By the time you’re 30 you will have made a great many commitments, most of them non-intentionally. Many of these unintended choices will have been the result of the intentions of other people. Your parents’ commitments will have decided your birth, birthplace, first language, school, religious tradition (or none), neighbours, early friendships, schools. The list goes on and covers many of the most important commitments you will have made. Your parents will also have influenced many of the commitments you have made for yourself by the age of 30, including those concerning education, occupation, and perhaps life partner and children. Now that you’re more or less a fully-functioning adult where does happiness lie?
First, no sooner than you have reached something like maturity, some functions go into reverse. Generally, and however old you are, you’re getting better at some things, worse at some other things, and you’re at a plateau at some other things. There’s not one age at which you’re peak on most things, and definitely not all of them.
- information processing speed is greatest at age 18 or 19, then immediately starts to decline.
- short-term memory is best at age 25, when it levels off and then begins to drop around age 35.
- the ability to recognize faces improves until the early 30s before gradually starting to decline.
- general visual short-term memory also peaks in the early 30s
- evaluation of other people’s emotional states is best in the 40s or 50s
- combining facts and knowledge and emotions is at its maximum in people’s late 60s or early 70s.
These ages are averages. You may differ. Some of the differences will be genetic, others environmental. Where environmental factors have a big impact the advice is standard: don’t smoke, maintain a normal body weight, take exercise regularly, choose a good diet (one high in plant matter, low in sugar, salt and preservatives and other additives) and keep drug and alcohol intake low.
- Compete and collaborate You have another balancing act here. Your communality can feel comforting or claustrophobic. In the West today, the problems are largely ones of imbalance with too much emphasis on the individual, and on a financial version of success where too much power and influence goes to the richest. A few years ago, I was invited to an awards dinner and one of the people I shared a table with was a businessman who is a household name. He is very rich and has some influence. But, as far as I could see, he was the most miserable person in the room. Perhaps he was thinking about business worries, or about his cars and houses. Perhaps it was the company he was keeping that night. Or perhaps he was just lonely. Some people will tell you that we have grown soft and we need to toughen up. Others will tell you that we need to redevelop our sense of community, of loyalty and support. Few of them will tell you that you need to do both. We are more intimately connected to other people than we recognise. Our drives pull us in opposite directions; we want to belong but we want to be the top dog. I suspect our dysfunctionality is invisible to us, and so advising you to refer yourself to therapy if your megalomania is showing may be futile. Equally, if you have succumbed to a religious cult you may need help to re-emerge. Otherwise, remember that it is not only in your interest that you both compete and collaborate; it is in your society’s too.
- Have a child (or more). And remember your parents Statistically, if you are not already a parent you are likely to become a one. This is one of several important life events that you cannot experience directly before it happens. A child will test you and your relationship. It may cry for hours as a baby, may be ill or have a disability, it can be socially difficult or even divisive, get into trouble with the authorities, take up most of your free time and energy and cost a fortune. But for all of this, I’d strongly recommend having children. They demand attention. In their earliest years, they demand to be put first, at least some of the time. It is a good thing to need to care for others, to put their needs first, at least once in your life. They will challenge you in ways that you will not have imagined and, if you’re open to it, they can give you a second childhood, a new way of looking at the world, new happinesses, new hopes and new fears. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says that we have a duty to care not only for our children but also for our parents. However, you cannot give them what they gave you and you don’t know in advance what they will need even if you could. It is not a simple debt repayment; it is a declaration of care and commitment.
- Give and take - it’s the best way to live in a community MacIntyre is clear about the ties that bind us. They go much further than our families and even our friends. You are integrally connected with your communities. This is much more than the contingency of sharing the same place. You owe your identity to those around you - parents, teachers, family, friends and others in your local community when you were growing up. You owe your community. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can give them is a good example. But as well as owing your own community a lot, you owe everyone a little, the human hand in times of trouble. From the times of Ancient Greece and Rome, philosophers have emphasised how important your contribution is, both to those close to you and to humanity as a whole. Modern social scientists conclude that if you are a taker, you are likely to be happy but if you are a giver, you are likely to find life more meaningful. Try both!
