Arthur C. Brooks presents David Blanchflower's research showing two groups: people whose happiness rises throughout life, and high achievers whose well-being declines after a peak. Success creates expectations that burnout and retirement can't sustain, a pattern Brooks calls psychoprofessional gravitation.
David Blanchflower collected data on how happiness changes through people's lifetimes. He's got data from countries all over the world. It turns out that the population breaks up into more or less 2 equal-sized groups where half the population gets happier all the way till death. And the other half of the population starts getting unhappier all the way till death. Who tends to be in the upper branch of happiness after 70 and who tends to be in the lower branch and is not who you think. It turns out that successful strivers tend to be in the lower branch, not the upper branch. That's not what the world tells you. The world tells you money, power, honor, prestige, Prestige, admiration of other people, fame. You get that stuff, you're going to be happy for the rest of your life. And it turns out the more of those things that you have, the more likely you are to actually be on the lower branch when you get old. Why? Well, this is the burden of high achievement, as some psychologists have called it. When you are identified as a super striver and successful when you're young, that is going to end at some point. And that's going to be noticeable to you, at which point you're going to be disappointed. What goes up must come down. I call that the principle of psychoprofessional gravitation. I made that up because it sounds fancy. The truth is what that means is what goes up professionally must come down. And if you have a big party in your career, when you stop doing it because you burn out or you get worse at it, or you have to retire, you're going to be bummed out. And that's exactly what we find from a lot of people in the lower branch of the curve.
