The Quest for Happiness
“Are you happy?” is the question at the center of almost every conversation I have, whether I’m sitting with someone one-on-one or giving a lecture to a room full of strangers. It’s also one of the most important questions we ask ourselves. When we’re at a turning point in our lives, or facing an important decision, we look back to see how we’ve lived, and forward to what might make the rest of it happy.
Some may find their lives satisfactory but even those who figured they are happy, also said they feel emptiness sometimes.
There was a report that people feel most unhappy when they are 45 years old. The feeling of satisfaction is being decreased after the age of 20 to hit the lowest point at 45. At 20, people have more hopes for the future than the worries for the future. However as they get older and reach middle age, their frustration is being accumulated. Their setbacks are sometimes as deep as experiencing being laid off, or losing a loved one. It continues until they reach 50 when they learn to accept their lives as it is and get to know how to be content.
Simply, we may assume the golden days are in our twenties but it cannot be compared to the happiness when we are content with our lots in our 60’s. Owing to the longer life span, we may have to be prepared for the later arrival of our true happiness in life.
So how does this connect to the way I look at a life? Before I go further, I should say that this way of seeing a life is inherently a matter of interpretation, not measurement. What it can offer is the bigger picture — whether someone tends to pursue wealth or authority, whether their nature is more intellectual or more expressive, whether they seem suited to working within an organization or striking out on their own. It can even offer hints about when in life certain goals tend to land. What it can’t do is tell you how much money someone will accumulate. And on top of that, whether someone is happy rarely lines up neatly with what they’ve achieved.
There’s an old Confucian teaching about the stages of a life — at fifteen, the mind turns to learning; by thirty, a person stands on their own; by forty, the doubts fall away; by fifty, one understands their place in the larger order of things. I’ve found something similar holds true in the way I read a life. The stretch from around fifteen to thirty tends to be the period when someone is actively building their sense of direction — it can be turbulent, but there’s rarely much frustration in it, because the whole period is carried forward by a vision of the future. What happens in that stretch shapes everything that follows. The years from thirty to forty-five, the ones most bound up with marriage and partnership, tend to surface a person’s agony most plainly, both physically and psychologically. It’s only after that period — after the turbulence and the agony have both been lived through — that people start learning how to simply accept their life as it is.
In the later years, the ones most tied up with children and legacy, people tend to look for security rather than take on some new challenge.
This way of reading a life offers one explanation for why the research found that people feel most unsettled around forty-five.
For someone in their twenties, that early building period matters most. For someone in their forties, it’s the marriage-and-partnership period that tends to predict what comes next. And when the later years are shaping up well, I can sometimes point toward a brighter stretch ahead, even for someone who has been through, or is currently in, a genuinely desperate situation.
Still, it’s that early building period that ends up shaping the greatest share of a life.
Much of our life path really is determined by what we do, and how we do it, before we turn thirty. Nearly every successful person I’ve studied — whether their success came through politics or through money — had a strong, well-used foundation in exactly that early period.