AGE OF OPPORTUNITY

THE 18TH OF JUNE 2019 WAS A TUESDAY LIKE MOST OTHERS.

I got up, did some work, ate my lunch and, at around 4pm, departed from my south-London flat to Islington for a pot of tea with my friend David Baker, a lecturer at the School of Life. In the evening, I attended my weekly t’ai chi class, before returning home on a swaying train. BBC Radio’s 10pm headlines were probably related to Brexit, and my final thoughts of the day would have been like other events in this 24-hour block of time: nothingy and evanescent. It was an everyday kind of day, free of depressive episodes or overspills of anxiety. There were no explosive interpersonal conflicts or items of heart-stopping news.

All in all, it was insignificant enough to mark an equally immaterial event: this was the day I turned 47.2 – and if you, too, can remember your 47.2nd birthday, you’re either lying or an economist. One such number cruncher is the esteemed David “Danny” Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, who earlier this year published a paper identifying this precise moment as the age of minimum wellbeing – the nadir of what academics refer to as life satisfaction, and what we civilians know as “happiness”. On average, it hits the floor at 47.2 years old.

DEFINING HAPPINESS

For some time now, data has suggested that happiness follows a U-shaped curve across life, dropping as life gathers in gravity, before rising again as middle age fades into one’s dotage. “The happiness curve is everywhere,” Blanchflower’s paper noted, meaning that it’s both provable and global. But it also time-stamps the so-called “midlife crisis” that folk wisdom has long identified, along with the flavours that often blend into it: awareness of one’s physical weakening and declining virility, plus the existential, meaning-of-life-type dilemmas, and perhaps burnout