As long-time readers know, one of the things that makes me happy is getting out on the water in my kayak. Especially when I can get out at sunrise and the water is as smooth as glass. In fact, the real dopamine rush hits probably as I stand on the dock getting ready to my boat in the water anticipating the paddle. Researchers call this form of happiness, experienced well-being. Experienced well-being is measured by reports of positive feelings - the “ah” of sliding into your kayak and pushing off from the dock, and seeing a heron flap lazily overhead. Of course we have negative feelings, too, and these count against experienced well-being. Someone cuts you off in traffic, the barista forgets to add your almond milk to your latte. Positive or negative, these feelings are fleeting and respond to changes in what is happening at any given point in the day. I’ve heard people say that emotions like happiness are more like compass directions, in that they tell you which way you are going. You don’t want to feel happy when something should be sad or frustrating. Your emotions are feedback that tell you to make a change or pursue something. In a sense they are like a sine wave, fluctuating up and down as you go through your day:
But there is also a macro pattern to happiness, and it moves through the life course.
(pic is of my students attending the American College of Healthcare Executives of Northern New England chapter’s annual meeting along with some of the executives)
The macro pattern comes from the kind of happiness I usually talk about in this newsletter. It is often referred to by researchers as life-satisfaction or evaluative happiness. It is not the happiness that comes from kayaking or doing whatever you might enjoy - having a glass of wine, a good meal, or engaging in a great conversation, etc. Evaluative happiness arises when we reflect on our lives and decide that what we have done is meaningful and valuable. Thus, you can engage in lots of hedonistic pleasures from day to day, scoring high on experienced well-being, yet feel your life is empty and purposeless, scoring low on evaluative happiness. As a teacher, I cycle continuously through joy and frustration when dealing with my students. On any given day you could ask me how I’m feeling and I could give you a thumbs up or thumbs down, and the answer will depend a lot on the last interaction I had with my students (experienced well-being). Were they engaged and talking in class today? My experience will be positive. Were they check-out and distracted, or asking, “will this be on the test”? My experience will be negative. But what makes being a teacher worthwhile is the evaluative happiness. It’s the moments when I can pause and look at how far the students have come on their journeys and I can think about where they are going and it's those moments that I feel deep satisfaction. It’s those moments when I feel like it is worth enduring the frustration. It’s the same pattern as being a parent. Happiness cycles, and that’s what I wanted to talk about today.
According to happiness research, evaluative happiness has a macro life-course shape, and that shape is a U, with its nadir in the late 40’s, close to 50. The above graph is based on US data, but studies show that the pattern holds across countries (Blanchflower, 2021). (The controls applied include education, marital status, labor force status, and others.)
I don’t think there is concurrence about what causes the U-shape, and of course every individual has a unique story of their life factors, but the average of the population shows this pattern consistently. This being evaluative happiness, the self-talk would be something like, “Here I am, successful/unsuccessful, and yet what has it all meant?” The book where I first saw this pattern discussed was the classic, The Season’s of a Man’s Life, and Levinson found that men in their late 40’s experienced this nadir of happiness whether their careers had been objectively successful (promotions, income) or unsuccessful. He also considered their personal lives, with factors such as divorce and remarriage. The pattern was the same.
Blanchflower makes the point that
In the USA, deaths of despair are most likely to occur in the middle-aged years, and the patterns are robustly associated with unhappiness and stress. Across countries, chronic depression and suicide rates peak in midlife.
So this is not a trivial thing. The bottom of the U is a dangerous place to be. Finding a way out is important. I want to talk (again, for those of you who have been long-time RWL readers) about two books that have influenced my thinking on this.
The first source I want to discuss is the philosopher Kieran Setiya addresses the U-shape in his book Midlife, and suggests that we realize at midlife that the pursuit of telic activities (activities with a purpose, such as the pursuit of a particular promotion, a particular level of income, tenure at a university, etc.) are things that will eventually hold no meaning. It’s why I started this series of newsletters with the statement, “Start with the end in mind: you will die and be forgotten.” Setiya suggests that the solution, at least to some degree is to pursue atelic activities - activities that have no particular goal, but instead provide meaning in the doing of them. For Setiya, that meant continuing to study and write philosophy, not with the purpose of publishing a particular number of papers, but because the doing of philosophy gave meaning to his life. For me, it’s teaching. There is no telic goal to being a teacher. It just gives me satisfaction to get up every day and think about teaching. And I roll into teaching this newsletter, RWL, the Health Leader Forge podcast, and the forthcoming Being in the World podcast that I am working on now. All of that is teaching. There is no end state. The purpose is to keep going and keep doing it because the doing makes me happy.
The second source is Arthur Brooks, the professional French horn player turned economist turned think tank CEO turned happiness researcher, he argues in his book From Strength to Strength that the U-shape comes from our physical and cognitive decline. Professional musicians, like professional athletes, reach physical decline, which causes many of them to leave the professional ranks. For many of us who work in cognitive fields, our cognitive acuity declines. Brooks cites studies that say we have two kinds of intelligence: fluid intelligence, which is a sort of cleverness that generates new ideas, new theories; and crystalized intelligence, which draws on our accumulated store of knowledge. Fluid intelligence declines in our 30’s and 40’s, which is why most great mathematicians and economists have their major contributions before they are 40. Crystalized intelligence grows until overall cognitive decline sets in. It is the fluid intelligence that gets us through our early career and gives us the sharpness to compete with older, wiser, more crystalized intelligent colleagues, but that fluid intelligence is waning by the time we get to the nadir of happiness. Something like this:
For Brooks, like Setiya, it is necessary to re-evaluate and find value in what you can do after fluid intelligence is no longer your competitive advantage. Crystalized intelligence allows us to explain how the world works. It’s useful for leadership, not being an individual performer. It’s useful for being a teacher. It’s useful for being a grandparent. Crystalized intelligence is good for being, not so much doing.
I think it’s useful to add the happiness U to the graph. I’m approximating the crossover point.
Some of the unhappiness of midlife definitely comes from decline. We know we’re not able to keep up with the young kids coming into our field. They’re faster, they have insights that we slap ourselves for not having seen. That’s when we realize we are in decline of fluid intelligence. Physical decline also follows the fluid intelligence decline, probably a few years sooner. Midlife requires reckoning with a lot of decline. It comes with realizing we need to give up many of the telic pursuits. The sense of loss we feel at that point overshadows the quiet rise of wisdom (crystalized intelligence). It takes time for us to substitute atelic pursuits and to come to appreciate them.
Before you walk away thinking I am suggesting that we should just start life with atelic activities, I want to say, I don’t actually think so. We have this fluid intelligence and this drive to achieve as young people for a reason. At 20, you haven’t earned the right to sit back and do the “I’m so wise” routine that those of us of an AARP age have earned, with our gray hair and stiff knees. I think young people should explore and push themselves and find out their limits. Young people should apply all those new insights, all that cleverness to solving problems and making their fortunes. But… with an eye to the future and an awareness that, while the music doesn’t stop, it does stop playing for you.
Whatever it is that causes the decline in happiness through the early life course, I think finding one’s way out of the valley requires change and acceptance. Probably most of us come to it naturally, but I think Setiya and Brooks have some useful insights. In that second phase of life, shifting to more atelic activities that take advantage of your growing crystalized intelligence probably is a way to climb up. What that looks like for each of us is going to be different. Regardless, to climb out of the pit of doom, I think we have to let go of our younger, more fluid, selves and embrace the person we become.
(to be continued)