The happiness curve has a purpose, and it’s social
In early 2015, the world’s best and most successful blogger shut down his website and walked away. He was fifty-one.
Andrew Sullivan was thirty-seven when he began The Daily Dish, as he called his blog. The form, then, was still new. People were already creating self-published journals online, mixing opinion with news items and links and occasionally the odd bit of reporting (and often it was odd). Some prominent journalists had taken up the form. But Sullivan took it to the next level. He had graduated from Oxford University, earned a PhD from Harvard, launched a career in journalism, and become editor of The New Republic, one of Washington’s most influential publications—all before the age of thirty. Even by the standards of Washington wunderkinds, he was a star. Blogging, though, tantalized him with an opportunity to reinvent himself and his profession. Writing in his own voice, without intermediation, he could connect directly to readers, building not just an audience but a community, thereby both exploiting and advancing an infant medium whose potential seemed boundless.
He succeeded. The Dish became a must-read for people in the United States and around the world. It pioneered a business model, managing to operate in the black at a time when traditional journalism was plunging deep into the red. It built a fiercely loyal following. And then Sullivan stopped.
A few months later, I asked him why he had walked away. He cited the mental and physical strain of running a business, of nonstop writing and editing and emailing and keeping up: “The sheer number of people you have to be in contact with. The sheer amount of data you’re processing.” He cited factors in his personal life. He cited, in other words, the stresses that can and do lead successful people to experience burnout in midlife.
But Sullivan wasn’t just tired. The river had turned. His values had changed, and his blogging work no longer aligned with them. “I was so absorbed in virtual reality,” he told me, “that I had neglected actual reality, the friends I cared about, the family I love.”
I asked about the influence and attention he was abandoning. After all, as he himself reminded me, walking away at the peak of success is “just not something one does in America.” He replied in terms that would not have surprised Laura Carstensen. “In my forties, I felt the attenuation of my ambition.” Meaning what? “It means that the worldly ambitions that I might have had, I increasingly see as distractions from the life I really want to live.”
I pressed him. What if people say, What ever happened to Andrew Sullivan? “It doesn’t bother me. I’m hardly free of ambition, vanity, or ego. But compared to my mid-twenties, it’s drastically reduced.”
I asked what he might do next. “I don’t know where I’ll be,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure I won’t be chasing after glittering prizes. And that, I think, will make me happy.”
I first met Sullivan when he was twenty-eight years old. By the time he closed the Dish, we had known each other for more than two decades. It was true: I had never seen him so happy.
Elliott Jaques, introducing the concept of midlife crisis in 1965, regarded it as a time of danger, but also of opportunity. “It is essentially a period of purgatory—of anguish and depression,” he wrote. But it can also bring commensurate rewards. “The sense of life’s continuity may be strengthened. The gain is in the deepening of awareness, understanding, and self-realization. Genuine values can be cultivated—of wisdom, fortitude and courage, deeper capacity for love and affection and human insight, and hopefulness and enjoyment.” He described midlife crisis as a “process of transition [that] runs on for some years.” Although, in researching this book, I have come to believe that Jaques got some important things wrong (beginning with the use of the word crisis for something that is usually gradual and undramatic), I think his idea of midlife as a transition is right.
As I interviewed people about their midlife transitions, and their lives afterward, I heard reflections like Andrew Sullivan’s again and again, always suggesting a reorientation of personal values away from ambition and toward connection. I came to believe that the feelings and themes I heard add up to more than just a hard-knocks lesson in realism or a random suite of changes in the brain. The transition has a direction: something you could even call a purpose. As we saw in the previous chapter, the upslope of the happiness curve has an emotional direction, which is toward positivity. But it also has a relational direction, which is toward community. In other words, this a social story, although we rarely experience it that way.
* * *
Perhaps the most dramatic example I encountered was Paul. He was fifty, a professor I met not long ago when speaking at a college in New England. I had hardly expected to make an intimate connection with him, because I was there on business and he seemed like an ordinary guy, one of those pleasant people you shake hands with and forget. My ears pricked up, though, when he mentioned that for years he had been a dedicated, even compulsive rock climber—and that he had shattered both legs in separate climbing accidents. I had not met many people whose response to shattering one leg would be to go right on and shatter the other, so I began asking some questions about his life. He decided to trust me with his story, which turned out to be a case study of how the turn in the happiness curve can change the way we see others.
The first couple of decades tell a familiar tale. In his twenties, Paul moved fast. He described his twenties with the words intense, ambitious, immortal. “I got married when I was twenty-four years old to my high school sweetheart. There was this sense that life was this big adventure. I got very invested in outdoor sports. When I started climbing, it wasn’t recreational; it was go big or go home.” In his thirties, after floundering for a while and working odd jobs, he began the professional climb that would lead to his professorship. “It was just a very intense time. I was just kind of running around all the time, putting everything I could into everything I was doing.” He adopted the same take-no-prisoners attitude toward rock climbing. He would set his sights on a semi-impossible route and not rest until he had conquered it, only to start all over again when the next season began. Paul strived to be the perfect climber, the perfect professor, the perfect husband, the perfect father, the perfect soccer coach. Everyone saw him as successful, a winner. But even as he conquered society’s crags, he knew, in his early forties, that something was wrong.
“I started having these weird symptoms. I started being obsessive-compulsive about what other people were saying about me. I started to question my moral center, the foundations of my identity. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I had just gotten tenure. I had a beautiful wife, beautiful children. And yet I was living in this very dark place.”
Unsettled, uncertain, he took a semester off, entered counseling, yet spiraled down. “When you don’t know what’s happening, it takes on a life of its own. I was so worried about other people judging me. I was judging myself. I would sit around the dinner table with my family, hoping to go back to work, but I couldn’t function. I couldn’t be in the room with them without nearly collapsing, mentally. I had to go up to my room, and it literally felt like the walls were caving in on me.
