Thomas Cole’s journey—and mine
Karl is forty-five years old. He is a successful professional who works with a nonprofit organization in a major American city. He has a PhD, two kids, and an okay, though not perfect, marriage. He is friendly, personable, approachable. Mostly, he is pleased with the way his life has turned out. Middle height, brown hair, not someone you would notice on the street, except maybe for his partiality to skinny-brim fedoras. A nice guy.
Like a lot of people, he got off to an exciting start in his twenties. Finished graduate school. Moved to New York City, a whirlwind for a Midwestern boy. Wild, free, energetic are words he uses to recall that period. “Staying out all night. Getting laid left and right.”
His thirties brought responsibility, then predictability. Graduate school ended, the search for a job began; he split painfully with a bohemian, fascinating, mercurial girlfriend. “It was the end of an era.” His next girlfriend was more sober, solid. At age thirty-three, Karl had a good job at a government agency; at thirty-four, he married; at thirty-six, they had their first child, and a second followed when he was thirty-nine. After his twenties, responsibility was a jolt, but he adjusted well: “For a long time I embraced it. It was kind of fun feeling like a grown-up doing the things I was supposed to do.”
But then the complexion of his life began to change. Not the external circumstances: everything was going well. Something else seemed wrong. That story about being a grown-up, hitting all the marks: “After a while it ceases to be very persuasive, and you begin to say, ‘Oh, man, all this is, it’s fuckin’ work.’”
Karl didn’t have time for a midlife crisis; by the age of forty he had two young kids and a brand-new baby. “The circumstances sort of pushed off whatever reckoning I’d have to do.” But only temporarily. “It felt like my life was for the most part either going to a job where I was increasingly unsatisfied, or it was going home and changing diapers and doing more work.” He applied for higher-up, managerial jobs. Then he switched jobs altogether, leaving the government to launch a new project at a nonprofit. Giving up tenure at one of the world’s few really secure employers was a risk, but he felt he needed change. “It’s helped a bit. But quite frankly I think what I’d really love to do is take off to someplace in Europe for a while by myself.” He won’t run away, of course; he’s not the type. “It’s been more of a grabbing freedom at the margins.”
Karl isn’t depressed, at least not in any clinical or medical sense. He is a vibrant, fully functional individual who is, in many ways that count, living his dream. No, not depressed: dissatisfied. And dissatisfied about being dissatisfied. And, he says, scared.
For this book, I gave scores of people a questionnaire about their satisfaction in life, both in the present and at earlier ages. I asked them to rate their life satisfaction in each decade of life on a scale of zero to ten, and I also asked for a few words or phrases to describe each decade. Karl described his forties with the words confused, searching, scared.
I ask him: “Why ‘scared’?” He pauses, draws breath. What he’s going through makes no sense. If his life were rotten, he would understand. But he has the things he wanted. He has more than he wanted, or more than he thought he wanted. “Am I losing my mind? How am I going to get out of this? The feeling of being lost, for a type-A, overtly successful, highly intelligent human being—to find yourself completely at sea, and not knowing where port is, and whether you’re going to get there…” He trails off.
I ask if he has considered going the medical route: therapy, medication? That might be necessary or valuable at some point, he replies, but it doesn’t feel relevant now. Especially not the pharmaceutical route. I think I understand why: when I talk to Karl, I see no mental illness or instability or dysfunction. The disease model doesn’t seem to fit.
“Whom do you talk to about all this?” Another pause. “I have one dear friend who I’ve brought it up with. Otherwise, nobody. You.”
“Not your wife?”
“I don’t know how much she would actually get it.” Besides, he’d risk triggering alarm and disruption. “It would be a shitstorm.”
“Friends?”
“It feels conceited to bring it up with them. I come from a pretty humble background in Pennsylvania. They’d just kind of look at me and say, ‘Jesus, you’ve got it all. What are you bitching about?’ I know people who’ve got cancer in their families.” Midlife crisis “is almost a punch line. Who wants to bring it up and feel like you’re walking into a joke? And it’s also fundamentally so irrational. Am I hungry? No. I have fine clothes on my back; a beautiful office; way more freedom than almost anyone who has a job has. Beautiful home. Good health. So what the hell am I complaining about?”
