U-Bend of Life

2 piles of books that I have read sit next to my bed. Unfortunately these piles are much smaller than the 3 piles of un-read books that sit alongside them. The really demoralising part of the story is that we haven’t even started talking about the audio books that I have downloaded but haven’t got round to putting on my ipod yet.

The only periodical I read/listen to with any regularity is the Economist. I have downloaded ten of the special reports from last year’s Christmas edition. I have been trying to listen to one a week to try and “catch up”. We’re already into week 7 of 2011 and I have 9 of the articles left to listen to. You can do the maths yourself. The frustrating part of the story is that when I do finally manage to listen to them, I really enjoy them.

The one that I have managed to listen to was all about age and happiness. The Economist purports that when people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness. It seems that four main factors influence happiness: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. One of the most interesting things I read in the article was that two personality traits seem to shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy. Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings.

The main conclusion that the Economist draws is that people are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46. They go on to say that the consequence of this is that on average, the greyer the world gets the brighter and happier it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47). The main conclusion I draw is that maybe this explains the desire of virtually every French person of working age to have their own private office. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions… http://www.economist.com/node/17722567?story_id=17722567