IIf you’re 34, watch out: Tom Hanks say 35 is the worst age. Why asks Hanks – as delightful as he looks – as opposed to, say, the highly qualified global community of happiness psychologists and social scientists? Because he has a movie out, duh – Herewhich required him to be renewed to various ages, including his dreaded mid-30s. “Your metabolism stops, gravity starts to break you down, your bones start to wear down [and] you stand differently,” Hanks told Entertainment Tonight. “You are no longer able to jump off a couch.”
This is such a movie star answer. Hanks’ gripe is physical degradation and yes, when your face, body, and couch-jumping ability are how your worth is measured, feeling like you’re physically degenerate must open up an existential abyss. However, for civilians, he is wrong: it is 47.2. This is when the US National Bureau of Economic Research human unhappiness peaks off. This finding in 2020 supported previous research on the “U-shaped happiness curve”: we start happy, well-being drops off at about 50, then we improve again. The U-curve is challenged but looks robust; Found a 2021 review “remarkably strong and consistent evidence across countries” of U-shaped happiness trajectories.
It makes sense. The basis of the U is when layered responsibilities – a “club sandwich” of care and work – clashes with the awareness of finite possibility and the specter of failure (and death!). I should know – I’m 49. But I don’t like the idea of bumping along the bottom of a U-turn – we recently took the one apart under our sink and it was disgusting – and I don’t think so either Hanks isn’t right, so I did my own, highly unscientific survey.
The first thing I learned is that you have great conversations and people ask their worst age. There is a shared vulnerability in exploring your unhappiest times. They still live inside you, I think – remembering my two worst years (14 and 21) hurts me from chest to diaphragm, the place where a black hole of loneliness opened up.
I also found that events can naturally devastate any age: illness, death and grief, for the way they feel, but also the way they distance you from your peers. Being as happy as your unhappiest child is an always, everywhere truth, and money worries can steal joy from every year and bleed into every area of your life.
However, to adjust for that, groups of better and worse ages emerge. No one seems to have been a truly unhappy toddler. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m on a tricycle; what a life,’” my sister gleefully recalls when she was three. The first real collective nadir is mid-teens, including for two of my most cheerful male friends. “The uncertainty and lack of agency was rough,” says one. “I was slightly friendless and terribly confused, surviving on library books and escapism,” says the other. Women hated that time too: the mean girls, the mortification and the body horror. Those years play in my head as a violent multisensory kaleidoscope of leaking pads, razor burn, smells and spots.
A handful of people hated parts of their 20s, which mostly evoke insecurity: not knowing what to do, who you are, whether it’s normal for your boss to throw a stapler at your head. Thirties can bite from any direction: “No sleep, head down, anxiety, raw loss of freedom,” A said of corporate life with young children; unattached H hated “watching everyone else get engaged, get married and start bringing baby scans into the office”. People call down bad ’40s and ’50s in the U-turn: that club sandwich push, “Is this it?” and damn hormones again (arrive awful, then depart awful).
However, there is hope. It’s a small sample, but none of my older friends chose a year past their 50s; instead, I heard “More joy” and “Life just gets better and better,” despite losses and bodies that have failed them. A surprising number of people think their happiest age is now – yes, now, in November 2024! They include Tom Hanks – who said he would “rather be my age”. Me too, actually. I think many of us tend to assume that we are past the worst, which suggests that we are optimists. That’s fine – we’ll have to be.
