Middle-Age Misery

Jan. 29, 2008— -- Happiness. It's actually part of what America was supposed to be about. The pursuit of happiness -- one of our unalienable rights along with life and liberty -- but is happiness measurable?

Apparently so, according to a study that hit the headlines Tuesday.

It may be hard to be a teenager. And it's not always easy growing old. But it's really the middle years that are the problem according to Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in Coventry England and the lead British scholar on the study.

"We find that all over the world happiness and mental health seem to follow a giant U-shape in life. That people are happy, have high mental health in their 20s. Then they swoop down and bottom out in their 40s and the best news is they become happier and happier in their 50s, 60s and 70s."

It's age 44 that they've pinpointed as the unhappiest point of life.

When they get older, "our guess is that people cut themselves a little slack. You might say they accept they're not going to be general manager of their company, they're not going to win the Nobel Prize. Once they've forgiven themselves then that's perhaps why it becomes easier to become more fulfilled in life," Oswald found.

But we wondered, is happiness really measurable?

We asked National Public Radio's Eric Weiner, who just published "The Geography of Bliss," which chronicles his journeys around the world to find out where people are happiest. Weiner, formerly a foreign correspondent, often found himself seeking out news that could be quite miserable.

"It's worthwhile work, it's rewarding work; it can also be a real bummer. Personally for myself, I found it to be a bummer, waking up every day and seeking out the most miserable places and the most miserable people in the world. So I thought what if I spent one year traveling the world seeking out the happiest places and the happiest people?"

The unhappiest place Weiner found -- Moldova.

And the happiest? "It's sort of a three way tie between Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland, depending on the survey," Weiner said.

So we decided to conduct some of our own research on the sidewalks of the nation's capital today.

We (unknowingly) spoke with former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., who has passed the 44-year-old slump. "I'm 71 years old, just retired, and happiness to me is being around family," he told us. And on a scale of one -to 10? "I'm an 11."

All we set was that simple one-to-10 scale.

Michael Spenard, at age 38, told us, "I'm a 10 -- at least this week. Next week I'll probably be a four, as my wife's traveling."

That didn't seem all that scientific to us.

But according to Weiner that's the scale the experts use. (Yes, there are happiness experts. Weiner found them at the World Database of Happiness in the Netherlands.)

"The way social scientists measure our happiness is through a very rigorous and empirical method -- they ask us. Overall, how happy are you with your life on a scale of one to 10, with zero being miserable and 10 being sort of Dalai Lama-size happiness. … We are good at gauging our won happiness and if we're not, then who is? You know, there've been all kinds of objective quality of life studies … but happiness is by definition subjective."

So our yardstick on the streets of Washington is OK, but what do we really know about what makes happy people happy?

When we talked to Todd Gillenwater in our nation's capital, he told us, "My happiest age was at 24 when I got married and that was a 10." And now, at age 37, "I'd have to say right now I'm about a nine out of 10."

Gillenwater's happiness follows a trend about marriage that Weiner has found. "Married people tend to be happier than people who are single … but perhaps we have it wrong. Perhaps it's happy people who are more likely to get married, because they're more attractive to the opposite sex, they're more likely to attract a mate. So it's very difficult to separate the chicken and egg."

But everybody we talked to said they were happy, giving themselves at least a seven out of 10.

"There is pressure in the U.S. to be happy … and there's concern among social scientists who study this that there may be a pro-happiness bias, especially in a country like the U.S. Let's face it, we love happiness. It's in our founding document. We invented the smiley face in 1963."

We asked Weiner, who at 44 is right in the "unhappy" target if he is happy.

"I'm not, but I was unhappy in my 20s, so I don't know if this is a fair comparison."

So we asked if we could tell him to "Cheer up."

"You can. But by saying cheer up you're engaging in a kind of pressure tactic. Because we Americans suffer from what one historian calls the unhappiness of not being happy. And it's a uniquely modern American malady. We are under pressure to cheer up and be happy. For most of human history that was not the case. For most of the ages, it was only the gods and fortunate few who could ever dream of achieving happiness. Now everybody is expected to be happy. And aging expectations are a sure recipe for unhappiness."