Arthur C. Brooks explains why happiness drops from your 20s to early 50s, then climbs again. He breaks happiness into three parts: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. In your 30s and 40s, you trade short-term pleasure for long-term purpose through kids, mortgages, and career. That meaning pays off later with bigger happiness gains.
People think that their happiness is going to go up and up and up and kind of max out at some point and then come back down again. That's actually wrong. The average person tends to actually decline in net-net year-to-year happiness from the early 20s until the early 50s. Now, don't panic. This is not a bad thing. Let me explain why that happens. Happiness has 3 macronutrients, 3 fundamental elements, components. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the 3 big parts of your life. You need to enjoy your life. You need to take satisfaction in your accomplishments and activities, and you need to know the why of your existence. Now, when I see happiness for the average adult declining, it's actually not the scary or alarming thing at all. What this is, is that people enjoy their lives a little bit less than they used to, but they're putting more meaning in the bank. It means that you're trading one macronutrient of happiness for another. Enjoyment is a short-term happiness play. Meaning is a long-term happiness play. When you're in your 30s and you're raising your kids and it's a pain and you're worrying about your mortgage and your job's crazy and you've got to commute, it's not that enjoyable a lot of the time, but it's very meaningful. And what that means is that you're sacrificing some of your enjoyment now for a bunch of meaning later. And that meaning really starts to come home to roost in your 50s. What we see is a massive escalation in average happiness for people from early 50s until about 70. So this is the thing to console you if you find that enjoyment is really, really tricky. You're making these happiness investments, and those happiness investments in terms of meaning are really going to pay off a little bit later.
