Older People Are Happier People.  Really!  

By Shlomo Maital

      So, go figure.  I am 80 years old – and feel happier and more fulfilled than ever before.  Not everything in my body works well, as it once did.  I walk rather than jog.  But all in all, life is really, really good.  I do forget some names but my brain still works pretty well.

       And I am not alone.  It turns out, there is a paradox of aging — Older people are supposed to be sadder, depressed, and all are undergoing, well, a slow or fast road to becoming decrepit.  But in fact we seniors are overwhelmingly happier than the young.  This is the finding of Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, reported on the podcast Hidden Brain.

     Carstensen says:  “Aging was once considered to be a serious threat to virtually everyone’s mental health. There was a clinical psychology textbook that I had when I was in graduate school. So this was a textbook on psychopathology. They had a chapter on anxiety, a chapter on depression, a chapter on drug abuse, and then they ended with a chapter on old age. So old age itself was considered pathological. The whole range. And at the time, people also believed that Alzheimer’s disease was the inevitable consequence of aging, so that cognitive impairment would begin and would eventually progress to dementia. so that that was the fate of people who lived very long lives.”

    Carstensen continues:  “We studied a whole range of positive emotions and negative emotions. We wanted to understand what emotional experience in day-to-day life was like. We designed a study using what was then the gold standard, probably still is, of studying emotional experience in day-to-day life. And we gave people pagers, electronic pagers, and they carried them for a week. And at random times during each of seven days, we paged them and asked them to tell us the extent to which they were feeling each of 19 different emotions. Some were positive emotions like joy, happiness, calm. Some were negative emotions like anger, sadness, fear. And so we had this detailed record now for individuals about their emotional lives.  So we knew from this large study of mental health problems that they had lower rates of that, but we didn’t know a lot about what day-to-day emotional life was like an old age.  

     “We found that increasingly older people had fewer negative emotions, less anger reported, less fear, less disgust, and just as much happiness, joy, calm.”

     Naturally, the entire scientific community reacted in disbelief, rejecting her findings. How can old people be happy?  But her studies have been replicated and validated.  Yes, overall, we are happier.  “With every study, it became clear that this was a highly reliable finding. Older people were happier in their day to day lives on balance than younger people were.” 

      Social networks play a key role in keeping us oldies happy.  “Because social relationships are what bring us our greatest happiness, there was thinking that if networks and older people were smaller than they were in younger people, then older people must not be as happy. That was basically the thinking. Instead, it appears that what happens is that over time, social networks get smaller, but they’re very well honed. And so the people who are retained in the networks are those that are most important, the people who are most predictable, most valuable, in our lives. And those are the relationships that stay.”

      For my wife and I, apart from our family our main social network is our synagogue community – which is tight-knit, loving, caring and a source of great happiness.   

      One more way old people are happier: We have good memories.  Carstensen: “What we find is that younger people remember almost the same numbers of positive and negative images. By middle age, we see a preference and memory for the positive images, and in old age, that preference is whopping. That is, older people are remembering almost exclusively the positive images, and they’re not recalling the negative nor the neutral ones.”

     I do know that there are a great many older people, suffering illness, isolation, and mostly, a feeling of a lack of meaning in their lives, after productive lives of service to the world.  But they are the exception, not the rule.  And I wish those of us not doomed to this state could organize to help those who are.