In the sentence that begins, “I’m dissatisfied with my life right now because,” there is nothing after the because.
* * *
Dominic is a little older than Karl: fifty, rather than forty-five. Other than that, the two have a lot in common. They work in related fields, travel in overlapping social circles, and are acquainted professionally. They share salt-of-the-earth backgrounds: Dominic grew up on a rural farm. They both had exciting, eventful twenties, though Dominic’s were not as bohemian as Karl’s. Dominic married young, then took degrees from two of the world’s most prestigious institutions (one abroad), then worked in Congress.
Dominic’s thirties, like Karl’s, brought responsibility and predictability. He describes that period as goal-oriented, though unlike Karl he landed in a role he actively disliked. He established himself in a high-pressure business job, one which provided a handsome salary, but at the cost of seventy-hour workweeks. “I had a growing sense of disconnect between the goals that were in front of me and what I felt was inspiring or valuable to me. I was working very hard and was adept at what I was doing but didn’t feel good about myself for doing it.”
Things came to a head for Dominic soon after he turned forty. He realized he would not make partner without taking on assignments that were even less to his liking. So, much as Karl did in his early forties, he made a jump into the nonprofit world. “I loved the clients, I loved the colleagues; the cynicism that had built up in me completely dissipated.” Professionally, he was in a good place.
Still, he felt discontent. “In my forties, my wife and I grappled with, Well, things haven’t turned out the way we expected. I realized that my professional prospects—and so much of my identity was wrapped up in my work—likely aren’t going to change. By any measure I was successful, and there weren’t any particular ambitions I had that weren’t being fulfilled. But I began to observe that I just had a friend win a MacArthur Award, and a friend who was confirmed as a federal judge. You start to see peers assume positions and you realize that my career pathway is not going to lead me to that kind of outcome. There was in the early forties some gnashing of teeth over that.”
When I ask Dominic to characterize his forties, he uses the adjective stressed and rates his life satisfaction as relatively low. But when I ask him to characterize his life right now, at fifty, he uses the word appreciative and rates his life satisfaction at nine out of a possible ten.
“Why?” I ask.
“In the late forties there was kind of a reappreciation of what I had done and where I was.” He found himself circling back to the values of his childhood on the farm, values centered on sturdy relationships and worthwhile work. “I came to appreciate that the life or the marriage or the employment are just such incredible assets. Try as I might have, I haven’t fully screwed those up.”
“Yes,” I say. “But why? What brought about your rebirth of gratitude?”
“That’s a good question. I think there’s a spiritual dimension to it. A spiritual maturity. Less of a self-centered or self-absorbed outlook on life. I came to appreciate that the best is the enemy of the good. There was an awareness that the life I had didn’t play out exactly as I imagined, but was still pretty good. I would describe it as a sense of feeling gratitude for where we’re at.
“What’s interesting is that by any objective measure things haven’t changed all that much. We’re dealing with a lot of the same issues. Our kids are facing some real challenges. I like my work, but there are aspects that don’t speak to me as much as prior forms of employment. So it’s not that I find myself in new external circumstances. I don’t know if it’s a combination of expecting less or appreciating more.”
He reflects for a moment, then adds: “I guess I’m expecting less and appreciating more.”
Dominic doesn’t know precisely what changed to make him feel more grateful. He only knows that his nagging sense of disappointment is diminishing. The closest he comes to an explanation is to venture that, after years of defining accomplishment in the language of competition, achievement, and keeping score, he is opening up to new sources of satisfaction.
“Like what?” I ask.
The other day, he was home with his eleven-year-old daughter, working on his laptop and trying to focus on the task at hand, when she announced she wanted to paint his toenails. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want painted toenails.’” And then, after a moment, he heard himself, somewhat to his own surprise, change his mind. “So right now, I’m going around with a smiley face on my big toenail.”
Like that.
* * *
In November 1828, almost two centuries before my conversations with Karl and Dominic, a young man of twenty-seven, on the cusp of a storied career as the founding father of American landscape painting, wrote to a friend about his own dissatisfaction. Having come out of nowhere from a working-class background, Thomas Cole was experiencing the first flush of lifelong success; he had already been elected a founding member of the National Academy of Design. But he wanted to be, he wrote, more than just a painter of leaves and pretty scenes. He hoped to make paintings that teach: “I still look forward with hope to the time when I shall be able to produce pictures that shall affect the mind of the beholder like the works of a great poet—that shall elevate the imagination and produce a happy moral effect.”
