Abstract: I examine the relationship between unhappiness and age using data from eight well-being data files on nearly 14 million respondents across forty European countries and the United States and 168 countries from the Gallup World Poll. I use twenty different individual characterizations of unhappiness including many not good mental health days; anxiety; worry; loneliness; sadness; stress; pain; strain, depression and bad nerves; phobias and panic; being downhearted; having restless sleep; losing confidence in oneself; not being able to overcome difficulties; being under strain; being unhappy; feeling a failure; feeling left out; feeling tense; and thinking of yourself as a worthless person. I also analyze responses to a further general attitudinal measure regarding whether the situation in the respondent's country is getting worse. Responses to all these unhappiness questions show a, ceteris paribus, hill shape in age, with controls and many also do so with limited controls for time and country. Unhappiness is hill-shaped in age and the average age where the maximum occurs is 49 with or without controls. There is an unhappiness curve.
3. Discussion
There appears to be a midlife crisis where unhappiness reaches a peak in mid-life in the late forties across Europe and the United States. That matches the evidence for a nadir in happiness that reaches a low in the late forties also (Blanchflower, 2020a). In that paper it was found that, averaging across 257 individual country estimates from developing countries gave an age minimum of 48.2 for well-being and doing the same across the 187 country estimates for advanced countries gives a similar minimum of 47.2.
Table 14 summarizes the results obtained by solving out the age at which the quadratic fitted to the data reaches a maximum. There are sixteen without controls that average at 47.4 and twenty-eight with controls with the maxima averaging out to 49.1, and 48.6 years overall for the forty-four estimates. This is very close to the finding in Blanchflower (2020a) that the U-shape in happiness data averaged 47.2 in developed countries and 48.2 in developing. The conclusion is therefore that data on unhappiness and happiness are highly consistent at the age when the low point or zenith in well-being occurs.
[table]
I add to the growing list of unhappiness variables that have hump shapes in age with or without controls. I find a broadly similar hill or hump shaped curve in twenty measures of unhappiness including being many not good mental health days; being stressed, unhappy; anxious, sad, sleepless; lonely; tired; depressed, tense, under strain; having bad nerves; phobias and panics and being in pain, feeling left out of society and several more. I also found the hump shape for a more general measure relating to the respondent's belief that the country 'is getting worse'. It doesn't seem to matter much how the question about unhappiness is phrased or coded or which country the question is asked or when we get similar results.
A referee has noted that if you look at the graphs, you see wave-like patterns (sadness, panics), hump-shaped patterns (sleep, stress), and increasing-to-a-plateau-like patterns (pain and worry with limited controls). No matter the exact shape of the plots in the various charts, it is clear that there is a peak somewhere in mid-life. I don't claim the patterns are all identical, but their broad similarity is striking, with a peak in prime age. There is a clear consistent pattern in the unhappiness and age data.
Blanchflower and Graham (2020) showed that the drop in measured happiness from youth to the mid-point low of the U-shape is quantitatively large and was not "trivial" as some psychologists have claimed. Indeed, they show the decline in well-being was about the equivalent of that observed from losing a spouse or a job. The results on unhappiness are similar. For example, in the Gallup USDTP averaged across the years 2008–2017 the probability of depression in the raw data rose from 12% at age 18 to 21% at age 58. The proportion of the employed who were depressed was 12% versus 24% for the unemployed. In addition, 12% of the married were depressed yesterday versus 19% of the widowed. In the raw data from the BRFSS the proportion who said they had 20 or more bad days in a month was 6.6% at age 18 and 8.4 at age 47, the peak. Among the married the rate was 5.5% versus 8% for the widowed. The rise in unhappiness to the mid-life peak, is thus large and comparable in magnitude to major life events.
So, what is going on in mid-life? In Blanchflower and Oswald (2008) we suggested three possibilities. First, that individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations. Second, it could be that cheerful people live systematically longer than the miserable, and that the nadir in happiness in mid-life thus traces out in part a selection effect. A third is that a kind of comparison process is at work: I have seen school-friends die and come eventually to value my blessings during my remaining years. Stone et al. (2010) suggest that "it is plausible that wellbeing improves when children leave home, given reduced levels of family conflict and financial burden" (p.9986, 2010).
The finding of a nadir in well-being in midlife likely adds important support to the notion that the prime-aged, and especially those with less education, are especially vulnerable to disadvantages and shocks.27 The global Covid-19 pandemic, which is disproportionately impacting marginal workers will likely make matters even harder to deal with for many at a well-being low point (Bell and Blanchflower, 2020). Some especially defenseless individuals might face downward spirals as age and life circumstances interact. Many will not be getting the social/emotional support they need as they are isolated and lonely, in addition to the first-order effects of whatever they are coping with in normal times. Lack of health care coverage in the US may well be a compounding factor where there is also an obesity epidemic. A midlife low is tough and made much harder when combined with a deep downturn and a slow and weak recovery. Peak unhappiness occurs in mid-life. There is an unhappiness curve.
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