There is a finding in the research on subjective wellbeing that surprises most people who hear it for the first time. The years adults in their seventies look back on as the happiest are not, in most cases, the obvious candidates. They are not the years of falling in love or starting careers or holding the new baby. They are usually the ordinary middle years that, at the time, felt like routine and obligation, and that the people living through them frequently described as forgettable while they were happening.
There is a converging body of research that helps explain this. Some of it is about how contemporaneous happiness actually varies across the lifespan, in ways that look different from what younger people assume. Some of it is about how older people remember the past, and how the remembering differs from how the years were lived. And some of it is about what people in their seventies say, in their own words, when they are asked which years they wish they had appreciated more while they were inside them.
We are writers and parents, not researchers in the psychology of aging. What follows is a reading of the research on subjective wellbeing across the lifespan, not life advice. The article describes a pattern in the empirical literature; it does not prescribe how anyone should feel about the years they are currently living.
What the lifespan research shows
The most widely cited empirical work on this comes from the economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald. Their 2008 paper in Social Science & Medicine, “Is Well-Being U-Shaped Over the Life Cycle?”, drew on data from roughly 500,000 randomly sampled Americans and West Europeans. The pattern they found, controlling for cohort effects, income, marriage, and other factors, was a U-shape. Self-reported happiness was higher in young adulthood, dropped to a minimum somewhere in the early to mid-40s, and rose again into the late 50s, 60s, and 70s.
The finding has been replicated and extended in subsequent work, including Blanchflower’s later cross-national research showing the U-shape across more than a hundred countries. It is one of the more robust patterns in the empirical literature on subjective wellbeing, though some researchers have argued the U-shape is partly an artifact of how control variables are handled in the regressions. The basic shape, however, has held across most of the careful re-analyses.
The trough, in the data, is the middle stretch.
What this suggests is that, contrary to the cultural assumption that happiness declines with age, contemporaneous self-reported happiness in many older adults is higher than it was when they were in their 40s. The years that felt hardest while they were being lived were, by the measure these surveys use, hardest.
The paradox of the middle years
This sits alongside a second finding that is harder to capture in survey data. When older adults are asked which years they remember as the happiest, the answers are surprisingly consistent across cultures and demographic groups. The years most often named are, in many cases, the same ones the U-shape identifies as the trough.
The Cornell gerontologist Karl Pillemer’s Legacy Project, which interviewed over 1,200 Americans aged 65 and older for his book 30 Lessons for Living, documented this directly. When asked which years they would want to relive, his respondents frequently pointed to the ordinary stretches in their thirties, forties, and fifties. The Sunday afternoons. The school years of the children. The early decades of long marriages. The interviewees often said, in some version, that they had not realized at the time what they had.
What makes this striking is that these are, on average, the same years the Blanchflower and Oswald U-shape identifies as the lowest contemporaneous happiness across the lifespan. The years that felt the hardest while they were happening are, in retrospect, often the years that older people most want back.
Why retrospect is kinder than the present
There are several plausible explanations for the gap.
One is that the middle years are typically dense with the kind of stable, ordinary, undramatic experience that contemporaneous happiness measures underweight. The Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen and colleagues have documented what they call the positivity effect in older adults’ memory. Older adults are more likely than younger adults to remember the past in a positive light, particularly in the context of meaningful relationships. The same Tuesday evenings that felt grinding while they were being lived become, in retrospect, the texture of a life.
Another is that the middle years are usually when the most quietly important things happen, even when they feel like the least interesting things happening. The children growing up. The marriages settling into their long shape. The friendships deepening. The career producing whatever it was going to produce. These are not the years that look dramatic in a memoir. They are often the years that, by the time the person is in their seventies, turn out to have contained what mattered.
And the gap may be partly about the comparison available to the seventy-year-old that was not available to the forty-three-year-old. In late life, the long view is available. The middle years can be seen against a complete arc. The person living through their forties is, in many cases, comparing the present to an imagined better future. The person in their seventies is comparing it to nothing at all, just remembering it for what it was.
What this might mean for the reader currently in the trough
The research is not, in any clean sense, a prescription. It does not say that anyone currently in the dense middle years should feel grateful or stop wishing for the things they are wishing for. The U-shape is real. The trough is real. The reasons the middle years feel hard while they are happening are also real, and not, in the research, a sign of personal failure.
What the research does suggest is that the assessment the reader’s seventy-year-old self is likely to make of these years is probably going to be different from the assessment the current self is making. The years that feel forgettable are often the ones the older self remembers most clearly. This is not, in itself, a comfort. It is information about how the assessment tends to evolve.
Most cultural conversations about happiness assume the assessment a person makes at any given age is the assessment that matters. The lifespan research suggests the assessments shift, in fairly predictable ways, across decades. The middle years are not, in most of the data, the unhappiest years of a life so much as the years in which the gap between contemporaneous experience and eventual memory tends to be the widest.
