The U-Shaped Happiness Curve, touted by researchers, claims that the data is clear, across cultures and even species. The numbers show that on average life satisfaction drops during midlife and begins its recovery around age 50, reaching its peak at the end of life. Younger people tend to be happy and the eldery tend to be happy, but persons in their 30s and increasingly into their 40s tend to be miserable. To be in the middle of your life is to struggle, as Dante told us some 900 years ago.
I have found the U Shaped Happiness Curve to be real in my own life. Thankfully, I am past the worst and have moved up the slope towards happiness for some time. Every year I tend to be happier than the previous one, as I am grateful just to have the simple gift of another day or another year. I no longer need or want much. I myself am enough. Wealth, prestige, looks, competition, ego, vanity – they all mean so much less. Existence has become simpler. It is as if after six and a half decades I finally acquired a bit of skill in learning how to live well. I can better appreciate what has value, and what doesn’t. Yes, I am doing much better than I was ten years ago.
But I am not so sure about about some of my friends.
Many of them struggle.
They don’t seem to be pulling out of the nadir of the U Shaped Curve into increasing life satisfaction. They seem stuck in an unhappy place.
And it pains me to listen to them tell me their struggles.
Some suffer serious health problems. Others have complicated issues with their children, which can cause seemingly unending misery. More commonly, I have several friends who live semi-isolated existences without much contact with others in their quotidian routines: they are almost always at home and alone. So they are lonely. It is not that they don’t have friends – they do. I have been friends with them for decades, as have others. But they don’t have “buddies”… guys they see on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. Or they get all their social support from their wives, which is a burden unfair to place on any one single person, no matter how loving and supportive she may be. Guys need their buddies, and many middle-aged men don’t have any, in my experience. It is a real problem. Negative outcomes will follow.
And digital distraction is no substitute for real life interaction, in my experience. No amount of online communication or multimedia exposure via screens is a substitute for frequent face-to-face time with a friendly human being who knows and cares about you. Social media is a pale, unsatisfying substitute for the very real, very human need for connection and belonging.
Then there are the more severe cases. I have a friend or two who struggle with many of the same old demons which have haunted them all their lives. Those demons probably will be there until the end — ugh, how is that for depressing?
Some of my friends don’t like their lives. Or maybe to be more exact, they tolerate their lives without taking much pleasure in them. This fact, in particular, makes me sad. Because it means that they pass their days – and spend their precious time, energy, and attention – without getting much in return. They endure their existences. They don’t mine them for happiness. They struggle. They suffer. They have few moments of real joy.
And every year this continues is one more year they will never get back. They add up, the years do. At some point they come to an end.
You spend enough years unhappy and that becomes, at least in large part, the sum total of your largely unhappy life.
And that is a serious waste, to state the obvious. It is a waste of potential. It is a squandering of your most precious possessions I mentioned before: your time, energy, and attention. How ironic that there are some who desperately want to live but fall ill and die. And there are some who are healthy enough in body but sick in soul and so take their own lives. It is not different from those who became pregnant by mistake through negligence, and are bitterly unhappy about it. And then others who desperately want to become pregnant and go almost to the ends of the earth to become so, but can’t.
For whatever reason, a few of my friends are stuck in the trough of unhappiness, when they should be rising up to a better emotional state. Life for them continues to be what it has always been: a long hard slog. They are who they are; it doesn’t change. What does seem to change is that with age they seem to become better at enduring it all. They are weathered; they are tough. But they are not happy.
It does not matter much what I think or feel for such a friend.
Because I can do nothing much for them in their struggles.
Oh sure, I can check in on them and listen. I can make time to see them in person, if they live nearby. That helps.
But everyone struggles alone in the end. Can you stand in front of the mirror and look yourself in the face and like the person you see? When nobody else is around, are you happy with your own company? We return to that important question: Are you comfortable in your own skin? Do you like yourself? Do you like your life? Do you understand yourself? Does your life have a point?
A wise old lady I know admitted to me once that she was not comfortable in her own skin until she was 70. “At least she finally got there,” I said to myself.
It would seem happiness is in large part genetic. Your neuroticism can be accurately measured under the Big Five Personality Test, and your position on that scale will have a lot to say about your potential for happiness. Some people seem to have been born under a dark cloud. For others it is totally the opposite. DNA is DNA.
But that is only part of the story.