“It was a terrible time. My oldest might have been in sixth or seventh grade. Watching me struggle had a massive impact on his life. He thought his father had his act together. As did all my friends. When they found out I needed to take time off and collect myself, they couldn’t believe it. I remember this profound sense of loneliness that was existentially frightening. I felt I was at the brink of this abyss.”
Was anxiety the problem? Depression? Some of both, Paul replied. Yet the psychiatric jargon didn’t really explain anything. “I think the reason it happened was that I didn’t like myself. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t think of myself as a good person. I’m very driven, but I ended up measuring myself through how others perceive me.” A single poor evaluation by a student, he had felt, was an indictment, a failure.
With psychiatric help, Paul battled his way back. He resumed his life, now trying to be more forgiving of himself. Normalcy returned. But, under the surface, the crisis had primed him for a larger change—a change in values. “There’s a great egocentrism that drove my past,” he said. “What really has changed me is a move from being goal-driven about Paul.”
One of Paul’s fields of study is Native American literature. A former student suggested to Paul that he visit a reservation in South Dakota to explore service-related learning opportunities for his students. He went, for a week. “From the first moment I was there to the moment I left, I felt that every single thing I was doing had more purpose and meaning than anything I’d ever done in my life. It sounds corny; it sounds cliché. But I’m putting a rivet in a socket in the house I’m fixing, and I feel like this rivet has purpose.”
When he returned from South Dakota, he brought home a question: Could he maintain a sense of purpose? Could he weave it into his everyday life? He knew he tends to overdo things, so he had to be careful. “I had to step back and say, Am I romanticizing this? Will I flame out from the intensity? I felt very ashamed of where I’d been for the past forty-seven years. Yes, I was a compassionate and kind teacher; I did as much as I could for my family, though I neglected my family for climbing. But it really triggered in me this sense of obligation to help people who didn’t have what I had. I knew it intellectually the whole time, but to get on the ground, to meet people, and to see other people in nonprofits, incredibly bright and talented people who have given their lives—that, for me, has transformed my life. I began to think about how to make my whole life more purposeful in terms of helping people, particularly these people.”
Today, he spends six weeks a year on reservations in the United States and Central America. He has developed educational programs and an oral history project for Native American communities he works with, and he is on the board of a nonprofit that works with Native Americans. Yes, he still rock climbs, but only a few times a year. Leg-shattering routes no longer tempt him. “Those things are not at the top of my list anymore.”
Listening to his tale, I suspected that the visit to the Sioux reservation, though transformative, was almost incidental. The trigger for his values change might just as easily have been a visit to an orphanage in Vietnam, or a week teaching low-income kids. The real change, of course, was in Paul. So I asked him: “What do you feel happened to you?”
Two things, he said. First, he became better able, finally, to forgive and trust himself, and with that came a sense of mastery, of competence. “You can be forgiving of yourself. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have moments of stress, when I have to sit on the stoop with my wife and say I need to sit back and take a breather. I think what’s increased my life satisfaction is the ability to handle those things, to put those things in perspective. To understand that it’s all going to be okay. Even if things get hairy, I think I have a tool belt now.”
Second, and seemingly even more important: Although Paul will always be intensely goal-oriented, his goals shifted outward, away from what psychologists call egocentricity and toward other-directedness. “In the past, I worked to help people,” Paul said, “but at the end of the day I did that because it was a goal I set for myself. On the reservation, I feel humbled. Yes, you need an ego to work there, to think you might make a dent. But you have to be humble, to listen to people, to try to understand.” In describing how he had changed, he used a phrase which stayed with me because it seemed so apt: he feels “a deeper sense of recognizing other selves.”
Paul’s life satisfaction is high. He rates it at nine on my Cantril Ladder test, higher than the seven of his twenties or the six of his thirties or the five of much of his forties. He finds himself, at fifty, in a world with a narrower time horizon, but a broader people horizon. He finds himself feeling less ambitious, in the conventional sense of ticking off life goals, but more competent. “I’m optimistic about my fifties. If things are good now, with a gathered wisdom of sorts, in the next thirty years or the next one year or however long I have left, I could leave the earth and each of my kids would say, ‘My dad was all right, not because he accomplished X and Y and Z, but because he cared about X and Y and Z.’”
* * *
Paul’s story, with its chaotic meltdown, fragile recovery, and transformational change, is dramatic: the tale of a sudden, wrenching change in values. Usually, the change is much more gradual and subtle.
More typical, for example, is David, age fifty-four, an entrepreneur whose start-up business finally took off after ten years of painful, sometimes desperate struggle. In his twenties, he had drifted, flailing, clueless; in his thirties, he got a good job and made a name for himself; then, at forty, when he was at the top of his game, he risked everything to pursue his dream of a start-up—only to flounder financially and emotionally. Every day brought struggle, threw up some fresh problem. Professionally, he felt at sea. Meanwhile, his marriage broke up. Therapy helped, but he did not talk to friends. “If you’re too despondent, others get despondent, so I had to keep up appearances.”
By the time he was fifty, the business had stabilized. By his mid-fifties, when we spoke, it was firmly established, and David was happily remarried. But he also found himself changing. “I think my impostor syndrome is dead. Finally. My sense of mastery is higher.” For the first time in his adulthood, his life satisfaction was high—though he said his affect had not fully kept pace. (Remember, life evaluation is not the same as one’s day-to-day emotional state.)
