In researching this book, I interviewed dozens of people about the trajectories of their lives. In doing so, my approach was reportorial, not scientific. Unlike the big-data researchers whose research is described here, I neither attempted nor desired to assemble what social scientists call a representative or random sample of the population. Rather, I sought people who had illustrative stories to tell or insightful perspectives to offer—and who were willing to share them in considerable detail.
Because my interviews delved into intimate matters and sometimes explored feelings shared with few if any others, a high degree of trust was required. Understandably, strangers tended to be guarded or unresponsive when confronted with a journalist inquiring about their inner lives, and so I found myself relying disproportionately—although by no means entirely—on people in my social circles and people with whom I had a personal connection. My interview population is thus skewed toward professionals and high achievers: a limitation which readers should bear in mind and which I hope to improve upon in future work. Where I could do so without compromising confidentially (which is generally), I have indicated when people I interviewed were personal friends or acquaintances.
Except in a couple of cases where identity is an element of the story, and then only with interviewees’ consent, I have used pseudonyms for my life-trajectory interviewees. Here and there, I change details that might reveal identity. Any such changes preserve social and demographic context.
* * *
To avoid scholarly apparatus, I have provided source references in the text where doing so is not too cumbersome. Following are additional notes and details on sources.
1. The Voyage of Life
The 1916 quotation calling for Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life to be restored and displayed in New York or Washington is from an anonymous article (“Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life”) in The Art World, October 1916. On Cole, I also draw upon Earl A. Powell’s Thomas Cole (Harry Abrams, 1990); Joy Kasson’s “The Voyage of Life: Thomas Cole and Romantic Disillusionment,” in American Quarterly 27 (1975); The Correspondence of Thomas Cole and Daniel Wadsworth (Connecticut Historical Society, 1983); and the National Gallery’s exhibition history of its set of the Cole quadriptych. Thanks to researcher Matthew Quallen for his help with Cole.
2. What Makes Us Happy (and Doesn’t)
An essential resource, providing a wealth of data and multiple analytical perspectives, is the World Happiness Report, which has been published almost annually since 2012. The economists John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs have made WHR a touchstone in the realm of happiness research. All editions can be downloaded at worldhappiness.report.
Also foundational for this book are the many articles and several books by Carol Graham and her various collaborators. I cite most in the main text. In addition, I draw on Graham’s “Adaptation Amidst Prosperity and Adversity: Insights from Happiness Studies from Around the World” (World Bank Research Observer, 2010). I can’t thank Carol enough for the many discussions, emails, and data analyses she provided.
The study of life-satisfaction duration by Bartolini and Sarracino is “Happy for How Long? How Social Capital and GDP Relate to Happiness Over Time,” in Ecological Economics 108 (2014).
The study of windfall winners in Kenya, by Haushofer et al., is a working paper accessed via Haushofer’s Princeton website, www.princeton.edu/haushofer/.
My source for the dollar-value equivalent of marital breakup and unemployment is David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, “Wellbeing over Time in Britain and the USA,” in the Journal of Public Economics 88 (2004).
The paper by Deaton and Stone on emotional parents’ life satisfaction is “Evaluative and Hedonic Wellbeing Among Those With and Without Children at Home,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 111:4 (2014).
The German study of life satisfaction among new parents is Rachel Margolis and Mikko Myrskyla, “Parental Wellbeing Surrounding First Birth as a Determinant of Further Parity Progression,” in Demography 52 (2015).
3. A Timely Discovery
The writings of David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald on life satisfaction are voluminous, indispensable, and fascinating. In addition to their many articles discussed in the text, I consulted “The U-Shape Without Controls: A Response to Glenn,” in Social Science & Medicine 69 (2009) and “International Happiness” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, January 2011). Their findings on age and antidepressant prescriptions are from their working papers “Antidepressants and Age in 27 European Countries: Evidence of a U-Shape in Human Wellbeing Through Life” (March 2012) and “The Midlife Crisis: Is There Evidence?” (July 2013). Both papers are available on their websites.
