Happy New Year everyone. Things can only get better from here, right?
Wrong.
It is my unfortunate duty to share with you the findings of the most profoundly depressing – if important – academic research you may read all year.
For a few years now, as the burdens of mid-life have piled up – the house bills, the childcare fees, the demands of juggling work and parenting – I have taken solace from research suggesting human happiness is U-shaped over a lifetime.
Yes, the happiness of youth must inevitably give way to the long, hard slog of middle age. But this too shall pass, giving way to a golden age of happiness in retirement. By the time people hit their 70s and 80s, their average self-reported levels of life satisfaction, or "happiness", return to where they were as teenagers, if not higher.
Sounds pretty good, huh?
The theory was pioneered by economists, Andrew Oswald and David Blanchflower, who collected data on happiness from 72 countries, including Australia, uncovering this distinct U-shape in every one.
The reasons driving the trend, however, remained unclear.
"One possibility is that individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations," they pondered in a 2008 paper.
Another possibility "is that a kind of comparison process is at work: I have seen schoolfriends die and come eventually to value my blessings during my remaining years".
It's an odd sounding recipe for happiness: give up your infeasible dreams and count yourself lucky you haven't died yet.
If it sounds rubbish to you, you're right, according to new research from Mark Wooden and Ning Li from the Melbourne Institute.
In a paper for the latest Australian Economic Review, they study data on self reported life satisfaction from Australia's longest running longitudinal survey, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia, which has followed the same sample of individuals for 15 years now.
Participants are asked: "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life?" and instructed to provide an answer between 0, indicating "totally dissatisfied" and 10, "totally satisfied".
On this data set, life satisfaction peaks at 8.5 at aged 15 – the youngest age of respondents in the survey – and declines sharply during a person's early to mid 20s to a score of about 7.9 – where it remains until they reach the end of their working lives.
At age 65, there is a slight blip in happiness in anticipation of retirement, but this declines sharply again to a score of about 6.4 by a person's early 90s.
According to Wooden and Li: "The loss in life satisfaction that is associated with moving from age 65 to 90 years is about three times the loss of life satisfaction that is associated with the onset of a severe disability or long-term health condition."
A reading below six out 10 on life satisfaction is the level where people are deemed at risk of depression, according to happiness researcher at Deakin University, Robert Cummins.
As depressing as it may be, Wooden says this finding of a decline in happiness with age is "commonsense". It's what gerontologists – people who study ageing – have been saying all along, but economists using inadequate data have failed to see.
One reason for the difference is the removal of the "selection effect". Just looking at average happiness by age group ignores the fact that by the time people are in their 80s and 90s, a lot of their cohort have already died. Miserable people have a high prevalence of health problems, and therefore tend to die earlier. Removing miserable people from your sample artificially inflates average happiness.
So, as it turns out, it may actually be pretty depressing to watch all your friends die. Together with increasingly poor health, this increased social isolation suffered by older people is a major culprit in elder unhappiness, according to Wooden and Li.
Many more years of longitudinal data is needed before we can draw a true picture of cradle-to-grave happiness. But if this new hypothesis holds, it may be that living longer is not necessarily the good news we imagined.
Indeed, according to Wooden and Li, it "might imply that increasing longevity will not necessarily be associated with a marked improvement in quality of life among older Australians; more Australians will simply be spending more years in a relatively dissatisfied state".
So what should we do?
From a policy perspective, Wooden and Li conclude we need to start paying greater attention to finding out what makes older people unhappy.
Rather than spending huge public resources on medical technologies to extend already very long lives, we should plough funds into policies aimed at improving the quality of life of our elders.
At an individual level, we can adjust our own expectations. Perhaps knowing tougher times lie ahead of us is instructive. You may never be as happy again as you are today. So enjoy it.
And maybe it's time for those of us who enjoy smashed avocado on toast to rethink the stereo-type of smug, happy seniors enjoying a second teenagehood.
Maybe we should use this time of year to resolve to call our grandparents, or parents, more often – the research suggests they might need a cheer up.
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