I asked: “Have your values changed?” Definitely! “I get a huge amount of pleasure in trying to help people succeed in things.” David was teaching. He did a lot of mentoring. “I like to try to help cool things come into existence, regardless of whether my name is associated with them.” He noticed himself worrying less about that checklist of accomplishments with which his younger self was so preoccupied. When he and I spoke, he was just back from a trip to California. Somewhat to his own surprise, he had canceled all his Silicon Valley business appointments and instead spent the time reconnecting with a friend from junior high school. That just seemed more important.
And so, in his forties, David had passed through not only a professional transition, but a personal one, too—yet without the kind of drama that Paul experienced. Most transitions seem to be of the quieter sort, but are just as developmentally profound. Another example is that of Christine, who experienced a series of challenges at midlife. Her mother’s death shook her, and a series of jobs caved in beneath her, forcing her to start over, not once but several times. At one point, she found herself on the brink of losing her family’s medical insurance and running out of savings. The scramble from job to job had denied her, in her fifties, the sense of professional arrival which many people achieve in their thirties and forties, yet with two kids and a husband to support, she didn’t have room in her life to do anything but keep going. Despite the stress, though, at fifty-three she reported her highest life satisfaction ever. When I asked what had changed to improve her sense of wellbeing, she replied by talking about what had changed in herself. She felt a sense of mastery. “I can do life. I have a sense of what my limitations are, what my strengths are, and I can now organize my life so I can play to my strengths.” And, she said, “I no longer feel an obligation to save the world.”
When I probed, I found that she no longer felt a need to save the whole world. Earlier in life, Christine had imagined holding big, important roles that make a dent in the world’s problems. In her twenties, she joined the peace movement and planned to end nuclear war. Had her ideals collapsed? Not exactly. “I can’t save the world,” she said. “I can save my little corner of it.” She had acquired a new passion, volunteering at a wild-bird rehabilitation center. “If I can rehabilitate a raptor, that’s focused, concrete, makes a difference.” The ambition and idealism were still there, but she had scoped them to fit her ambit of control. She was less invested in the abstract and general, more in the concrete and specific.
And so, although some people, like Paul, experience an existential crisis and an internal drama at the bottom of the happiness curve, many of us make the turn gradually and mundanely and inconspicuously; often we are only indistinctly aware of it ourselves. Yet the critical and gradual paths both lead us in the same direction: toward others, and toward wisdom.
* * *
When I interviewed Andrew Oswald about the happiness curve, he was eager to talk about the data and its many implications. Empiricist that he is, he was more reluctant to talk about explanations. Instead, he suggested I call someone whose work he found intriguing: an unorthodox psychiatrist named Dilip Jeste.
Jeste was sixty-nine when I first encountered him in 2014. He spoke in a lilting Marathi accent, a legacy of his upbringing in India, and cut a modest figure. He was on the short side and slight of build. When we met, in San Diego during the summer, he was wearing a baggy blue blazer and a sweater, because, as he told me, he is always cold. His clothing and build made him look his age, but he moved and walked like a much younger man; when we left his office to visit his lab across campus, I had trouble keeping up with him. His mind is equally quick. It needs to be, because it occupies parallel worlds.
Born in 1944, the son of a lawyer, he was one of five children and grew up in a small town near Mumbai. In seventh grade, to learn English, he moved to the city of Pune, where he discovered the library in the U.S. consulate and began voraciously consuming books. One of them was Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. “It was like an Agatha Christie mystery,” he recalled. “Instead of starting with a murder, you start with a dream.”
Solving the mind’s riddles, the young Jeste thought, should be his life’s work. Deciding on psychiatry, he began medical training in India and then continued in the United States, at a series of gold-plated institutions: Cornell, the National Institutes of Health, George Washington University. Finally, in the mid-1980s, he landed at the University of California at San Diego. At this writing, he is still there—now with a very long string of titles (Director of the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging; Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences; several more). His office wall is covered with plaques, certificates, and awards. As they imply, Jeste became what one might fairly describe as a pillar of the American psychiatric establishment. In 2012, as president of the American Psychiatric Association (he was the first Asian American to attain that position), he supervised the first major revision of psychiatry’s diagnostic manual since the mid-1990s. His field, primarily, is geriatric psychiatry and the study of successful aging. In the previous chapter, I mentioned his finding that people report higher subjective wellbeing as they move through the late decades of life, even while they grow more infirm. He is also a brain researcher, someone who spends a lot of time (and money) putting experimental subjects inside deafening magnetic-resonance imaging machines to observe their mental circuits firing. The day I visited him, he was conducting an experiment to learn more about how older brains process compassion.
I dwell on Jeste’s scientific credentials because he has another side which is quite different, one which challenges mainstream psychiatry in fundamental ways. For one thing, he is an evangelist for something he calls positive psychiatry, an extension into medicine of positive psychology. This is a new idea. Psychiatrists, being physicians, concern themselves with treating mental disorders. If they ameliorate your depression or anxiety, their job is done. As Jeste puts it, if they take you from minus five to zero, they’re finished. He thinks psychiatry can and should do more: it should apply itself to making well people happier and more resilient, taking them from zero to plus five, thereby enhancing wellbeing and preventing psychiatric problems.
Positive psychiatry has yet to catch on in the psychiatric world, partly because improving happiness, rather than treating illness, is not in the medical curriculum. Jeste, however, studied a different curriculum. He grew up in India, immersed in one of the world’s great wisdom traditions: specifically, in the teachings of The Bhagavad Gita. “It’s cultural, growing up in India,” Jeste told me. “We read the Gita. The whole thing is about wisdom.”
Jeste was struck early in his career by a puzzle. Why would life satisfaction rise as people move into old age, even in the face of physical decline? The trend was too strong to be happenstance. “I started wondering whether the life satisfaction we were seeing in older people was related to their becoming wiser with age, in spite of physical disability. So then the question is: What is wisdom?”