In 1839, in his late thirties, Cole received a commission for a series of four paintings called The Voyage of Life. “I work at it ‘con amore,’” he wrote, “and hope to make it the finest work I have executed.” His hopes were not disappointed. First exhibited in 1840, The Voyage of Life was greeted with critical and public acclaim, proving to be Cole’s most popular and durable work and more than fulfilling his ambition to tell elevating stories with art.
The paintings are imposingly large; including their frames, they are more than seven feet long and five feet high. That alone is enough to ensure they make an impression. They are also meticulously detailed. Inspect them up close and the trees seem to sprout real leaves, the rocks real crags. The palette is rich, almost phantasmagorical, and the contrasts bold. Years before the magic of computer-generated graphics and video games, Cole created an immersive otherworld. In it, he tells a story.
The voyage begins, in the first painting, with Childhood. The scene here is all promise, all joy. From a craggy cave at the left of the picture, a river emerges. On it glides a gilded boat, whose passenger is a joyful baby, delighted at having materialized from the darkness of preexistence into an Eden of dawning sensation. Behind the child in the boat, holding the tiller and hovering within close reach, like an attentive parent, stands the traveler’s guardian angel. Infancy, for Cole, is a time of untroubled security and innocent wonder. The prow of the boat is decorated with the figurehead of a golden angel, holding up before her an hourglass. The voyage, we are reminded, is through time.
The second painting, Youth, is the lightest, the airiest, the loveliest of the four, a scene of magical beauty and charm. The river is placid, the banks lush with grass and trees, the sky azure and cloudless. The infant is now a young man in the first blush of adulthood, his cheeks still smooth. Now he steers the boat himself, but his guardian angel stands behind him on the bank nearby, unseen but in easy hailing distance, gesturing ahead encouragingly.
Ahead—there, beckoning to the Voyager—is the proverbial castle in the sky, “a cloudy pile of Architecture,” as Cole describes it (in his own commentary on the paintings), “an air-built Castle, that rises dome above dome in the far-off blue sky.” The celestial Taj Mahal soars like a cumulus formation, and the Voyager reaches eagerly toward it. We, however, from our elevation above ground level, can see what the Voyager cannot. The river will turn away from the castle, bearing the boat sharply off toward rough waters and rocks faintly visible through trees in the distance. The way to the castle is not by river at all, but instead along a winding dirt path that disappears into hazy hills on the horizon: the road not taken. Perhaps the Voyager fails to notice the side road, or perhaps he pauses to wonder where it might lead; but his fate belongs to the river and the hourglass. “The gorgeous cloud-built palace,” Cole says in his description, “whose glorious domes seem yet but half revealed to the eye, growing more and more lofty as we gaze, is emblematic of the daydreams of youth, its aspirations after glory and fame: and the dimly seen path would intimate that Youth, in its impetuous career, is forgetful that it is embarked on the Stream of Life, and that its current sweeps along with resistless force.…”
Youth is a masterpiece of both draftsmanship and storytelling, perhaps the greatest depiction in Western visual art of the boundless expectations of early adulthood (though it has a literary rival in Joseph Conrad’s short story “Youth”). The air in the painting vibrates with hope and aspiration. In Manhood, the third of the four, the scene and story are very different. The Voyager is now (as Cole tells us) “a man of middle age,” appearing to modern eyes to be perhaps in his early forties, bearded, and robust, but holding his hands clasped before him as if in supplication. The colors, the clouds, and the horizon all are dark. “Storm and cloud enshroud a rugged and dreary landscape. Bare, impending precipices rise in the lurid light. The swollen stream rushes furiously down a dark ravine, whirling and foaming in its wild career, and speeding toward the Ocean, which is dimly seen through the mist and falling rain. The boat is there plunging amid the turbulent waters.” Its rudder has broken off; the Voyager cannot steer and must trust his fate to the guardian angel. But the angel, though still attentive, now looks on from behind and afar, gazing down through the clouds. The seraphic figure is out of the Voyager’s sight and too distant to hail in any case. For all the Voyager can tell, he is on his own. His clasped hands pray for deliverance, but his eyes show fear.
