The Happiness Curve

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17 September 2020

Jonathan Rauch's The Happiness Curve is subtitled "Why Life Get's Better After 50", so I figured it would be a good book to read as I wade further into my forties. It's hard not to feel down when you have reached this point in your life and, like most people, life has fallen short of expectations for decades. I try to be stoic about it, but it is nevertheless a fact of life. I used to say that you're only old when your regrets outnumber your dreams, and I have had the chance to pile up a mountain of regrets. Still, the dreams are there and my list of life goals grows faster than I can check things off of it.

By compulsion I make lists;
Lists of things I don't get done.
Sometimes it's hard to see
My mountain of successes
In this sea of incompletes.

For some reason when I was a teenager and saw the movie Death Becomes Her the funeral scene at the end lodged strongly in my head for later reference. Life begins at 50. And there is the cliché of the midlife crisis we all laugh at and belittle. The interesting thing that I learned reading Rauch's book is that this pattern predates humanity. Chimpanzees experience the same downward trend in happiness until it bottoms out and then rises again late in life. It's a population trend though. Not everyone's life experience is the same obviously.

In his book Rauch takes us on a literary journey, using the paintings of Thomas Cole to analogize the stages in life. He mixes scientific research with anecdotes to make the principles concrete. And he ends with a call to action: bring midlife out of the closet! Too many people suffer the bottom of the U-shaped happiness curve believing that they are alone in that suffering and that it is somehow wrong to feel that way. It's not.

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