Jeste imagined he might be able to conjoin two divergent traditions by developing a neuroscience of wisdom. The first step might be to define wisdom in a scientifically rigorous way. The second might be to measure it. The third might be to understand which parts of the brain are most involved with it, and thereby to explore whether wisdom has a physiological basis. A fourth, one hopes, might eventually be to learn how to cultivate and enhance wisdom.
Medical traditionalists were skeptical (and still are). Jeste recalled being told by colleagues: “Do anything, but don’t utter the word wisdom. No one will take you seriously. It’s not a real concept. It’s a philosophical concept rather than a neuroscience concept.” He took their skepticism as a challenge.
When he set out, he couldn’t find any articles on wisdom and neurobiology (apart from ones mentioning people named “Wisdom”). By 2010, he was cranking them out himself. Top journals were publishing his papers, which were packed with sentences like this one: “Two brain regions were identified as being common to different domains of wisdom—the prefrontal cortex (especially dorsolateral, ventromedial, and anterior cingulate) and the limbic striatum.” Damage to those domains, he found, can lead people to behave in ways that most of us would agree is unwise, yet without affecting intelligence.
But what are the “domains of wisdom”? Alone and with colleagues, Jeste combed through wisdom about wisdom: ancient and modern texts, Eastern and Western texts, traditional and scientific texts. When I asked what he had gleaned, he replied: “The concept of wisdom has stayed surprisingly similar across centuries and across geographic regions.” Again and again, modern scholarly definitions mention certain traits: compassion and prosocial attitudes that reflect concern for the common good; pragmatic knowledge of life; the use of one’s pragmatic knowledge to resolve personal and social problems; an ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, and to see multiple points of view; emotional stability and mastery of one’s own feelings; a capacity for reflection and for dispassionate self-understanding. By comparison with modern Western sources, the Gita places more emphasis on controlling one’s desires and mastering materialistic cravings. But, write Jeste and Ipsit V. Vahia in a 2008 article in the journal Psychiatry, “A comparison of the conceptualization of wisdom in the Gita with modern scientific literature shows several similarities, such as rich knowledge about life, emotional regulation, contributing to common good (compassion/sacrifice), and insight (with a focus on humility).”
Jeste told me, “All across the world we have an implicit notion of what a wise person is.” Of course, culture imposes many variations on the theme. Yet there is more than enough consistency across eras and societies to suggest that wisdom is not just a random label meaning different things to different people in different places. Rather, wisdom is its own recognizable quality. Its ubiquity, Jeste believes, suggests it is something important for Homo sapiens—and something hardwired, at least in part. “The concept of wisdom is universal,” he told me. “And so it has to be biologically based. I think there are brain changes that are conducive to feeling better and improving some aspects of old age.” No one supposes there is a “wisdom organ” somewhere in the brain. But much might be learned, Jeste believes, by understanding how wisdom works, and how it may be embedded in our circuitry.
If wisdom has a biological basis, then it presumably also has an evolutionary basis. Presumably it evolved because it helps people do better in life. But why might it persist, and often increase, among the elderly, including older women, who are past their fertile years? In biology, the so-called grandmother hypothesis posits that postmenopausal women improve their lineage’s prospects by investing in the wellbeing of their children and grandchildren. A grandmother effect likely helps explain why human females undergo comparatively early menopause and then long outlive their fertility, a phenomenon seen in only two other species, short-finned pilot whales and orcas. In studies of orcas, marine biologists find that having postmenopausal mothers and grandmothers in the group greatly improves the survival prospects of younger males, even (in fact, especially) when they are well into adulthood and are siring offspring of their own. Something analogous may be true of humans.
“Wisdom is useful at any age,” Jeste said. “But in older age it becomes especially important. From an evolutionary point of view, younger people are fertile, so even if they’re not wise, they’re okay. But older people need to find some other way to contribute to the survival of the species, and that is through the grandmother effect of wisdom.”
Perhaps. The biology and neuroscience of wisdom are chapters yet to be written. As of now, the work which Jeste and others like him have embarked upon proffers more questions than answers. But a science of wisdom is being born.
* * *
Until I met Dilip Jeste, it had never occurred to me that the concept of wisdom might have scientific meaning, much less that wisdom might be quantifiable. But that turned out to be the case, as Monika Ardelt was able to demonstrate.
I called on Ardelt at the University of Florida, where she was a sociology professor. In her office, Post-its, cartoons, photographs, and children’s drawings adorned every vertical surface. Every inch of shelf space was crammed with books. But her conversational demeanor was orderly and precise. She was born in 1960 in the German city of Wiesbaden and grew up in a smaller town near there. She was only a child when she first felt the pull of wisdom. “I had this one uncle who fascinated me,” she said. “He didn’t say a lot. He had this completely white hair and sat there while others were gossiping and would smile. There was this very positive aura around him. Just being with him made me calm. You felt good sitting with him there. That was fascinating to me, because the rest of my family wasn’t like that. He was modeling acceptance, equanimity.”
In her late twenties, she came to the United States for her graduate studies. Hunting for a dissertation topic, she hit upon adult development and successful aging. “I was always fascinated by wisdom,” she told me, “but I didn’t think of it as a topic of scientific study.” But one day when she went to the library to look up a data set, her eye chanced upon a 1990 book edited by the Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg: Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development. “I was like, I can’t believe it! There are people who actually study wisdom!” That led her to a pioneering 1980 paper by the psychologists Vivian Clayton and James Birren, which had conceptualized wisdom as an alloy of strengths in three domains, each reinforcing the others. One is cognitive, the domain of knowledge and reason—of understanding and learning. Another is affective, the domain of emotion and empathy—of feelings about ourselves and others. The third is reflective, the domain of self-understanding and dispassion—qualities which allow us to get some perspective on ourselves and others.