“Trouble is characteristic of the period of Manhood,” Cole tells us. “In childhood, there is no carking care: in youth, no despairing thought. It is only when experience has taught us the realities of the world, that we lift from our eyes the golden veil of early life; that we feel deep and abiding sorrow: and in the Picture, the gloomy, eclipse-like tone, the conflicting elements, the trees riven by tempest, are the allegory.…” At our elevation we can see calm oceanic waters beyond, but the Voyager can catch only fitful glimpses of peace, and the river bears him not there but toward implacable rapids and what appear to be the watery mists of a cataract.
The fourth and last painting of the series, Old Age, is also dark in hue, but its tone is again very different. The sky is dark but the storm is clearing; heavenly light breaks through. The boat, battered and broken, has lost both its figurehead and its helm; rudder and hourglass alike are gone. Neither marking time nor setting course is now necessary, for the boat has emerged from sharp crags at the mouth of the river into calm waters of a boundless ocean. The Voyager is balding and white-bearded, as battered as his vessel. He sits in the boat as the infant did, rather than standing like the youth and middle-aged man. His aspect, seen in left profile, is calm, expressing neither joy nor wonder nor fear; his hands are raised in a gesture of greeting—for before him, now nearby and in full view, the guardian angel beckons him heavenward. “Directed by the Guardian Spirit, who thus far has accompanied him unseen, the Voyager, now an old man, looks upward to an opening in the clouds, from whence a glorious light bursts forth; and angels are seen descending the cloudy steps, as if to welcome him to the Haven of Immortal Life. The stream of life has now reached the Ocean to which all life is tending.”
These, then, are the ages of man. Life begins and ends with happiness, but with happiness of two very different kinds, the first joyful and excitable, the latter calm and resigned. The youth and old man both see hopeful apparitions, but whereas the youth sees castles in the sky, the elder sees a beckoning angel. The middle-aged man, by contrast, sees only savage rocks and turbulent waters.
Soon after Cole painted his splendid quadriptych, the paintings were purchased and locked in a private collection, much to the ambitious artist’s disappointment. Eager to display them, in 1842 he painted a second set, almost identical to the first. They were exhibited repeatedly and to great effect. Cole, meanwhile, converted to Anglicanism and turned more explicitly to religious themes in his work. Alas, his life was fated to be short, ending with a case of pleurisy in 1848, when he was only forty-seven. His reputation, burnished both by his landscapes and his allegories, was such that a posthumous retrospective of his work in 1848 drew nearly half a million attendees in New York City, at the time equivalent to half the city’s population. Later, the second Voyage set disappeared into private hands, eventually resurfacing to be displayed at a hospital, where it was poorly looked after. In 1916, an unnamed “eminent artist” called for all four paintings to be bought, relined, cleaned, reframed, “then properly established in some gallery by themselves, either at the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the National in Washington.”
So they would be. In 1971 the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., acquired the 1842 Voyage set, there to be encountered by millions, one of whom was me.
* * *
It is winter of 1980. I am a college sophomore on break, spending a few days in Washington. Sightseeing with a friend, I am visiting the National Gallery for the first time. In a passageway between buildings, hung there temporarily while renovations are under way, Thomas Cole’s four Voyage paintings loom into view. Like so many people, I’m stopped first by the sheer size of the paintings, then am captured by the immediacy of their storytelling. Only one other painting, a landscape by Rembrandt, would remain in my memory of that day. I linger a long time with Cole’s vision. I wonder if their story will be my story.
The swaddled innocence of Cole’s Childhood certainly rings true. So do the sky-high aspirations of Youth. Almost twenty years old myself, standing on the foothills of maturity, I want to make a mark on the world, though I have no settled ambitions. I’ve recently joined the college newspaper, having given up, for lack of talent, the notion of being a musician. I love reading and writing, so perhaps the future points that way? But it is hard to be a writer, and I imagine I am more likely to wind up as a lawyer, like my father, if only because that path is so well marked. I feel myself reaching upward for—well, for something, though I don’t yet know what. Youth is a story about high hopes and great expectations, and mine are high enough and great enough. As for the calm of Old Age, it seems plausible, but too far in the future to interest me.
