Study Finds Attitudes about Aging Contradict Reality

Kara Gavin, University of Michigan

University of Michigan and Veterans Administration team find young and old alike fail to anticipate late-life happiness

Back when he was 20 years old in 1965, rock star Pete Townshend wrote the line “I hope I die before I get old” into a song, “My Generation,” that launched his band, The Who, onto the rock ‘n’ roll scene.

But a unique new study suggests that Townshend may have fallen victim to a common, and mistaken, belief: that the happiest days of people’s lives occur when they’re young.

In fact, the study finds, both young people and older people think that young people are happier than older people—when in fact research has shown the opposite. And while both older and younger adults tend to equate old age with unhappiness for other people, individuals tend to think they’ll be happier than most in their old age.

In other words, the young songwriter might have thought others of his generation would be miserable in old age. But the opposite is likely to be true: older people “mis-remember” how happy they were as youths, just as youths “mis-predict” how happy (or unhappy) they will be as they age.

The study, performed by VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and University of Michigan researchers, involved more than 540 adults who were either between the ages of 21 and 40, or over age 60. All were asked to rate or predict their own individual happiness at their current age, at age 30 and at age 70, and also to judge how happy most people are at those ages. The results are published in the June issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies, a major research journal in the field of positive psychology.

“Overall, people got it wrong, believing that most people become less happy as they age, when in fact this study and others have shown that people tend to become happier over time,” says lead author Heather Lacey, Ph.D., a VA postdoctoral fellow and member of the U-M Medical School’s Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine. “Not only do younger people believe that older people are less happy, but older people believe they and others must have been happier ‘back then.’ Neither belief is accurate.”

The findings have implications for understanding young people’s decisions about habits—such as smoking or saving money—that might affect their health or finances later in life. They also may help explain the fear of aging that drives middle-aged people to “midlife crisis” behavior in a vain attempt to slow their own aging.

Stereotypes about aging abound in our society, Lacey says, and affect the way older people are treated as well as the public policies that affect them.

That’s why research on the beliefs that fuel those one-size-fits-all depictions of older people is important, she explains. The study is one of the first ever to examine the ability of individuals to remember or predict happiness over the lifespan. Most studies of happiness have focused on people with chronic illness, disabilities or other major life challenges, or have taken “snapshots” of current happiness among older people.

The senior author of the new paper, Peter Ubel, M.D., has conducted several of these studies, and has found that ill people are often surprisingly happy, sometimes just as happy as healthy people. This suggests an adaptability or resilience in the face of their medical problems. Ubel is the director of the Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine, an advisor to the RWJ Clinical Scholars Program, and author of You’re Stronger Than You Think: Tapping the Secrets of Emotionally Resilient People.

“People often believe that happiness is a matter of circumstance, that if something good happens, they will experience long-lasting happiness, or if something bad happens, they will experience long-term misery,” he says. “But instead, people’s happiness results more from their underlying emotional resources—resources that appear to grow with age. People get better at managing life’s ups and downs, and the result is that as they age, they become happier—even though their objective circumstances, such as their health, decline.”

Lacey adds, “It’s not that people overestimate their happiness, but rather that they learn how to value life from adversities like being sick. What the sick learn from being sick, the rest of us come to over time.” The new study, she explains, sprang from a desire to see whether the experience that comes with advancing age affects attitudes and predictions about aging.