A few months ago, bioethicist
Ezekiel Emanuel had an essay in The Atlantic saying that, all things
considered, he would prefer to die around age 75. He argued that he would
rather clock out with all his powers intact than endure a sad, feeble decline.
The problem is that if Dr
Emanuel dies at 75, he will likely be missing his happiest years. When
researchers ask people to assess their own well-being, people in their 20s rate
themselves highly. Then there is a decline as people get sadder in middle age,
bottoming out around age 50. But then happiness levels shoot up, so that old
people are happier than young people. The people who rate themselves most
highly are those aged 82 to 85.
Psychologists who study this
now famous U-Curve tend to point out that old people are happier because of
changes in the brain. For example, when you show people a crowd of faces, young
people unconsciously tend to look at the threatening faces, but older people’s
attention gravitates towards the happy ones.
Older people are more relaxed,
on average. They are spared some of the burden of thinking about the future. As
a result, they get more pleasure out of present, ordinary activities.
My problem with a lot of the
research on happiness in old age is that it is so deterministic. It treats the
ageing of the emotional life the way you might treat the ageing of the body: As
this biological, chemical and evolutionary process that happens to people.
I would rather think that elder
happiness is an accomplishment, not a condition, that people get better at
living through effort, by mastering specific skills.
I would like to think that
people get steadily better at handling life’s challenges. In middle age, they
are confronted by stressful challenges they cannot control, such as having
teenage children. But, in old age, they have more control over the challenges
they will tackle and they get even better at addressing them.
Aristotle teaches us that being
a good person is not mainly about learning moral rules and following them. It
is about performing social roles well — being a good parent, teacher, lawyer or
friend.
IMPROVING WITH AGE
It is easy to think of some of
the skills that some people get better at over time. First, there is
bifocalism, the ability to see the same situation from multiple perspectives.
Dr Anthony Kronman of Yale Law
School once wrote: “Anyone who has worn bifocal lenses knows that it takes time
to learn to shift smoothly between perspectives and to combine them in a single
field of vision. The same is true of deliberation. It is difficult to be
compassionate, and often just as difficult to be detached, but what is most
difficult of all is to be both at once.”
Only with experience can a
person learn to see a fraught situation both close up, with emotional
intensity, and far away, with detached perspective.
Then there is lightness, the
ability to be at ease with the downsides of life. In their book, Lighter As We
Go, Dr Jimmie Holland and Dr Mindy Greenstein argue that while older people
lose memory, they also learn that most setbacks are not the end of the world.
Anxiety is the biggest waste in life. If you know that you will recover, you
can save time and get on with it sooner.
“The ability to grow lighter as
we go is a form of wisdom that entails learning how not to sweat the small
stuff , learning how not to be too invested in particular outcomes,” write Drs
Holland and Greenstein.
Then there is the ability to balance
tensions. In Practical Wisdom, Dr Barry Schwartz and Dr Kenneth Sharpe argue
that performing many social roles means balancing competing demands.
A doctor has to be honest, but
also kind. A teacher has to instruct, but also inspire. You cannot find the
right balance in each context by memorising a rule book. This form of wisdom
can only be earned by acquiring a repertoire of similar experiences.
Finally, experienced heads have
intuitive awareness of the landscape of reality, a feel for what other people
are thinking and feeling, an instinct for how events will flow.
In The Wisdom Paradox, Dr
Elkhonon Goldberg details the many ways the brain deteriorates with age: Brain
cells die, mental operations slow. But a lifetime of intellectual effort can
lead to empathy and pattern awareness.
“What I have lost with age in
my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for
instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight,” Dr Goldberg writes.
It is comforting to know that,
for many, life gets happier with age.
But it is more useful to know
how individuals get better at doing the things they do.
The point of culture is to
spread that wisdom from old to young; to put that thousand-year heart in a
still young body.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Brooks, a New York Times
columnist, is an author of several books.
