THE NUANCE
Why We Should All Adopt a 60-Year-Old’s Mindset
There’s a reason happiness peaks just after middle age.
In a 1954 letter to a friend, the spy novelist John le Carré wrote that he was “miserably tired of trying to live for the future indefinitely. I want to live for the present.”
The line jumped out at me because I’ve been feeling the same way. A lot of my idle thoughts these days fall into two categories: worrying about the future or regretting choices I made in the past. My mind seems eager to look ahead or wander back.
Be here now is a popular mantra among the mindfulness crowd, and I’m often not. I’m somewhere else.
This habit of mind seemed to show up around the time I hit middle age, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I may be sliding into the “midlife well-being dip” we’ve all heard about.
Around the world, and regardless of socioeconomic status or education levels, people find middle age a drag. And that may be an understatement. “The effects of the mid-life dip . . . are comparable to major life events such as losing a spouse or becoming unemployed,” wrote the authors of a 2022 study.
“There is a huge amount of evidence to support this dip — over 600 published papers,” said David Blanchflower…