- Do not seek to eliminate suffering, especially your own You may think that avoiding or minimising pain is essential to your happiness. It is not. In fact, doing so may block important routes to being happy. The challenges in painful experiences help us to grow, give us tools to cope and can provide direct sources of happiness. Wrapping children in cotton wool doesn’t help them to develop the skills to overcome problems and pains. It weakens them and makes them feel entitled. It is much easier to be a coping adult if we have learned the basic skills earlier. Learning to overcome pain has two sources of pleasure: one of mastery; the other of comparison, of knowing that even a bad condition is better than a worse one. Some stress is necessary to develop resilience whereas overwhelming stress is… overwhelming. If your life has been one of low to moderate adversity consider yourself fortunate. Pain is useful; it warns of danger, of limits. But it also provides an anchor for our pleasures.
- Success may not be enough Where do you see yourself in five years time? is the sort of question you may be asked at a job interview. And it appears that goals matter to success. If nothing else, they provide a frame for your attention; they draw goal-relevant information to you. But his begs the question of the relevance of the goals to your well-being or happiness. After all, if your goals are inappropriate, you may be putting your effort in the wrong place. What conclusions have researchers reached? Having clear goals makes their achievement more likely. There is a satisfaction in reaching these goals. Goals that are generated internally are more powerful than goals that are imposed. However, there is a special class of external goal that is persuasive; when someone you trust encourages you, you are more likely to feel that the motivation is much like your own. Money doesn’t equal happiness but the two are generally positively correlated. And, like the things that we own, money may be a visible demonstrator of a type of success. You may feel that positions of power and influence are signs of achievement and success. They are related with better health and general well-being. And to a combination of hard work and good luck. But in these years, even if you have been fortunate enough to have attained many of your goals and gained some of the trappings of success, you may feel that this kind of success is not enough. The contentments that were so lively in childhood may look pale. The world may have lost its sparkle. Despite any riches you have, life may feel empty.
- Finding Meaning Happiness is about pleasure. Happiness is also about achievement. But without pain and failure there would be no context for happiness. And the bigger context for happiness is given by eudaimonia. Etymologically, eudaimonia means feeling like a benevolent god, or being protected by one. In practice, it means living with a good spirit. It provides a kind of confidence that is unassailable. In modern psychology, it is often seen as the third level of happiness. It has the modern synonyms fulfilment and flourishing. After a crisis, or even after great success, the world can seem meaningless. All is dross or nothing can ever match the peak again. Finding something that gives your life as a whole meaning - what you are, what you do, the connections with people around you - can take happiness to a different level. The best of these meta-meanings are unfalsifiable. Of course, that makes them non-scientific or beyond science. I think the best word for this is a calling. Most people who find such a motivational state choose callings that are generally positive. Religion, charitable acts, caring and educating regularly feature in people’s reports and, perhaps more neutrally, skill building. There is a problem though. Meaning may be internally coherent but externally dysfunctional. End of the world theorists are often embarrassed when they exceed their best before date. More troubling are the autocrats who have great clarity of purpose in their life. If Hitler had employed Trump’s marketing team he could have campaigned under the banner Make Germany Great Again. Clear, coherent, catastrophic.
Contentment, achievement, fulfilment and flourishing are all available to you as an adult. Quite how you balance them out is another question. Hedonism, an Ancient Greek philosophy, focused on contentment; why bother to trouble yourself too much if you can have sensual pleasures. Plato and Aristotle advocated meritocracy, rule based on achievement. Aristotle, however, thought that eudaimonia was the peak of happiness, that we should all strive to live well, with a good spirit. The good life is not only good for individual self-interest but good for our communities.
The route to success, even the achievement of goals, is often best made obliquely. In any complex environment, we often don’t know the best way to approach our goals. In these circumstances, I suggest that you frame your goals broadly and head off in what seems like the right direction, then improvise. The feedback will not only guide you on you journey, it may also change your goals.
To choose the finding and living of a good life as the core of your being is difficult. What was once a practical philosophy with people trying but often failing to reach their quest, finds a narrow audience today. The path to eudaimonia is not strewn with roses but it may be the only way to overcome despair and meaninglessness.