The tripartite paradigm posits that wisdom can be analyzed as a set of measurable psychological components. This happens to map rather well onto the Buddhist conception of wisdom, a good example of the kind of convergence across eras and cultures that Jeste emphasizes. Here is how the economist Jeffrey Sachs summarized the Buddhist approach in the 2013 World Happiness Report:
The Eightfold Noble Path prescribes eight “right” responses to transience and interdependence. These are grouped into three dimensions: a cognitive dimension (right view, right intention); an ethical dimension (right speech, right action, right livelihood); and a mental-concentration dimension (right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration). The cognitive dimension is to understand the nature of reality itself: always in flux, impermanent, and interconnected. The ethical dimension is to avoid causing harm to others through the wrong kind of behavior, such as lies or livelihoods that bring harm to others. The concentration dimension is to train the mind to avoid false attachments to transient pleasures.
The Buddha, of course, did not have modern psychological testing at his disposal. Ardelt did. She wondered if she could sift the hundreds of questions in standard psychological tests and select some which reliably identify people and behaviors that most of us would recognize as wise. In time, she developed a thirty-nine-item questionnaire—subsequently simplified, by herself and others, to twelve questions. Sure enough, people who are identified by peers or interviewers as comparatively wise (“wisdom nominees”) score higher on the Ardelt test. People’s overall wisdom could thus be compared, as could their relative strengths in wisdom’s three domains. Meanwhile, other wisdom tests appeared, and the various tests turned out to produce consistent results. In science, anything you can quantify is real. So it’s official. Wisdom is real!
I took Ardelt’s thirty-nine-question wisdom test. I tried as hard as I could to be unsparingly honest about myself, as Ardelt emphasized I must. Some questions seem obviously related to wisdom, like, “I always try to look at all sides of a problem.” Other questions are more oblique: “Sometimes when people are talking to me, I find myself wishing that they would leave.” (True in spades!) My results placed me toward the higher side of the “moderate” range. I think I know why I don’t qualify for the top category. I score well on the reflective elements; I’m good at seeing many points of view and thinking objectively about problems. But I do less well on questions about sympathy and compassion (“I often have not comforted another when he or she needed it”). I am not someone who instinctively reaches out to help others, or who intuitively grasps how to do it. Besides being something I need to work on, my empathy shortcomings hurt my wisdom grade, because my own wisdom, fundamentally, is not about me.
* * *
What, then, is this quality which Jeste is brain-mapping and Ardelt is testing? Scholars disagree on the fine points but have arrived at a strong consensus on the big ideas.
Wisdom is a package deal. It entails a variety of traits, but its magic lies in the integration of those traits, so that they support and enrich each other. Someone who had a lot of brainpower or knowledge without much empathy or compassion might be clever or expert, but also manipulative and devious, and therefore unwise. Someone who had a lot of compassion without much reflection might be generous and kind, but impulsive and impractical, and therefore unwise. Someone who had a lot of reflectiveness but not much knowledge might be thoughtful but naïve, and therefore unwise. In Star Trek, undoubtedly the wisest of all television shows, a recurrent theme is that the most blazingly intelligent character, the Vulcan Spock, lacks the instinctive empathy of Dr. McCoy and the pragmatic decisiveness of Captain Kirk. None of the three alone is wise. Wisdom arises from the (sometimes tense) interaction of the triumvirate.
Because it depends on such interactions, wisdom is also a dynamic quality, not a static one. Even within individuals, it varies from situation to situation and day to day. Igor Grossmann, a young social psychologist at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, has found that there is more variation in wise reasoning within individuals than between individuals. That is one reason it is so important to surround ourselves with diverse people and multiple points of view: in any given situation, the wisest reaction may not originate with whoever is ostensibly the wisest person.
Grossmann’s experiments also suggest that wise thinking can, to some extent, be learned or induced: for instance, by asking people to talk about a situation in the third person, as if it had happened to someone else, instead of in the first person, as if it were their own experience. That seems like promising news, and it makes me wonder if schools should spend more time teaching young people how to think with detachment rather than how to pass standardized tests.
Wisdom is not intelligence or expertise. You might think that people with the fastest mental processors would bring more cognitive power to bear on reflection and therefore would be wiser; but voluminous research finds that raw intelligence and wisdom simply do not map to one another, at least not reliably. In a 2013 paper, Grossmann and four colleagues found no association between intelligence and wisdom. In fact, on some dimensions, such as wise reasoning about intergroup conflicts, they found that cognitive ability and wisdom were negatively related. Many other studies have come to similar conclusions.
Similarly, expertise alone is no guarantee of wisdom. “Wisdom means that wise people know something,” Ardelt said. “So this is knowledge. But wise people don’t necessarily know the latest development in quantum physics. What wise people know about is life. They know particularly about the interpersonal aspects of life: how to relate to other people, how to understand other people. And the intrapersonal aspects of life: understanding yourself.”
The point is not that being bright or knowing quantum physics is inimical to wisdom, or that you can grow wiser by becoming stupider. It is that if you want to become wiser, you must become wiser, not smarter or better informed. At some level, we all know that Ardelt and Grossmann and Star Trek are right to see wisdom as different from intelligence, and as more complex and precious. So why is it that, these days, the highest compliment we pay, so often, is “She’s very smart”?