The finding by Powdthavee, Oswald, and Cheng that the U curve occurs in individuals over time is reported in their paper “Longitudinal Evidence for a Midlife Nadir in Human Wellbeing: Results from Four Data Sets,” in The Economic Journal (October 15, 2015).
“A Snapshot of the Age Distribution of Psychological Wellbeing in the United States” by Stone et al. was published in PNAS 107:22 (2010).
The article by Weiss, Enns, and King on the heritability of personality and wellbeing in chimps and humans is “Subjective Wellbeing Is Heritable and Genetically Correlated with Dominance in Chimpanzees,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83:5 (2002). The article by Weiss and King on chimp and human personality development is “Great Ape Origins of Personality Maturation and Sex Differences: A Study of Orangutans and Chimpanzees,” in Personality and Social Psychology 108:4 (2014). I also draw upon Weiss’s chapter on parallels between chimp and human wellbeing, “The Genetics and Evolution of Covitality,” coauthored with Michelle Luciano, in Genetics of Psychological Wellbeing: The Role of Heritability and Genetics in Positive Psychology, ed. Michael Pluess (Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 146–60. Oswald’s and Weiss’s coauthors on “Evidence for a Midlife Crisis in Great Apes Consistent with the U-Shape in Human Wellbeing” are the psychologist James E. King and the primatologists Miho Inoue-Murayama and Tetsuro Matsuzawa.
4. The Shape of the River
The Susan Krauss Whitbourne quotation is from “Worried About a Midlife Crisis? Don’t. There’s No Such Thing,” at Psychology Today’s website (www.psychologytoday.com, 2015). The study of vegetable consumption and happiness, by Oswald, Blanchflower, and Stewart-Brown, is “Is Psychological Wellbeing Linked to the Consumption of Fruit and Vegetables?” (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012). The finding by Graham and Ruiz Pozuelo that higher levels of happiness are associated with earlier U-curve turning points are in “Happiness and Age: People, Place, and Happy Life Years,” in the Journal of Population Economics (2016). See also the notes above to chapter 3.
5. The Expectations Trap
For a comprehensive and comprehensible overview of the psychology of happiness, Jonathan Haidt’s 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books) can’t be beat. Quotations are from page 143 and various locations in chapter 5.
Also foundational is the work of Martin E. P. Seligman, whose 2002 book Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (Atria Books) provides much insight, as well as the useful happiness formula which I adapted.
The 1990 experiment by Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler on endowment bias is reported in “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias,” published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives 5:1 (1991).
Tali Sharot and various collaborators have published extensively on optimism bias. Sharot lays out her findings concisely and readably in her ebook The Science of Optimism. Other Sharot work I consulted includes “The Optimism Bias” in Current Biology 21:23 (2011); “Neural Mechanisms Mediating Optimism Bias,” coauthored with Alison Riccardi, Candace Raio, and Elizabeth Phelps, in Nature 450 (2007); “Selectively Altering Belief Formation in the Human Brain,” coauthored with Ryota Kanai, David Marston, Christoph W. Korn, Geraint Rees, and Raymond J. Dolan, in PNAS 109:42 (2012); “The Optimism Bias,” in Time magazine (May 28, 2011); “Optimistic Update Bias Increases in Older Age,” coauthored with R. Chowdhury, T. Wolfe, E. Düzel, and R. J. Dolan, in Psychological Medicine 44:9 (2013); “Human Development of the Ability to Learn from Bad News,” with Christina Moutsiana, Neil Garrett, Richard C. Clarke, R. Beau Lotto, and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, in PNAS 110:41 (2013); and “How Unrealistic Optimism Is Maintained in the Face of Reality,” with Christoph W. Korn and Raymond J. Dolan, in Nature Neuroscience 14 (2011).
