Soon we will have drugs to reverse ageing and become unhappy
again.
excerpt time.com
Newsflash for rock stars and teenagers: It turns out
everything doesn't go downhill as we age — the golden years really are
golden.
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That's according to eye-opening research that found the happiest
Americans are the oldest, and older adults are more socially active
than the stereotype of the lonely senior suggests.
The two go hand-in-hand — being social can help keep away the blues.
"The good news is that with age comes happiness," said study author
Yang Yang, a University of Chicago sociologist. "Life gets better in
one's perception as one ages."
A certain amount of distress in old age is inevitable, including
aches, pains and deaths of loved ones and friends. But older people
generally have learned to be more content with what they have than
younger adults, Yang said.
This is partly because older people have learned to lower their
expectations and accept their achievements, said Duke University aging
expert Linda George. An older person may realize "it's fine that I was
a schoolteacher and not a Nobel prize winner."
George, who was not involved in the new study, believes the research
is im****tant because the general public continues to think that "late
life is far from the best stage of life and they don't look forward to
it."
Yang's findings are based on periodic face-to-face interviews with a
nationally representative sample of Americans from 1972 to 2004. About
28,000 people aged 18 to 88 took part.
There were ups and downs in overall happiness levels during the study,
generally corresponding with good and bad economic times. But at every
stage, older Americans were the happiest.
While younger blacks and poor people tended to be less happy than
whites and wealthier people, those differences faded as people aged.
In general, the odds of being happy increased 5 percent with every 10
years of age.
Overall, about 33 percent of Americans re****ted being very happy at
age 88, versus about 24 percent of those age 18 to their early 20s.
And throughout the study years, most Americans re****ted being very
happy or pretty happy; less than 20 percent said they were not too
happy.
A separate University of Chicago study found that about 7
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