Manhood, too, seems far away, but in some respects all too close. Even at the young age of almost twenty, I was well aware that middle age can be difficult. My father was overworked and overstressed, my mother suffered from depression, and their marriage broke up when I was twelve, leaving my father to raise three kids on his own. One day, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I learned that my father, then in his mid-forties, had lost his anchor client and half his law practice. If there was a moment when I left the coddled world of Cole’s Childhood, that was it. A few years later, gazing upon Manhood, I see my father in the skiff, beset by white water and rocks as he tries to raise a shattered family and rebuild a broken business, all on his own and with no tiller or guardian angel.
Manhood, I suppose, does not show the way my life will go. There are sure to be crises and difficulties, true. I will encounter disappointment and failure. Perhaps there will be challenges as daunting as my father’s. But, at age twenty, I assume that anywhere will be better than here. As of now, I have no firm goals, no money, no love life (or prospect of one), no conspicuous talent, just my studies and a summer job. Not that day at the National Gallery, perhaps, but around that time, I make a vow to remember where I started and appreciate any blessings that come my way. I am certain I will accomplish something worthwhile by middle age, and, of course, I will feel thankful.
* * *
Twenty eventful years pass. I’m about to be forty and my accomplishments have exceeded my hopes. I’m seventeen years into a successful career as a journalist. Three years into my first successful romantic relationship. Yet, on a cold February day in Washington, D.C., I am writing a troubled diary entry.
I am counting blessings this morning, in a particular sense. I’ve been puzzled about the turbulent restlessness I’ve been carrying around all the time lately, the sense that my life is disappointing and that I am disappointing. I live too safely, I am not Mozart, I lack an audience, I am stuck at National Journal, etc., etc., all day long, though the volume gets louder and softer depending on my mood.
This morning, lying in bed, I did a little enumerating.
When I was twenty, I dreamed of being a writer or public intellectual, but assumed I would end up a lawyer. I thought I would be fortunate to be published just once in a major magazine. Today I have been published in many of the major publications and have routine access to them and have graced their covers. I have as friends and acquaintances many of the best nonfiction writers of my generation. I am anthologized in The Norton Reader!
When I was twenty, I loathed my body, and a girl who saw it remarked that I looked like I had just escaped from Auschwitz. I weighed probably 112 pounds, or 116. Today I weigh 136 or 138 and the difference is all muscle.
When I was twenty, I had no money of my own. Today I have $600,000, including this condo. It is possible that I’ll be worth a million in a few years.
When I was twenty, I believed that romance and love and sex were impossible for me; I thought there was no one to kiss. Today I am in my fourth year with a man I love, and I have forgotten what it is like to be sexually tortured.
I tend to go around flaying myself for not working hard enough, not accomplishing what I might. I wonder why I seem not to digest, emotionally, what is obvious about the list I just wrote: accomplishing any one of those things in twenty years is unusual and worthy of pride. To accomplish all of them! And still to be young! It strikes me as a crime to be blasé about these changes. Why don’t I walk around filled with fulfillment?
I’m puzzled. Just the previous month, I had visited my alma mater as a guest speaker, fulfilling yet another of the promissory notes I had written to myself at age twenty. “This trip has been great for my complexes,” I wrote in my journal. “I am treated like a VIP and even with a certain amount of awe. People want to know How I Got Here. I still feel like young-little-aspiring-me, and suddenly I am on the other side of the mountain. I recall so vividly being here and dreaming of having even one article in a major publication. In truth, the place I always yearned to get to is: here.”
Why don’t I walk around bursting with fulfillment? I was entering the trough of the happiness curve.
* * *
I couldn’t have known that in midlife it is perfectly natural to feel dissatisfied without having anything to be dissatisfied about. I couldn’t have known I was entering an adjustment period that occurs not only in humans but in chimps and orangutans, too. In 2000, when I turned forty, evidence of what scholars call the U-shaped life-satisfaction curve had only just begun to surface. The first major study documenting the phenomenon was four years in the future.