6. The Paradox of Aging
Laura Carstensen’s astonishingly rich and multifaceted research provides the backbone of this chapter, and her relevant articles are too numerous to list. Exploration should begin with her seminal article, coauthored with Derek M. Isaacowitz and Susan T. Charles, “Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity,” in American Psychologist 54:3 (1999); and with her book A Long Bright Future: Happiness, Health, and Financial Security in an Age of Increased Longevity (PublicAffairs, 2009). For engaging summaries, see Carstensen’s April 2012 TED talk, “Older People Are Happier” (www.ted.com/talks/laura_carstensen_older_people_are_happier), and her 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival talk, “Long Life in the 21st Century” (www.aspenideas.org/session/aspen-lecture-long-life-21st-century). Other Carstensen contributions I consulted include “Emotional Behavior in Long-Term Marriage,” with John M. Gottman and Robert W. Levenson, in Psychology and Aging 10:1 (1995); and “Aging, Emotion, and Evolution: The Bigger Picture,” with Corinna E. Löckenhoff, in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1000 (2003). I owe Carstensen a deep debt of gratitude for her help with this book.
Brassen’s coauthors on “Don’t Look Back in Anger!” are Christian Büchel, Matthias Gamer, Sebastian Gluth, and Jan Peters.
Blazer’s article on depression among the elderly is “Depression in Late Life: Review and Commentary,” in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences 58:3 (2008).
Yang’s quotation, “With age comes happiness,” comes from her article “Social Inequalities in Happiness in the United States, 1972 to 2004: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis,” in American Sociological Review 73:2 (2008).
Comparing the effects on life satisfaction of aging and education, Sutin writes with Antonio Terracciano, Yuri Milaneschi, Yang An, Luigi Ferruci, and Alan B. Zonderman, in “The Effect of Birth Cohort on Wellbeing: The Legacy of Economic Hard Times,” in Psychological Science 24:3 (2013).
Gana’s findings on aging and life satisfaction in France are in “Does Life Satisfaction Change in Old Age? Results from an 8-Year Longitudinal Study,” coauthored with Nathalie Bailly, Yaël Saada, Michèle Joulain, and Daniel Alaphilippe, in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 68:4 (2013).
The remark by Carstensen et al. that emotional life may not peak until well into the seventh decade is from “Emotional Experience Improves with Age: Evidence Based on over Ten Years of Experience Sampling,” coauthored with Susan Scheibe, Hal Ersner-Hershfield, Kathryn P. Brooks, Bulent Turan, Nilam Ram, Gregory R. Samanez-Larken, and John R. Nesselroade, in Psychology and Aging 26:1 (2011).
The study by Lacey, Smith, and Ubel on misunderstandings about age and happiness are from “Hope I Die Before I Get Old: Mispredicting Happiness Across the Adult Lifespan,” in Journal of Happiness Studies 7 (2006). More evidence that happy older people believe that other older people are unhappy is in Laura Carstensen and Susan Scheibe, “Emotional Aging: Recent Findings and Future Trends,” in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 65B:2 (2010).
Cooney’s piquant quotation about old age and bad luck is from the manuscript of No Country for Old Women, provided to me by the author.
Jeste’s findings on successful aging can be found in “Correlates of Self-Rated Successful Aging Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults,” coauthored with L. P. Montross, C. Depp, J. Daly, J. Reichstadt, S. Golshan, D. Moore, and D. Sitzer, in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 14:1 (2006); and in “Association Between Older Age and More Successful Aging: Critical Role of Resilience and Depression,” coauthored with Gauri N. Salva, Wesley K. Thompson, Ipsit V. Vahia, Danielle K. Glorioso, A’verria Sirkin Martin, Barton W. Palmer, David Rock, Shahrokh Golshan, Helena C. Kraemer, and Colin A. Depp, in the 2013 American Journal of Psychiatry article discussed in the main text. In 2016, Jeste, along with Michael L. Thomas, Christopher N. Kaufmann, Barton W. Palmer, Colin A. Depp, A’verria Sirkin Martin, Danielle K. Glorioso, and Wesley K. Thompson, published further findings that mental health improves with aging (“Paradoxical Trend for Improvement in Mental Health with Aging: A Community-Based Study of 1,546 Adults Aged 21–100 Years,” in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 77:8).
The finding by Kunzmann, Little, and Smith that aging confers protection from psychological distress owing to declining health is from “Is Age-Related Stability of Subjective Wellbeing a Paradox? Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Evidence from the Berlin Aging Study,” Psychology and Aging 15:3 (2000).
