the most emotionally rewarding, pro-social time of life. I mean, good heavens, what homo sapiens in history would not have given their eye teeth for what you and I are going to have?
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