Older, wiser, and ... happier?

We, by our human nature, love to label things in an attempt to better understand them. “Baby Boomers”. “Millennials”. And now, “Gen Alpha”.

Stereotypes that pit ‘us’ against ‘them’ can be a barrier to proper discourse. But exploring demographic groups in this way can help us to gain a clearer picture of human happiness.

That’s why we decided to put the relationship between happiness and age under the microscope in World Happiness Report 2024. There has been much discussion around our findings, and how they fit with results from other researchers the world over.

For respondents aged 60 and above, we found in many countries, including India and most countries in Latin America, Asia, North America and Australasia, that happiness grows with each year of ageing. This seems puzzling because we know that social interactions become less frequent at higher ages, and self-assessed health status gets steadily worse with age.

Since our research shows that physical health and social interactions are both strong positive predictors of happiness, how can people be reporting higher happiness at older ages?

One reason, beyond the gradual secession of the mid-life crunch, comes from research suggesting that as we age, we acquire sufficient wisdom to look through the prevailing negativity bias to pay more attention to noticing and remembering the good features of our lives.

Therefore, even though the frequency of social interactions decreases with age, wiser selection of what to focus on and how to connect with others leads older people to report higher levels of social support than those of middle age.

Perhaps no country better represents the huge disparity between youth wellbeing and the happiness of older generations than the nation I call home: Canada.

Canadians over the age of 60 are, on average, the 8th happiest such group in the world. Ask a Canuck aged 60 or more how satisfied they are with their life, and the average response is more than 7 out of 10.

And yet, our under-30s languish at 58th in the world. Canadian Gen Z-ers are almost a full point worse off on the 0 to 10 scale we use to measure life satisfaction. This languishing is much less in French-speaking Quebec, where less attention is paid to the negative news and views in English-language US social media.

There are, of course, many domestic factors at play here. And perhaps we’d do well to look at Lithuania (1st for the young), Serbia (3rd), and Romania (8th), where the picture is reversed, and young people are embarking on happier lives than their parents and grandparents could have previously imagined.

Prof John Helliwell
Editor, World Happiness Report

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