Mather’s paper on processing emotions in old age is in “The Emotion Paradox in the Aging Brain,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1251:1 (2012).
For a useful review of evidence that older people are more attentive and responsive to positive stimuli, see Susan Turk Charles and Laura L. Carstensen, “Emotion Regulation and Aging,” chapter 15 of Handbook of Emotion Regulation, ed. James J. Gross (Guilford Press, 2007). Also good on aging and positivity: Raeanne C. Moore, Lisa T. Eyler, Paul J. Mills, Ruth M. O’Hara, Katherine Wachmann, and Helen Lavretsky, “Biology of Positive Psychiatry,” in Positive Psychiatry: A Clinical Handbook, eds. Dilip V. Jeste and Baton W. Palmer (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2015); and Laura L. Carstensen, “The Influence of a Sense of Time on Human Development,” Science, June 30, 2006.
The research on emotional selectivity among macaque monkeys is in Laura Almeling, Kurt Hammerschmidt, Holger Sennhenn-Reulen, Alexandra M. Freund, and Julia Fischer, “Motivational Shifts in Aging Monkeys and the Origins of Social Selectivity,” Current Biology 26 (2016).
7. Crossing Toward Wisdom
The literature on the emerging science of wisdom is fragmented and awaits the publication of a major synthesizing works that puts the various pieces together. Still, taken together, the articles of Dilip Jeste, Monika Ardelt, and Igor Grossmann cover most of the fundamentals. An ideal place to begin exploring the contemporary science of wisdom is Katherine J. Bangen, Thomas W. Meeks, and Dilip Jeste, “Defining and Assessing Wisdom: A Review of the Literature,” in the The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 22:4 (2014).
Jeste’s and Vahia’s comparison of the Bhagavad Gita with modern wisdom science is “Comparison of the Conceptualization of Wisdom in Ancient Indian Literature with Modern Views: Focus on the Bhagavad Gita,” in Psychiatry 71:3 (2008).
The finding that wise thinking and behavior vary within individuals is in Igor Grossmann, Tanja M. Gerlach, and Jaap J. A. Denissen, “Wise Reasoning in the Face of Everyday Life Challenges,” in Social Psychological and Personality Science 7:7 (2016). Grossmann’s experimental finding that wise reasoning can be induced is in his paper, coauthored with Ethan Kross, “Boosting Wisdom: Distance from the Self Enhances Wise Reasoning, Attitudes, and Behavior,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141:1 (2011).
On intelligence and wisdom, Grossmann’s finding of no reliable association between them is in “A Route to Wellbeing: Intelligence vs. Wise Reasoning,” coauthored with Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett, in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142:3 (2013). Intriguingly, Dilip Jeste and Thomas Meeks’s report that intelligence and wisdom implicate different brain regions; see “Neurobiology of Wisdom: A Literature Overview,” in Archives of General Psychiatry, April 2009, a splendidly comprehensive article. Other valuable research on the distinction between wisdom and intelligence is Dan Blazer, Helena C. Kraemer, George Vaillant, and Thomas W. Meeks, “Expert Consensus on Characteristics of Wisdom: A Delphi Method Study,” in The Gerontologist, March 2010; and Monika Ardelt, “Intellectual Versus Wisdom-Related Knowledge: The Case for a Different Kind of Learning in the Later Years of Life,” in Educational Gerontology 26 (2000).
The research by Bluck and Glück on the lesson-teaching, transformative characteristics of wisdom situations is in “Making Things Better and Learning a Lesson: Experiencing Wisdom Across the Lifespan,” in Journal of Personality 72:3 (2004).
The quotation from Jeste, Bangen, and Meeks on the active component of wisdom is from their article “Defining and Assessing Wisdom,” cited above.
On wisdom’s physical and emotional benefits, I consulted a variety of sources.