To an extent, the evidence confirms what we all know: the middle years of adult life are often the most restless, stressed, and unhappy. Of course, midlife stress can come from the burdens of demanding jobs and jammed schedules and teenaged kids and aging parents. But here is where the evidence and the conventional wisdom part ways: the midlife dip in happiness shows up even after factoring out the stresses and strains and ups and downs of life. In fact, it shows up especially after factoring out the stresses and strains and ups and downs of life. The passage of time, by itself, affects how satisfied and grateful we feel—or, more precisely, how easy it is to feel satisfied and grateful. Young adulthood tends to be a period of natural excitement and, in the phrase Dickens made famous, great expectations, along with great uncertainty. Together, those feelings make for life satisfaction that can be high but also volatile and precarious. What comes next is a period of consolidation and achievement, but also of growing disappointment and declining optimism. The downturn is gradual, gentle, but cumulative, and it sinks into a trough, a frequently years-long slump when instead of savoring our accomplishments we question and reject them, feeling least fulfilled just when we have most cause for satisfaction. Under the surface, though, the trough is really a turn, a change of emotional direction. Almost imperceptibly, our values shift, our expectations recalibrate, our brains reorganize, all in ways that lead to an upturn in late middle age and then to surprising happiness in late adulthood.
Everything I just said is true on average, not for every person. As I will say often in this book, your mileage may vary. But the pattern applied to me, and with a vengeance. At age forty-five, I had published books, won journalism prizes, been republished in anthologies, done more speeches and media appearances than I could count: all the hallmarks of success in my chosen profession. My health was good, my finances solid; my relationship with the man I would eventually marry was strong and getting stronger. Objectively, I had nothing, as in zero, to complain about. Chase them away as I might, however, preoccupations pestered me about what I had not accomplished. Mornings were worst, before the day brought its distractions. As soon as my eyes snapped open, a voice in my head carped at me. I’m wasting my life … I haven’t done anything worthwhile in years … I need to move somewhere else, do something else, anything … How come I’m not on the Sunday talk shows? How come I’m not in charge of something, like a business?
What especially puzzled me was that many of my buzzing self-condemnations were manifestly absurd. For example, appearing on Sunday talk shows and running a business were never things I had aspired to do. It was as if, having met so many of my own goals, some perverse organ of my brain was busy creating new, spurious ones. In the same fashion, try as I might, I could not suppress comparisons of myself with others. How come I’m not doing what he or she is doing? Look where she is, and look where I am. Pathetic! Dissatisfaction would alight on any convenient cause, real or invented. I began to think of it as a parasitic wasp that had lodged itself in my brain and was feeding on discontent it created.
Keenly aware of how elated and grateful the twenty-year-old me would have been to accomplish even part of what the forty-five-year-old me had done, I felt ashamed of my ingratitude and embarrassed by my dissatisfaction. I didn’t tell my husband about it. I tried not to talk about it at all. “Prozac,” said one of the few friends I did consult. But I felt dissatisfied, not depressed, and there is a difference. Getting out of bed, enjoying enjoyable things, working hard, or savoring music or making love or entertaining friends: all of those pleasures remained.
Of course, I was aware of the concept of midlife crisis, but in my case the concept did not seem to fit. A crisis, by definition, would be dramatic. It would come rapidly to a head, push other matters aside, and demand an urgent response. According to the stereotype, midlife crisis would impel me to behave disruptively or self-indulgently. None of those descriptions fit me. I fantasized about quitting my magazine job, now, today, without having made other plans or even having other ideas, but I never acted rashly. If anything, I was risk averse. Instead, I hunkered down. As months turned into years and forty became forty-five and then forty-six and forty-seven, I came to think that my dissatisfaction was the very opposite of a crisis. I thought it was permanent. It was just something I would have to live with: the new normal.
Believing that I could soldier on and nothing dramatic would happen was reassuring in some respects, but it raised an unsettling prospect. What if I had become a chronically dissatisfied person? Gradually, my morale sank. It dawned upon me that I was becoming someone I didn’t like. I began to feel defined by my ingratitude.
And then, seemingly as inexplicably as it had descended, the fog began to lift. The timing was strange, to say the least. When I was in my late forties, my mother died. My father, to whom I was much closer, contracted a vicious neurological syndrome, and he died, too. When I was fifty, my magazine job went away, a victim of the economic mayhem in America’s newsrooms. I decided to launch a start-up, an idea market for writers, but it failed. So I there I was, finally, in the rapids, being hurled against the crags of middle age. And yet that voice in my head became ever so slightly less loud and insistent, then noticeably so. My obsessive habit of comparing myself with others, always to my own disadvantage, diminished. The change was so subtle, so gradual, that I was hesitant to acknowledge it, for fear it would prove illusory or fleeting. Still, whatever part of me was busy inventing causes for dissatisfaction seemed to be quieting down.
