Kathy Foley

February 24th, 2008

Wrinkles? Grey hair? Dodgy back, hips and knees? Other people would never believe it, but you’re probably thrilled skinny with life,notwithstanding your accelerating decrepitude. This is according to a new study, which found that people get happier as they get older.

I ran this theory past my (retired) father. “Dad,” sez I, “this study says that older people are just as happy as young people.”

“What?” he spluttered, “Jaysus, that’s not true at all - sure we’re 20 times happier.”

I pointed out that according to this latest research young people associate old age with doom and gloom. “Oh yes,” he nodded, making a pretend-serious face. “It’s very doomy and gloomy around here alright.” Then he guffawed again and went off to make a cup of tea. The boffins could be onto something.

Ireland is supposed to be one of the happiest countries in the world. Depending on which study of recent years you believe, we are either the first, third, fourth, fifth, eighth or 11th happiest country of all. One other survey marked us down as the 113th happiest country, but I can only assume those researchers caught us on a bad day. Perhaps they were out with their clipboards on the night the football team failed to qualify for the World Cup.

Given our national talent for happiness, our old folk must be among the cheeriest people in the world. Don’t be fooled when you hear one of them grumble about the weather, corruption, the influx of foreigners and how things were generally better in their day. They’re just pretending to be miserable. In reality, they’re giddy with glee.

I find all of this rather comforting. I’ve expended a lot of energy worrying about my choices in life, following other research studies on happiness. Obviously, I want to be as happy as possible, so have wondered if I should move to Galway, reputed to be the happiest place in Ireland. I have even considered becoming a hairdresser, since they are the country’s happiest workers. But dealing with other people’s split ends, dandruff and colouring quandaries, while also being on my feet all day, would render me acutely and bleakly miserable.

Now, however, it seems all any of us have to do to ensure bliss is keep on keepin’ on. Hang in there and the older you get, the happier you’ll be. There’s no effort required other than continuing to breathe. By the time you get to the end of this article, you will be slightly happier than you were before you started because you’ll be a tiny bit older.

The most interesting part of this research from Queen’s University in Belfast is that younger people, particularly young men,
associate growing older with misery. Consequently, they don’t worry about their alcohol and cigarette consumption and couldn’t care less about diet and fitness. Why not live it up now, they think, when the only way is down?

“Young people like to enjoy themselves, but this often means behaving in ways that can damage their future health,” says John McGarry, the author of the study, who found a strong correlation between levels of binge-drinking in young men and their belief that happiness declines with age.

It’s easy to tut-tut when we see boorish young fellas behaving badly, but McGarry’s research indicates that we may have failed to understand these louts are actually suffering the worst sort of existential angst. They don’t drink to get drunk; they drink to rail against the perceived pointlessness of life, to forget their conviction that their best days are behind them and block out their belief that they are only going to become more miserable with every passing day. Apparently.

If only young men could understand that they’re wrong and that they are actually going to get happier with time, maybe they wouldn’t drink so much, says McGarry. “Perhaps health professionals should consider this in their efforts to tackle binge drinking amongst young men,” he says. “By addressing their incorrect perception that growing old is a miserable experience, they may be encouraged to drink more responsibly.”

Fat chance. The relevant health bodies could try posting pictures trampolining grannies and bodypopping granddads on Bebo and uploading videos to YouTube that show nonagenarians having mad craic in the day room of a nursing home, but I don’t think it’s going to make a blind bit of difference.

McGarry’s report doesn’t address why older people are happier. For that, we have to turn to another study released a few weeks ago by the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College in the US. It found an “extraordinarily consistent” pattern of happiness across 72 countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe, including Ireland.

Happiness is U-shaped, it seems. We start off happy, become increasingly despondent with time, hit a nadir of depression in our
mid-forties and then get happier again, eventually becoming ecstatically jolly by about 70. I’ll tell you why, but if you’re under
the age of 40, you’re not going to like it.

One reason for the U-shape of happiness is that cheerful people live longer, so on average more older people are cheerful, because many of the misery guts have already kicked the bucket. Furthermore, forty-somethings “quell their infeasible aspirations”. In other words, they let go of all their cherished dreams, accept they’re never going to amount to anything and cheer up no end.

And whatever McGarry might say, if that’s not reason enough to engage in a spot of binge-drinking, I’m not sure what is.