Ardelt finds wisdom has a strong effect on life satisfaction, in “Wisdom and Life Satisfaction in Old Age,” The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 52:1 (1997). A useful summary of research on wisdom and health, by Jeste, Katherine Bangen, and Michael Thomas, is “Development of a 12-Item Abbreviated Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS-12): Item Selection and Psychometric Properties,” in Assessment, July 24, 2015. Grossmann’s finding of multiple health benefits from wise reasoning is from the article coauthored with Jinkyung Na et al., cited above. Jeste and James C. Harris find that wisdom can compensate for physical decline, in “Wisdom—A Neuroscience Perspective,” Journal of the American Medical Association, October 13, 2010.
Grossmann’s examination of time diaries, finding more positivity when people are in wise-reasoning mode, is coauthored with Tanja M. Gelach, and Jaap J. A. Denissen, and can be found in “Wise Reasoning in the Face of Everyday Life Challenges,” cited above.
The statement by Jeste and Meeks that promotion of the common good is a consistent component of wisdom is from “The Neurobiology of Wisdom,” cited above.
Blankenhorn’s profile of William Winter is “In Defense of the Practical Politician,” The American Interest, May 24, 2016.
The 2013 paper by Grossmann et al. reporting an association between wisdom and age is “A Route to Wellbeing,” cited above. Grossmann’s and Ethan Kross’s paper finding no meaningful difference in wise reasoning by older and younger adults is “Exploring Solomon’s Paradox: Self-Distancing Eliminates the Self-Other Asymmetry in Wise Reasoning About Close Relationships in Younger and Older Adults,” in Psychological Science 1:10 (2014). Grossmann’s paper on wisdom and age in the United States and Japan is “Aging and Wisdom: Culture Matters,” coauthored with Mayumi Karasawa, Satoko Izumi, Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett, in Psychological Science 23:10 (2012). See also Grossmann’s article “Reasoning About Social Conflicts Improves into Old Age,” coauthored with Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Denise C. Park, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett, is in PNAS 107:16 (2010).
I took Monika Ardelt’s thirty-nine-question wisdom test via The New York Times website, at www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/20070430_WISDOM/index.html.
8. Helping Ourselves
One reason I haven’t tried to summarize the best thinking on self-help and reinvention in middle age—besides the sheer impossibility of doing so—is that I could not improve on Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife (Riverhead, 2016). Her engaging book is chock-full of good advice and solid science.
Haidt’s discussion of meditation is in The Happiness Hypothesis, cited above and in the text. On the medical value of mindfulness-based techniques, I draw upon Samantha Boardman and P. Murali Doraiswamy, “Integrating Positive Psychiatry into Clinical Practice,” in Positive Psychiatry: A Clinical Handbook, cited above.
The Strenger and Ruttenberg quotation is from their article “The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change,” Harvard Business Review, February 2008.
The Whitbourne quotation about the value of incremental steps is from “Four Surefire Ways to Change Your Life for the Better,” Huffington Post, February 16, 2015.
9. Helping Each Other
Three books are invaluable in charting the new territory of encore adulthood. For a wide-ranging, well written survey, see Marc Freedman’s The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife (PublicAffairs, 2011). For pathbreaking thinking on the social implications of this new phase of life, see Phyllis Moen’s Encore Adulthood: Boomers on the Edge of Risk, Renewal, and Purpose (Oxford, 2016). For self-help, see Richard J. Leider and Alan M. Webber, Life Reimagined: Discovering Your New Life Possibilities (Berrett-Koehler, 2013).
On the invention of adolescence, I draw upon Greg Hamilton, “Mapping a History of Adolescence and Literature for Adolescents,” in The ALAN Review (the peer-reviewed journal of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English), Winter 2002; David Bakan, “Adolescence in America: From Idea to Social Fact,” Daedalus 100:4 (1971); John Demos and Virginia Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Marriage and Family 31:4 (1969); and Marc Freedman’s book The Big Shift, cited above.
Encore.org’s polling on prevalence of encore careers is from “Encore Careers: The Persistence of Purpose,” at Encore.org. This fact sheet reports on an online survey of 1,694 adults ages fifty to seventy, conducted by Penn Schoen Berland in 2014.
The figures on age demographics of start-up entrepreneurs are from The 2016 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity (Table 5).
The figures on people who describe themselves as “retired but not working” are from Phyllis Moen’s Encore Adulthood, cited above.