I couldn’t have known then what I know now. Like Cole’s middle-aged Voyager, I was at the mercy of time.
* * *
That middle age can be hard is not news. Thomas Cole obviously knew it. Dante knew it in the early fourteenth century. Not coincidentally, his visit to hell begins in middle age:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
Dante’s metaphor is a dark forest, not so different from Cole’s midlife rapids (likewise “savage, rough, and stern”). As brilliant as Cole and Dante both were, however, there is a lot they didn’t know about age and happiness. In these pages, I retrace the route of Thomas Cole’s Voyager, but with the aid of a map provided by recent discoveries in economics, psychology, and neurobiology. The book is about new light being cast on happiness by the dismal science, economics. It is about the frequently perverse behavior of life satisfaction, which has less to do with our material circumstances and accomplishments than we imagine. It is about the serendipity which led maverick economists to discover that age, independent of other things going on, makes contentment harder to come by in midlife. It is about the slow-motion emotional reboot which makes the years after midlife surprisingly satisfying, and why evolution might wire us to reboot. It is about the dawn of a whole new stage of adult development which is already starting to reshape the way we think about retirement, education, and human potential.
Along the way, I will introduce a young economist who discovered a negative feedback loop that manufactures midlife unhappiness without apparent cause. I’ll introduce psychologists and neuroscientists who are bringing to light the surprising payoffs, personal and social, awaiting on the far side of the slump. I’ll introduce a psychiatrist and a sociologist and others who are building a new science of wisdom and showing how aging equips us to be happier and kinder, even as our bodies get frailer. I’ll introduce social thinkers and reformers who are exploring and mapping a whole new stage of adult development.
If what those and other researchers are learning is correct, some adjustments are in order. We need to understand why a lot of what we believe about aging and happiness is wrong. We need to understand why midlife dissatisfaction is, for the large majority of people, not a “crisis,” but a natural and healthy transition. With that understanding, we can become smarter about coping with the happiness curve, in ways which I’ll illustrate. Although we can’t think our way around the trough, we can think our way through it.
We can help others through it, too. I spent years exploring the science of the happiness curve and the evidence on age and happiness, but I did not understand the story until I realized that it is not a story about me. Or about you. It is about us. The curve seems to be imprinted on us as a way to repurpose us for a changing role in society as we age, a role that is less about ambition and competition, and more about connection and compassion.
How to cope with the happiness curve is also a social story, because coping is not something we can do very well alone, in the privacy of our heads. We need society’s help. Society needs to reeducate itself about middle age and old age, abandoning clichés about red sports cars and sad, cranky decrepitude. It needs to offer support and outreach rather than shame and isolation to those who are in the midlife trough.
If you are in the trough, or know someone who is, I have no magic cures (there are none), but I do have some practical suggestions, which you’ll find in the last couple of chapters. I also have some heartening news:
First, midlife slump (not “crisis”!) is completely normal and natural. Like teething or adolescence, it is a healthy if sometimes painful transition, and it serves a purpose by equipping you for a new stage of life. You may feel dissatisfied, but you don’t need to feel too worried about feeling dissatisfied.
Second, the post-midlife upturn is no mere transient change in mood: it is a change in our values and sources of satisfaction, a change in who we are. It often brings unexpected contentment that extends into old age and, yes, even into frailty and illness.
Third, by extending our life spans, modern medicine and public health have already added more than a decade to the upturn, and they will add more years in the future. We are in the process of adding perhaps two decades to the most satisfying and pro-social period of life. Some sociologists call this new stage of life encore adulthood. Whatever you call it, it is a gift the likes of which mankind has never known before.
Understanding and exploiting the gift require rethinking patterns of life that our parents and grandparents (and their parents and grandparents) took for granted and built into their worlds, and into ours. Fortunately, the knowledge we need is advancing quickly. It begins with the perverse logic, or illogic, of human happiness.