The U-Bend of Happiness

Heaven knows I am miserable now. One third way through my 45th year, I suffered a severe bout of indigestion at the breakfast table when I spotted an article in the Telegraph today with the stark headline “44 is the age of depression, say researchers”.

The economics of welfare and happiness has been a remarkably productive area of research in our discipline over recent years. Richard Layard gave a memorable series of lectures on the subject a couple of years back together with a well received book. And top class economists such as Professor Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick and Richard Easterlin have been at the forefront of building survey based research in the drivers of human happiness and mental health. This time Andrew Oswald has teamed up with MPC member David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, USA. Their latest number-crunching is on the back of a huge global sample covering more than eighty countries from Albania to Zimbabwe and two million people.

In brief, they have found that people are more likely to feel depressed in their mid-life, with the peak age for depression being about 44. And that happiness or its polar opposite tends to follow a U-shape over a normal lifetime. Maybe there really is something in the proverbial ‘mid-life crisis’. Indeed the survey results suggest that the slow descent into a trough of middle-aged despair is not simply the result of coping with bringing up a young family and period crises at work. There is a noticeable dip in contentment across all groups - married and single, separated, divorced, rich and poor.

So why the unhappiness at this stage of a life cycle. According to Layard and Blanchflower one reason is that people “learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations”. Another factor mentioned at the end of the research is that cheerful people tend to live longer than the miserable leading to a batting average effect on average measures of happiness as the depressed leave the scene a bit earlier. Oswald also suggests tentatively that many people emerge from the trough of unhappiness because they may see their school friends and other contemporaries die early and they start to value their blessings.

My own explanation for some of the slump in happiness during the mid to late 40s is that this is the time when those of a very active disposition start to find whatever it is they enjoy doing more of a physical struggle. That game of six-a-side football on a Friday night takes the whole weekend to get over; the mid-week squash match requires 72 hours before the stiffness ebbs away. We battle on, adjust our sights and come to enjoy sport and other physical activities for other reasons than narrow competition, but it takes time to come to terms with the fact that we can no longer beat personal bests! A few hours after reading the depression Telegraph article, I was on the Hockey pitch doing some coaching enjoying myself thoroughly but knowing that the reckoning will come when I try to climb out of bed in the morning!

Suggestions for further reading

BBC News: Depression risk ‘highest in 40s’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7213387.stm

Professor Andrew Oswald
http://www.andrewoswald.com

Richard Layard: “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science”