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On his 70th birthday, in 1905, Mark Twain gave a speech about the secret to successful aging. (If 70 doesn’t sound aged to you, bear in mind that because of high infant-mortality rates, the average life expectancy for someone born before 1850 was less than 40.) “I have achieved my 70 years in the usual way,” he declared, according to an account in The New York Times, “by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.” The maxim he offered was this: “We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.”
Typical for Twain, this was solid folk wisdom wrapped in a joke. The secret to a long and happy life is clearly not smoking, drinking, and carousing. But he’s correct that there is no plug-and-play formula that works for everyone. Within obvious parameters, each of us should experiment with different ideas and specific ways of living, a proposition I have previously discussed. Some people are at their healthiest on a vegetarian diet; others will be so by eating Mediterranean. Some are happiest living in a big metropolis such as New York City and Los Angeles; others are living their best life out in the country.
These details aside, however, a few general habits do matter. I won’t detain you with the health-and-wellness stuff that you might hear from your doctor: Lay off the smokes and go for a walk, for God’s sake. I want instead to call your attention to certain patterns of behavior that are not so obvious but that help explain why old people tend to be happier than young adults. The sooner you can learn and adopt these rules for good living, the sooner you can enjoy their fruits.
No question, you will come across some grouchy, unhappy old people, but on average in the United States, older adults score significantly higher in well-being than younger adults. Older people experience lower psychological distress and negative affect, and more frequent positive affect. I have also written before about how older folks tend to enjoy positive changes to their personality: agreeableness and conscientiousness rise as we age; neuroticism falls. What explains this pattern is not immediately apparent. Without a doubt, acquired wisdom plays a role: Older people have more life data and make fewer errors. But three particular patterns of behavior that old people display do matter a great deal.
[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be happy growing older]
The first involves social networks. Early in life, you were probably encouraged to develop a wide range of friendships with different kinds of people, for the sake of your happiness. This was good advice insofar as you learned new ways of thinking and living from people outside your typical social circles. But it doesn’t mean that you need to expend special effort maintaining links with lots of people with whom you have superficial ties. This would just fill your free time with unrewarding interactions. Yet precisely this sort of broad but thin acquaintance characterizes the networks of many young adults. Older people selectively narrow their social circles to focus on the individuals with whom they share common passions, experience positive emotions, and derive satisfaction. The casual associates who don’t make the cut are left behind.
This might sound selfish, but people actually become more altruistic as they age—the second pattern of behavior that raises older people’s happiness compared with that of young people. In a 2021 survey of research on self-reported altruism and observed charitable behavior, four psychologists found that 14 of the 16 studies they reviewed revealed that older adults are more focused on others than younger ones. In one especially ingenious demonstration of this finding, researchers asked adults of differing ages to clasp a handheld grip-strength device called a dynamometer and squeeze it with a high level of effort in order to obtain rewards for themselves or others. Younger adults gripped harder than older adults for self-rewards; older adults gripped harder than the younger adults to gain rewards for others.
The third pattern involves how older people react to difficult events in life. As a person ages, they usually get better at both avoiding and dealing with life stress. One 2023 longitudinal study involving nearly 3,000 adults ages 25 to 74 found that 70-year-olds felt stress on 40 percent fewer days than 25-year-olds did. Part of this is because the elders exposed themselves less to stressful events, but it is also because they were less reactive to stressful situations. Some of this is surely down to life circumstances: Retired 70-somethings no longer have demanding jobs. But another factor is that when old people encounter a stressful situation, they tend simply to shrug it off. Whether to respond to a challenging event might not seem voluntary, but in fact, it can be—and when the stress is unavoidable, the elderly simply react less by caring less.
As I was writing this essay, one experience came to mind that reinforced the points above, involving a two-day meeting that I’d attended in Rome some 25 years ago for a large international charity. The conference convened a small group of well-being specialists —some very junior (as I was at the time), some much older and more famous. Among the latter was a 60-year-old woman of global stature in the field. Feeling honored to be in her company, I paid close attention to her behavior. At the time, it seemed a bit strange; now it does not.
She had flown long haul through the night to attend the meeting, without compensation, and participated fully in every session. But when it came to the lavish dinner party held on the last night of the conference—which to me was a great perk—she walked into the bistro and declared, “This place is too loud” and left. This remarkable woman was exhibiting all three happiness patterns: She was spending time professionally with people who shared her passion for a cause, she was making a personal effort and donating her considerable expertise, and she was saying no to something that wasn’t worth the stress and sacrifice for her.
At 36, I was amazed that she’d pass on the party. Today, at 61, I follow her example: I will go to considerable personal effort to serve causes that I care about, and I will discuss matters of spiritual depth or scientific importance for hours on end. But small talk in a noisy bar? No chance.
So what follows are three general rules I learned from older people that lead to higher well-being.
1. Go deep or go home. I try to ensure that my social relationships—those that are voluntary and involve discretionary time—focus only on facets of life that matter: love, faith, philosophy, virtue, culture, aesthetics. I don’t want to talk about my beach vacation, or yours, unless a major epiphany occurred as the tide came in.
2. Serve more. A unique channel of well-being is serving others in causes I care about. This can mean giving money and time, of course. But it also entails regularly subjecting my work to a “values test”: Does each activity primarily edify and uplift others?
[Read: Life for 30-somethings is getting more stressful]
3. Care less. I think back to the things that kept me awake as a younger man—this conflict at work, that worry about money—and shake my head. Now when something is bothering me or threatens to stress me out, I ask myself whether the issue is likely to be bothering me in a week’s time. If the answer is no, I try to get a head start right then on not caring.
True to his craft as a satirist, Twain preferred to mock the whole business of elders dispensing counsel to youngsters, as he did in his 1882 essay “Advice to Youth”: “If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick.”
I strongly suspect, however, that Twain followed better rules than this by the time he was 70. Closing his birthday remarks, the old riverboat pilot said that he had laid a course “toward the sinking sun with a contented heart”—no doubt by following the happy (if not quite so funny) principles above.
The post Three Reasons Old People Are Happier appeared first on The Atlantic.