Wisdom is balanced. Wisdom balances strengths in multiple domains, so that none dominates and each supports the others. It entails balance in other respects, too. A wisdom characteristic that comes up consistently across eras and cultures is emotional balance. Wisdom does not imply always being calm and tranquil, by any means; but it does imply being good at emotional regulation, and thus being less likely to fly off the handle in a provocative situation. (No five-dollar reactions to nickel provocations, as my father put it.) If you are wise, you are better able, in the poet Rudyard Kipling’s words, to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.”
Another kind of balance also characterizes wisdom: the ability to maintain emotional and intellectual equilibrium in uncertain, ambiguous situations. That is challenging, because humans are wired to seek certainty and clarity, even if we attain certainty by overlooking important nuances. “The urge to resolve ambiguity is deeply rooted, multifaceted, and often dangerous,” writes Jamie Holmes, in his book Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing. “In times of stress, psychological pressures compel us to deny or dismiss inconsistent evidence, pushing us to perceive certainty and clarity where there is neither.” Jeste argues persuasively that being able to exercise good judgment amid uncertainty and ambiguity is one of wisdom’s core traits.
Wisdom is reflective. As I mentioned, Ardelt and others of her school of thought regard wisdom as combining competence in three areas. One domain is cognitive (relating to knowledge and intellect), the second is affective (relating to compassion and emotion), and the third is reflective—but reflective means something more than mere contemplation. “The reflective dimension of wisdom is basically defined as the ability to look at phenomena and events from different perspectives,” Ardelt said. “It’s also the ability to look at yourself from an outside perspective. By doing this, by looking at phenomena and events from a different perspective, people get a broader understanding of the world, but also a broader understanding of themselves. That reduces ego-centeredness. It also helps develop greater sympathy and compassion for other people.”
The English language lacks a precise word for the quality Ardelt describes. In colloquial usage, reflection and self-understanding and self-awareness imply inward-looking navel-gazing or mental self-absorption: an egocentric kind of self-exploration, which is not the right concept. Other psychologists have used the term self-transcendence, but that sounds like an LSD trip. Dispassion and objectivity are also in the right neighborhood, but they can imply aloofness or calculating indifference. Whatever we call the ability to get distance from one’s own passions and viewpoint, it opens paths to the cognitive and compassionate elements of wisdom. “I think the reflective dimension is the most important of the three,” Ardelt said. “It gets you to the other two.”
Wisdom is active. Reflection, however necessary, is not sufficient. “Behavior or action is an essential part of wisdom,” Jeste, Katherine Bangen, and Thomas Meeks write. “An individual may think wisely, but unless she acts wisely, she does not truly embody wisdom.”
Acting wisely is harder than reasoning wisely, even (perhaps especially) for the hyperintelligent. Recall how the psychologist Jonathan Haidt found he was incapable of following his own better judgment about dating. His “rider” saw the best path to travel, but his “elephant” had its own ideas. To extend Haidt’s metaphor, when we talk about wise behavior and wise reasoning, we are not talking about either the rider’s ratiocinations or the elephant’s instincts. We are talking about how we think and behave when the rider and elephant jointly identify the best path and travel it in harmony.
Because wisdom requires us to act, it has the further interesting quality of acting upon us. “Wisdom is realized knowledge,” Ardelt told me. “It transforms the individual. Intellectual knowledge does not, necessarily. You just know more.” In 2004, Susan Bluck of the University of Florida and Judith Glück of the University of Vienna collected people’s stories of doing, saying, or thinking something wise. Most people recalled their wise moments as teaching a valuable lesson or overcoming a problem, for example by wresting a positive outcome from a negative situation. Ordinary knowledge and intelligence won’t typically have any of those life-inflecting effects.
Wisdom is good for us individually. Recent studies have shown wisdom to be associated with, among other things, better physical health, better mental health, happiness, life satisfaction, mastery, and resilience, along with less addiction and impulsivity. We cannot be completely sure which way the causality runs: flourishing may increase wisdom, as well as the other way around. But here is another clue that wisdom is, in and of itself, a good influence: the same positive relationships hold within individuals, not just between them. Examining time diaries (in which people recorded their emotions and reactions over the course of the day), Grossmann and several colleagues found that when people are in wise-reasoning mode they experience more intense positive emotions and less intense negative ones, and they have better emotional regulation, and they are more forgiving.
Wisdom is good for us collectively. Has any healthy society ever wished for less wisdom? Of course not, and for good reason. Wisdom confers what economists refer to as “positive social externalities.” In other words, the benefits of having wise people and behavior in our midst spill over to make life better for the rest of us, wise and unwise alike. This is perhaps the single most distinctive and important trait of wisdom, one which all modern definitions agree upon and emphasize. “One of the most consistent subcomponents of wisdom, from both ancient and modern literature,” write Dilip Jeste and Thomas Meeks, “is the promotion of common good and rising above self-interests.”
If you think about it, wisdom’s characteristic strengths have in common their utility for social problem solving. Wise reasoning helps people put themselves in others’ shoes; it focuses not on abstract intellectual inquiry, but on navigating interpersonal conflicts and other social problems; it is demonstrated in action, not merely in thought. It improves our lives by improving the quality of our relationships—which, because every relationship involves at least one other person, improves others’ lives, too. It expresses itself by proffering actionable advice, spreading itself around; and, when good advice is taken, wisdom is contagious. Temperamentally, it leans toward equanimity and balance, traits essential to compromise and conflict resolution. I can’t count the number of times a wise friend has talked me down from some high dudgeon, whether by pointing out that the person I’m angry with might have a point, or by suggesting that I might be reading sinister motives into a mistake or a misunderstanding, or by helping me see that the smart thing to do is let the matter go. Wise counsel is sometimes most high-minded or principled, but just as often it encourages us to “rise above principle and do what’s right,” as the novelist Joseph Heller put it. It expresses itself, often, in counterpoint to ideology.
