This is a tedious book. Jonathan Rauch is a competent journalist, and does well summarizing the work of scientist and other thinkers about happiness. However, he attempts to make his own contribution to the field by conducting a survey and using the experience of his correspondents and his own life story to illustrate the scientific findings. There are dome nuggets of interesting material here, but the reader is mining low-grade ore.

I thought this was worth reading, as it's another to add to the list of self-help books about happiness, which seems to be a popular topic. It includes both factual academic information as well as experiences of the author, so would be a good combo for those who like more than just author opinions.

A self-help book but loaded with scientific and academic knowledge and facts. A great book for those who can't stand the traditional self-help book

Lengthy meandering summary of research studies about aging.

The Happiness Curve is found worldwide in both males and females and even in apes. The curve shows that people get decreasingly satisfied with life (the definition of happiness used here) from age 20 to their early 50s. After bottoming out, their happiness grows until old age diseases occur sometime in their 80s. Studies cited conclude that at around 50, people get more realistic about what they can still achieve. This jolt to reality is painful and may result in the stereotypical mid-life crisis of divorce, career change and sport cars. A few people may have an ascending line or a V curve depending on their life experiences. Therefore, it is possible to avoid the common depression of mid-life but it is harder then than during other phases of life.

I wanted to like and recommend this book. However, I didn’t and I can’t. The Happiness Curve is full of personal experiences of the author and people he met. I don’t think they added anything other than more pages. Please just get to the information promised in the book’s summary. 2 stars.

Thanks to the publisher, Thomas Dunne Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

“When I'm ridin' round the world
And I'm doin' this and I'm signin' that
And I'm tryin' to make some girl, who tells me
Baby, better come back maybe next week
Can't you see I'm on a losing streak

I can't get no, oh, no, no, no, hey, hey, hey
That's what I say, I can't get no, I can't get no
I can't get no satisfaction, no satisfaction
No satisfaction, no satisfaction”
-- (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Songwriters: Keith Richards / Mick Jagger

”I interviewed dozens of people for this book trying to understand in an intimate, textured way how they experience life satisfaction over time. I have learned what we all already know. There is no single, standard trajectory for human happiness.”

”Knowing the independent effect of age on happiness tells us no more about our actual lives than knowing the independent effect of pitching on baseball tells us about who actually wins the game.

“The answer lies in understanding what the happiness curve is really saying, which is this: It is perfectly possible to be very satisfied with your life in middle age, but it is harder.”

The best non-fiction is as easy and rewarding to read as the best fiction, it holds your interest, it focuses on facts in a way that makes it all that much more real, a visual, and maybe emotional experience. This was, for the most part, not a book I ever felt fully engaged in, and while it had some parts that were more compelling, it felt mired down by the way it was told.

Essentially, The Happiness Curve is a different view on that period of life frequently referred to as a “mid-life crisis” is really a “curve,” which means that after that period of dissatisfaction, life satisfaction goes back up, creating a U shape. At least according to the charts – meaning that there is no guarantee, but the majority of people come out of the mid-life period of “dissatisfaction” with their focus changed.

This period of life that creates this U Shape is what Rauch calls the Happiness Curve.

For me, this book had it’s own curve, and began showing more of a personality at the mid-point, and it began to hold my interest more, for a while. There are a lot of points he makes, repeatedly, in various ways. After a while that was annoying.

I wouldn’t consider it a Happiness Curve in the Pharrell Williams sense, I would equate it more with a calmer sense of happiness, a higher level of appreciation for life, in general, for contentment rather than needing as much high levels of excitement, at least from the examples he cited.

Pub Date: 1 MAY 2018


Many thanks for the ARC provided by St. Martin’s Press / Thomas Dunne Books

A few years ago, Jonathan Rauch’s Atlantic article “The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis” was passed around avidly on social media by many people in my 40-something cohort. Rauch’s piece discussed research on the “U-curve,” which indicates that youth and old age are periods of relative happiness, while middle age is often a time of discontent and sometimes even despair. This holds true not just for people, but for primates, implying that the origins of the phenomenon “may lie partly in the biology we share with closely related great apes.”

Many of us middle-agers can identify with Rauch when he writes how he “would wake up feeling disappointed, my head buzzing with obsessive thoughts about my failures. I had accomplished too little professionally, had let life pass me by, needed some nameless kind of change or escape.” (Rauch is an award-winning and very successful journalist and author, proving that even the highest achievers are prone to this particular malaise.) Now 57, Rauch is happier and feels he’s emerged from the trough of the U and that his life is on the upswing.

