Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters
I have read several times that there is evidence of a U-curve in happiness over an individual’s life. People are happy in their youth, and happy again after retirement, but suffer from a serious malaise in between as they grapple with their finances, careers and family life. […] Today I was glad to find some evidence that the U-curve is just a statistical illusion. […]
Happiness is nearly flat from 20 through 50. Frijter’s explanation for the disagreement with the existing literature is that, “happy people in middle age are busy and don’t have time to participate in lengthy questionnaires, leading previous studies to erroneously think there was a huge degree of unhappiness in middle-age.”
photo { Irving Penn, Girl in Bed (Jean Patchett), New York, 1949 }