A person can improve the quality of their interior life through patience and hard work via conscious effort. Maybe that might mean seeing a therapist to work through some of the unpleasant emotional baggage we all carry with us. Maybe it might mean changing our jobs, religions, friendships, marriages, or even our countries. But you can become happier. As Henry David Thoreau posits, “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” Life can get better. You can put in the hard work to make it better.
Unless you are convinced you cannot. Then of course it won’t.
This long introduction leads me to the main point of this essay: my gratitude for my personal webpage which I am writing on at the moment, and its ability to help me understand my thinking, my desideratum, and my path in life. As my Thoughts Worth Thinking page announces at the top from the Book of Proverbs, “For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Or the following by Ralph Waldeo Emerson:
“What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so we are.”
We can come to know ourselves, Emerson is saying, we can understand. Many a man, in contrast, lives a stranger to himself. They live layered in silence. They don’t even know why they are unhappy.
I will not have that be me.
This webpage is where I work through it all. My feelings. My family. My job. My life.
Maybe that is why I took to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy like a duck to water. CBT gives you tools which help you to understand your own thinking, and strategies on how to to change that thinking for the better. This process almost always helps me to ameliorate the pain of “hot thoughts” which threaten my emotional peace of mind and bring unhappiness. Through the use of reason you can dispel the midsts of doubt and displeasure which leave you adrift at sea, and you can harness your interior life to the solid land of intention and gratitude. You don’t have to be lost. You can find yourself.
Yes, that’s it. Sitting there in front of the written page, trying to understand the source of my thoughts and feelings, and using the discipline of the written word to translate inchoate impressions into intelligible ideas – well, that is the business of my webpage.
It takes untold hours of my time and a good chunk of my waking energy. I work on my webpage for no financial profit – proving Dr. Johnson wrong, I hope, when he claimed that no man other than a “blockhead” wrote except to make money. The reward is understanding who I am. The payoff is working through an issue which troubles or confuses me until I can wrestle it down and make sense of it. This is hard work. There are no short-cuts.
Some have a therapist they regularly talk with, and I have done this on occasion, too. I found it helpful, if painful. But a therapist has never been my go-to. This webpage is my therapist, and I work on my issues through it in my own way and in my own time. It works for me.
I flatter myself that the result is a person who better knows himself and why he is on earth than he would have otherwise. I live consciously and purposefully. I do not drift. I am not one thing today and another tomorrow; I have direction, and I have purpose. I know who I am.
That does not mean I don’t struggle, too. It does not mean I have it all figured out.
It is a cliché attributed to Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” That might go a bit far. I would say that the unexamined life leads one to live a stranger to oneself, and that almost always has negative byproducts. Prison is full of gnarled survivors of misfortune and violence who are layered with years of silence, trauma, and damage.
Some would call what I do here “journaling” and I would not dispute that. Others would say my essaies have an air of the devotional – like something a Puritan would explicate on the written page between himself and the Almighty God – an extended form of prayer, a private commune with the Deity and the Self. Again, I would not argue my webpage is not that. Or my postings are in the form of the more formal essays like those of Michel de Montaigne, or philosophical explorations à la Thoreau or Emerson. Or maybe my blog is akin to a diarist like the Confederate Mary Chestnut or Unionist George Templeton Strong during the Civil War. Maybe it is a bit of all those, I suspect, and none of them, too. I don’t know.
But without formal intention or specific design, I do know that my personal webpage became what I needed it to be. Or maybe it evolved into that over the years. In efforts more successful or less, I have sought in my postings to make sense of my life and the world around me. Where there was darkness, I sought light. Where a new year commenced, I sought an opportunity to learn and improve. I would use my time, not waste it. My webpage helped. My blog was invaluable.
It was how I sought to grow my soul through art, which artistry is writing and the written word.
It was how I sought to become the best possible “me” I could become.
Or at least it was how I sought to live in a manner true to my essential nature, something harder than it sounds.
It is how I made sense of what didn’t start off making sense. That was no easy task.
And for all that, I am immensely grateful.
My personal webpage is worth every hard-earned cent I put into it and every difficult hour I labored on it decade after decade – I am so blessed.
AMEN
“A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist; it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the midst, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.”
J.S. Mill
"A PSALM OF LIFE" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist. Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day. Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave. In the world’s broad field of battle, In the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife! Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,— act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o’erhead! Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again. Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
One Comment
Zach
Thanks for writing and being willing to publish. I found this blog today and intend on reading in the future. Bravo and, again, thank you for writing.
Zach