He has expanded his Atlantic article into a new book, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. The research he presents is quite convincing, though it’s not difficult to come up with anecdotal counter-examples. For instance, I read this passage—”With age, apparently, we lose not our emotional sharpness, but our tendency to have our day ruined by annoyances and setbacks. Perhaps, then, positivity comes about because older people lose their emotional edge… when storms do boil up, older people have better control over their feelings”—shortly after one of the president’s more apoplectic tweets hit the news cycle. (Luckily, most people in their 70s don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re under investigation by the FBI.)

Rauch’s main goal in The Happiness Curve is to reassure people in their late 40s and early 50s that it will get better; science says so. Economist Hannes Schwandt studied people who had grown up in two very different cultures, East and West Germany, under varying economic circumstances; he found that younger people usually overestimated how happy they’d be in five years, while older Germans greatly underestimated their future life satisfaction. “‘If [people] know that life satisfaction tends to be U-shaped in everyone and previous expectations don’t match up with outcomes for most people, that could make people feel less unhappy about their life,’ Schwandt told me. Normalization, he believes, can have a double-whammy effect. ‘If you tell people there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, this already helps you. And the second thing that helps you is maybe you can break the cycle of this vicious feedback effect. By knowing this is a normal developmental stage, you will also suffer less.'”

Many of us fear aging because we fear ill health and infirmity. However, Rauch quotes a study showing that “even as people became more afflicted with disability, their self-rated successful aging increased… most people remain surprisingly happy despite getting frail and infirm.”

The Happiness Curve will provide readers with a lot of food for thought, but the scientific study of happiness is still a relatively young field and I’m sure there is still more work to be done. Ultimately, perhaps this research may one day give us insights that could help the enormous numbers of people in their 50s who struggle with issues like opioid addiction and suicide. Meanwhile, those of us with garden-variety middle-aged ennui should read the book and take its lessons to heart.

I found this book interesting, but a bit lengthy in areas. I could not place myself into the same categories of a number of the people included in the study because it seemed to be male dominated. However I did find the information interesting.

We've all heard about "mid-life" crisis and the seemingly nutty (or outright crazy) things that people can do during that slump. Turns out that this is normal, as we naturally begin facing our own mortality and sometimes desperately try to avoid it. There is something empowering in understanding why we face these challenges at particular points in our lives......and something hopeful in knowing that we come out of it on an upswing, with a better appreciation for ourselves, our accomplishments, and more compassion for other people. Jonathan Rauch's exploration of the 'Happiness Curve' led him to interview people from all walks of life and it appears that, the world over, we are indeed the same in this respect. During that downswing, we face not only mortality, but we question our value in society and become more concerned about what others think of our progress, regardless of how much we make or how successful we are, or how wonderful our families are. Society leads us to believe that our happiness is measured in personal success. What he finds, however, is that the upswing begins to occur when we stop fretting over our own forward momentum and start looking at how we can be a positive impact for others. The author shares a huge amount of information that has been scientifically reviewed but also gives us an interesting look at how aging can be a productive and beautiful, as well as necessary, part of the human condition.

It makes intuitive sense that happiness troughs in the 40s and then starts to upswing in one's 50s. There are commonly a lot of pressures in place (financial, caring for aged parents and one's children both, career etc) that tend to ease up as one gets a bit older. Combine that with the continued physical health and stamina most have in their 50s and -voila- happiness increases. The author discusses this main concept in an engaging and thorough way and buttresses all points with applicable research findings. An enjoyable read.
My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

We've all heard the jokes about midlife crisis and folks who are experiencing difficulties in midlife are often pooh-poohed -- I remember one middle aged friend laughing at midlife crises as self-indulgent, saying "I can't afford a midlife crisis!"

Would we do the same thing with respect to adolescents? There may be many satires and jokes about adolescence but we are all very aware of the real changes and challenges faced by humans in this phase of their development. It exists and it's not a joke.

Well, the same can be said of midlife, as it turns out. Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Happiness Curve" starts off by diving into a huge pile of research: dozens of research teams have seen this u-shaped curve in self-reported life satisfaction scores. We start off VERY happy in life and our satisfaction gradually decreases at mid-life, and then begins to increase again after this midlife trough. It's not just cultural -- it's found across multiple cultures and samples across decades. And, it's not just humans -- researchers working with primates around the world, in various settings, have found the same curve in our nearest non-human primate relatives and may be biological.

Rauch defines this midlife slump as "normal and natural." it's not just a "crisis" but "a change in our values and sources of satisfaction, a change in who we are."