I believe the single most fundamental trait of wisdom is this: You cannot be truly wise on a desert island by yourself. You can be shrewd, resourceful, intelligent, skilled, and much else besides. You can exhibit various elements of wisdom: putting yourself inside the head of a rescuer, or possessing useful knowledge about survival, or making levelheaded decisions. But so long as you are a society of one, you are only potentially wise. Wisdom is oriented toward social harmony and the good of the people around us, not just toward ourselves.
In 1996, in his book The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin penned a memorable description of wisdom in the political sphere:
What is called wisdom in statesmen, political skill, is understanding rather than knowledge—some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what: what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.
Berlin aptly captured wisdom’s ineffable, yet distinctive and tangible, quality of social practicality. So did a politician who confronted one of the hardest social problems America ever faced. In 1962, a thirty-nine-year-old Mississippi state tax collector traveled to Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, to give a speech which he called “In Defense of the Practical Politician.” His name was William F. Winter, and he would go on, in the early 1980s, to become one of Mississippi’s most estimable governors. Still later, he led the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, where he was still active as I wrote this chapter. But in 1962 he was an obscure official trying to think his way through the country’s most intractable and antagonistic conflict, namely race relations. “He was a moderate in a state in which the very word ‘moderate’ had been successfully transformed into a term of vilification and abuse,” observes the writer and social philosopher David Blankenhorn, who, growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, bore witness to that fraught era. Profiling Winter in The American Interest magazine in 2016, Blankenhorn recalls 1962 as a time when angry Southern populists, caught up in the passions of racial politics, denounced compromise as surrender and swore to fight, fight, fight (a political tendency which has by no means vanished).
Winter spoke in a different vein. “Willingness to compromise involves great courage,” he told his audience at Centre College. “Some of the most courageous public officials I have known have been the quietly dedicated men of reason who have worked under the most unrelenting pressures to gain acceptance of unpopular but necessary agreements, while bombastic orators denounced them as traitors or worse.” Practical politicians, he said, do not prefer to compromise. Like anybody, they would rather have things their own way. But they know when the time has come to compromise, and then they know how to do it. Americans, he said,
owe much to the practical politician and the adjustments he brings to the inexact science of government. If he is less than certain, it is because he knows … that certitude is not always the test of certainty. If he is less than an intellectual, it is because he knows that not all answers are found in books. If he is less than perfect, it is because he is dealing with less than perfect men.
Winter was describing a bundle of characteristics which we cannot manage without if we hope to share a diverse, divided country. He was describing wisdom.
* * *
Back, then, to Thomas Cole’s river, the stream that runs through our story. As the sands fall in the Voyager’s hourglass, the river’s course and current twist. An undertow pulls toward disappointment and pessimism in the middle passage, even (or especially) if our situations seem objectively good; then it changes direction, pulling toward surprising emotional rewards in later decades. Knowing the hydrology of Cole’s river, we are in a position to ask an important question. Do the river’s current and its peculiar reversal have a purpose—for individuals, for society? Does the undertow of age double back on itself for a reason?
Yes. We are a social, tribal species. We evolved to coexist in groups, and we rely upon our social instincts to maximize the odds of passing our genes down to thriving children and grandchildren and beyond. It would make sense for us to be programmed to be striving and ambitious and competitive in youth, to seek altitude as fast as we can in early adulthood, to attain status and the social and material and sexual perquisites that go with status. It would also make sense for us to shift toward a different role once prime childbearing and parenting years are past: a role more oriented toward the good of society, toward the flourishing of those in our communities and groups, toward helping navigate the challenges of life in the tribe. And it would make sense for there to be a transitional passage in between: a sometimes awkward, grueling, confusing period of being neither here nor there. If wisdom increases with age, we can tell a meaningful and ultimately heartening story about the social and possibly biological logic of the happiness curve. The curve is the current we cross toward a less egocentric, more satisfying perspective on life.
If wisdom increases with age. I would like to be able to say that contemporary science proves that age increases wisdom, or even that age and wisdom consistently go together. As of now, however, research is ambiguous. Some studies find that wise reasoning rises with age. Igor Grossmann and his four colleagues reached just that finding in their 2013 study on wisdom and intelligence. But in another paper, in 2014, Grossmann and Ethan Kross found no meaningful difference in the wise reasoning of older and younger adults. In yet another study, published in Psychological Science in 2012, Grossmann and six colleagues studied wise reasoning about interpersonal conflicts in America and Japan. They found that wise reasoning improved with age among Americans, but not among Japanese. And so it goes, in research by Ardelt, Jeste, and others.
Looking at the evidence, I do not think we can say that aging automatically or necessarily makes anyone wiser. Here, though, is what I think we can say. Other things being equal, the aging process makes it easier to be wise in later life. It gives us, so to speak, better equipment.
More balance and equanimity; more contentedness and less regret; more mastery and practical experience; more comfort with inner and outer ambivalence and conflict; more emphasis on investing in social relationships and on what my interviewee Paul called “recognizing other selves”: in recent research, those changes tend to be associated with both age and wisdom. To adopt Paul’s metaphor, they are wisdom’s tool kit. We hear them alluded to in the stories I told at the beginning of this chapter and elsewhere in this book. Andrew turns away from “glittering prizes” and toward friends, family, and religion. Paul gives up his status-conscious quest for perfection and discovers meaning in his work on Native American reservations. David turns his entrepreneurial energies toward helping others launch projects. Christine saves birds rather than the world. In all their accounts, and many others which I do not have space to include, we discern elements of growing wisdom: movement toward equanimity, toward pragmatic problem solving and reflection, toward other-directed priorities.
