Older People Are Happier Overall
Negative stereotypes about aging are false
A friend told me recently that older people are happier because they’re more forgetful. I wondered if that’s what accounts for my cheery personality. I can’t remember a thing! It’s hard to hold a grudge if you’ve forgotten exactly what your girlfriend did that made you so mad in the first place. And if a big chunk of your energy isn’t devoted to nursing bad feelings, you have more to spend on positive activities like taking a walk along the waterfront. Still, the explanation sounded suspect. So I looked it up.
And it’s true! According to science, older people are generally happier than their juniors. You may not be able to hop the fence to get into a Buddy Guy concert (who is still strutting the stage at 87, btw), remember everyone’s name at a political meeting, or be the first to come up with the answer in a trivia game, but if you’re a senior, you probably don’t care. You’re happy with yourself anyway.
But that happy outlook isn’t the result of a forgetful brain. A number of factors have been shown to affect older people’s mood. For one thing, most of the studies have been done on members of WEIRD…