"It is about the dawn of 'encore adulthood,' a whole new stage of adult development which is already starting to reshape the way we think about retirement,education, and human potential."

Studies have examined all sorts of extrinsic and intrinsic factors -- income, education, wealth, fast or slow growing economies, depression, and so on. The author provides a very indepth review of these studies and how different kinds of happiness are defined (affective vs longer term life satisfaction).

Humans are programmed to start off big and then switch gears -- so when we get to middle age and we haven't saved the world, we get a negative feedback loop that says "Something's wrong with me."

The keys to surviving or "muddling through" this trough are to first and foremost, accept as "normal" what you are going through and resist the urge for comparison to others or to your own goals/expectations. Then, despite your inclination to become a hermit and hide out -- connect and reach out to others who are going through it or who have gone through it: connectedness is one of the keys to surviving. Finally, make changes in small steps, not giant leaps -- and build on your strengths, skills and experience.

Just before that section of the book -- the author gets into the wisdom studies and some very pragmatic and clear information on what it is and why it is important to those

Rauch also supplies plenty of studies that demonstrate the universal principles of underlying wisdom and where people usually end up on the other side of the trough:

"compassion and prosocial attitudes that reflect concern for the common good; pragmatic knowledge of life; the use of one’s pragmatic knowledge to resolve personal and social problems; an ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, and to see multiple points of view; emotional stability and mastery of one’s own feelings; a capacity for reflection and for dispassionate self-understanding."

There are three basic components of wisdom -- and they have to be balanced with each other, and serve to enrich and strengthen the other components. The author uses "Star Trek" as an example: "In Star Trek, undoubtedly the wisest of all television shows, a recurrent theme is that the most blazingly intelligent character, the Vulcan Spock, lacks the instinctive empathy of Dr. McCoy and the pragmatic decisiveness of Captain Kirk. None of the three alone is wise. Wisdom arises from the (sometimes tense) interaction of the triumvirate."

The studies on wisdom align nicely with the basic tenets of Buddhism -- which may explain why so many folks are drawn to it in middle age, it provides a structure and community for their changing values and beliefs. There's no association between wisdom and intelligence, "What wise people know about is life."

Wisdom, he says, is balanced, reflective, active -- "the happiness curve is a social adaptation, a slow-motion reboot of our emotional software to repurpose us for a different role in society."

"You may be dissatisfied, but you don’t need to be quite so dissatisfied about being dissatisfied!"

It's a long slow adjustment that is normal, not pathological, and you're NOT crazy or losing your mind!

The book is really well written, enjoyable and informative. I really appreciate that it doesn't focus entirely on perimenopause or "hormones" -- but I do wish that there was a bit more coverage on that area aside from a mention of "the grandmother effect" and the interesting bit of trivia that humans are one of 3 species on this planet where the female of the species long outlives her fertility (the other two species are whales).

Just as learning has a curve, so does midlife malaise according to author Jonathan Rauch in his latest nonfiction book, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. Rauch tackles the complexities of midlife dissatisfaction and existential unease by synthesizing reams of research on the subject of happiness. Rauch concludes that happiness follows a bell curve that deep dives during midlife and upswings in the third act of people’s lives. The research is encouraging if you are in the midlife doldrums; unsettling if you are on the front end, and reassuring if you are on the back in of this so-called curve of life satisfaction. Happiness is circumstantial and situational. Happiness also is a mindset and a decision. Its many nuances come together in a bell curve pattern that explains human nature and life satisfaction in a hopeful, compassionate and reassuring narrative. My takeaway: The Happiness Curve is an educational, insightful, intelligent and entertaining exploration of one of life’s most counterintuitive riddles: Why getting old makes us happier?

I requested this book to learn more about the happiness curve, and it does that. I appreciate text that’s not written in research passive style.

However the author explains every concept by telling stories. They’re full of detail, and very long, and they wander down every side trail without an editor. Is it really necessary to know what color of clothes a researcher is wearing? Do we need to learn about the waist size of their pants? Do we have to read about their ancestors to understand their credibility?

I wanted to read the book for its research insights, but I had to work through a lot of distractions to get there.

Appealing writing with situations that draw you into the topic well. Not going to light a major fire but offers reasons, suggestions and guidance

The Happiness Curve is an interesting take on ageing. It's a collation of research and anecdotes on life satisfaction and happiness. The message seems straightforward: the mid-life slump is normal and it gets better. I like the advice the author shares in the last two chapters of the book. Interesting point about the "Get me out of here!" temptation and starting over.