I’ve interviewed many people who expressed satisfaction in their fifties and beyond. Few have spontaneously invoked the term wisdom. Today the word is barely part of our everyday vocabulary. Yet anyone attuned to wisdom’s wavelength will hear its signal loud and clear. I recall, for example, interviewing Chip, a military retiree and part-time limo driver who, in his mid-sixties, rated his life satisfaction at eight, an all-time high. When I asked why, he said he had developed patience which he had lacked in his youth; that he had become less judgmental of others; that material things had receded in importance. (“I’m not a millionaire,” he said. “I’m not even a thousandaire. I’m not unhappy about that. A lot of money is trouble.”) Perhaps most telling, he said he had learned how to avoid the conflicts that once had been endemic in his life, with the result that his fourth marriage was succeeding, after three prior failures. “When I was younger, the least little things set me off,” he said. “I’m the kind of person now, before I will argue with you I will see if there’s a way to settle a thing. I’ll try to see if there’s a way to compromise. If not, we’ll put it on the shelf and try to get it done later.” Wise words!
Of course, we shouldn’t bemoan the world-saving, egotistical ambitions of youth. David could not advise young entrepreneurs on their start-ups without first having succeeded with his own. Both slopes of the happiness curve serve a purpose. That purpose is not to help us be happy (or unhappy) as individuals. If the undertow steers us first toward grandiosity and restlessness and volatility and status competition, and later toward realism and satisfaction and equanimity and sociability, and if there is often an unpleasant, worst-of-both-worlds transition in between—well, our individual feelings are quite incidental. If my interpretation of the evidence is correct, the happiness curve is a social adaptation, a slow-motion reboot of our emotional software to repurpose us for a different role in society. It came into being because it helped our tribes survive and thrive.
Thomas Cole depicts the life’s voyage as an inner, solitary journey, bereft of human companionship or society. He depicts the subjective psychology of aging. That is an impressive accomplishment for someone who was working in the 1830s and 1840s, when the invention of psychology was decades in the future. Still, I can’t resist pausing to savor an irony at Cole’s expense. The Voyage of Life may be a subjective portrayal of an interior journey, but if my argument is correct, the river’s winding track was laid down and its banks were carved by precisely that which is missing from Cole’s paintings: our collective interactions with others, writing themselves, over the course of eons, into our culture or our genes or (most likely) some combination of the two.
In that important respect, Cole’s solitary river voyage is a social journey after all. We humans share it and collectively shaped it, even though we travel it one by one.
* * *
Understanding how the happiness curve reorients us toward communitarian values helps, I think, make sense of a paradox I alluded to in chapter 5. The downslope and trough of the happiness curve represent a squeezing out of optimism: a long, slow adjustment toward what psychologists have called depressive realism. We reduce our expectations of our future happiness. Emotionally, we lower our sights and learn to settle. Settling increases our contentment.
Settling? That sounds dreary. It sounds like grudgingly accepting contentment of a diminished and impoverished sort: like resigning ourselves to the abandonment of our youthful dreams and the deflation of our youthful hopes. It sounds like, well, depressive realism.
Yet depression, deflation, and diminution are not at all what most people experience. Not even close. In my interviews with people who had navigated the transition, I rarely heard notes of disappointment or resignation. I heard that life after the reboot seemed richer, more than compensating for any losses.
Partly, that must be the result of the psychological changes we saw in the previous chapter: the positivity effect, socioemotional selection, and the rest. Partly, though, it is a function of something Aristotle understood without the benefit of fMRI scans and big data: Wisdom enriches us. It changes our values, not just our knowledge; and in doing so it changes who we are and how we perceive the world.
Jerry Hirsch, who was in his early seventies when we spoke (he let me use his real name), gave an evocative description of the change. He was the chairman of the Lodestar Foundation, a philanthropy in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. In the first portion of his career, he had made serious money, building shopping centers. He thought his life was good—until his marriage caved in when he was forty-eight. After divorce came depression, a suicide attempt, hospitalization, and a hard look at his life. “I realized my tombstone would say, ‘Before there was Hirsch, there were 426 Kmarts, and now there are 693 Kmarts.’ Is that what I want my legacy to be? I said no. There has to be something else.” He went back to school, then studied spirituality, “always searching for what would give my life more meaning.” He settled on philanthropy. “I concluded if I wind up helping someone, it would give me more meaning in my life. Coincidentally, the more I helped others, the more it satisfied me. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”
He reported a step change in his life satisfaction: not just a quantitative change, like a higher Cantril rating, but something more fundamental, a change in what the concept of quality of life means to him. In his case, making that step change required a crisis. “I didn’t know about the depth of happiness and satisfaction one could get from these other types of endeavors. I didn’t know there was a deeper level. It took something to tear apart those layers that were covering my core.”
I had heard that word, depth, in one of the first interviews I conducted when I began exploring happiness and age. I was speaking with Karla, a friend who, at age fifty-four, seemed to have safely established herself on the happiness curve’s upswing. When we spoke, Karla’s life satisfaction was high and improving. In her fifties, she told me, she savored more than ever before the friendships she had nurtured over many years. She felt better organized, more efficient. She was doing more work with the neighborhood civic association, and had started volunteering in church. She reported uncovering an additional depth in life, an intangible dimension which had been beyond the ken of her twentysomething self. “It was always striving and looking ahead then, as opposed to being in the now. Now I feel grateful for the now. On a day-to-day basis I probably do the same things, but I feel different.”
Just so: same life, yet it feels different. And so, of course, it is not the same life. The river alters the Voyager, not just the scenery. Although the world beyond the bend in the river looks less exciting without an overlay of unrealistic optimism, it does not look emptier or narrower. It looks richer and deeper. That is the beginning of wisdom.