I'm not embarrassed to say that I just turned 48 years old. It feels good to be in a life place where I've had a lot of experiences that help me empathize with other people, and can still look forward to having many more experiences. I feel like I've accomplished a lot in my 48 years, and have found and am actively pursuing my passions. That being said, though, I noticed that as I celebrated that birthday, and as my husband approaches his 50th birthday, together we find ourselves in a little bit of a midlife "weird spot." It's by no means a crisis, but we're not feeling the way we thought we'd be feeling at this time in our lives. And according to Jonathan Rauch, author of The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, we're not alone.

Like a good many others of our demographic, he says, we find ourselves disappointed and restive, and disappointed in ourselves that we're disappointed and restive, even though we're exactly where we planned, hoped, and worked to be for many years. We have a lot of hobbies that we enjoy as a family: dirt biking, camping, fishing, snow skiing, water skiing, gaming, etc. We have had a little bit more than our share of health crises in the past year or so, what with my oldest's vestibular neuritis, etc., but all in all, we don't really have much to complain about.

"...Contentment is harder to come by in midlife," Mr. Rauch says.  Across the board—developed or developing countries, genders, income levels, education levels, etc.—there is an almost unilateral decline in self-reported life satisfaction that begins in the mid- to late-30's and troughs in the early 50's.  But also across the board, life satisfaction tends to increase from there on out, making a kind of U-shaped curve in the line of satisfaction over time, like this:



That is what he calls the Happiness Curve. Rauch reviews data set after data set, interviews hundreds of people, and cites source after source showing that people in their early 50's the world over tend to say to themselves: "I'm discontented and I don't know why,' and this makes [them] more miserable, and this makes [the error in their forecasts of their life satisfaction] even larger. So [they] keep the circumstances constant, but [they] feel bad about them. Since [they] feel bad about them [they]'re disappointed, [their] life satisfaction decreases and [they] feel even worse about that. [They]'re in a downward spiral. "

Some of the solutions he recommends are to:

adjust your expectations and values, realizing that there is a skill that rises with age of being able to put bad things in context and cherish the good ones
realize that older people experience negative emotions just as intensely as young people do, but with less frequency, and for shorter spells
live in the present, prioritizing the really important people and relationships in life
value yourself for your wisdom, even if others might not recognize it
do everything: "All the behaviors and attitudes that are good for you at all times of life are also good for you if you are caught in a midlife emotional trap."
interrupt the internal critics
don't compare yourself to others
be mindful
share - talk to others. "Being caught in the trough is no small problem, and avoiding self-isolation...can go a long way toward providing stability and preventing mistakes. Outreach can take the form of professional counseling or therapy, which you need not be sick or dysfunctional to take advantage of."
He makes other research-based recommendations as well, but I don't want to give the whole book away.

What Makes The Happiness Curve Good
It's one thing for a self-help book to point out problems. It's another to do it with a solid and broad research base. It's then another to provide vignettes of real people who are experiencing or have experienced those problems, still another to provide solutions to those problems, and still another to show real people who've implemented at least one of those solutions with success. As I've mentioned before, it's rare to encounter a self-help book that has all of those elements or strengths. Though the vignettes in The Happiness Curve tend to run a little long, and the solutions he provides still comprise a small fraction of the book, this is one of those books that has most of those elements. For those in similar shoes to mine, I highly recommend it.

Note: I received a free ARC of the book through NetGalley, in exchange for my honest opinion. The book will be released May 1st.

The Happiness Curve, ultimately, has an uplifting message: make it to 50 and things get better. World-wide, happiness increases around that age (slightly earlier in some cultures, slightly later in others). However, as indicated on the cover of the book, you will have to live through your 40's to get there, and the most dissatisfaction occurs during these years. The introduction was an interesting and informative article and would have been an intriguing and conversation provoking read by itself. The rest of the book delves deep into the studies that support the thesis. As a reader of popular non-fiction, many of these studies and ideas were not new to me. And, the writing summarizing the research and putting it into a bit of a contrived outline for this book was quite dry and dull, in my opinion.

Interesting book, predominantly written from the male perspective. Although a few females case studies are given they are from a small select group and don't really give a feminine view. All that said it is still a good read and a relief not have everything hinging or depending upon mid life hormones. It is a fresh approach, definitely food for thought. It isn't a balanced view in itself but alongside the many books already out there on the issues of midlife it helps give a balanced overall perspective. Some good advice and some re-assurance for those entering this stage - Thank You