On the connection between time and happiness:
Research of people’s happiness, and how time plays a critical role. How do age and, more specifically, the amount of time people feel like they have left in life influence both how people experience happiness, as well as the types of experiences that elicit greater happiness?
A study found that age influences how people experience happiness. Looked initially at how people express feeling happy on their personal blogs, spending time looked at millions of blogs. Any time someone wrote “I feel” or “I’m feeling happy,” looking at the content of that emotional expression. Found that there are really two forms of happiness that emerged — one that is tied to feeling excited, and the other that is tied to feeling calm.
Based on the bloggers’ profile information, they could see who was expressing these different types of happiness. They found that people in their teens and twenties were significantly more likely to express excited happiness than calm happiness. People in their thirties were actually equally as likely to express one or the other. And then people in their forties, fifties, sixties and above were significantly more likely to express feeling calm happiness than excited happiness, suggesting that the way that we feel happy changes over the course of our life.
In other work, looking at the types of experiences that are associated with greater happiness, finding that again, age has an impact. They compared the happiness that people extract from extraordinary experiences — those events, like incredible vacations, life milestones, graduation, getting married — vs. ordinary experiences, those mundane everyday events. Among younger people or people who felt like they had a lot of time left in their lives, it was really those extraordinary experiences that led to greater happiness. But interestingly, as people got older, ordinary experiences produced increasingly greater happiness, such that older participants felt as much happiness from ordinary experiences as they did from extraordinary experiences.
The most surprising conclusions of the research was when a 20 year-old says, “I feel happy,” and when a 60 year-old says the very same thing … they’re likely feeling very different things. One will be feeling excited, and the other, a greater sense of calm. It’s surprising — and actually quite nice — that ordinary experiences, those little moments that pop up every day, can produce as much as happiness as extraordinary moments.
Another implication is to understand that what makes you happy, and even the way that you feel happiness, will or has changed over the course of your life. So you shouldn’t evaluate or assess your level of happiness, or not hold yourself to a standard, based on a concept that you had when you were younger. You should allow yourself to accept and appreciate that it is maybe those quiet moments, those calming moments, where you really will find happiness.
Happiness is not a singular thing that people are pursuing and will someday find. It’s also not purely idiosyncratic and something different to everyone. Instead, there is predictable regularity in how people experience happiness, as well as in the experiences that elicit happiness. Also, there is a systemic shift over the course of people’s lives whereby when people are younger, happiness is more about feeling excited, and as people get older, happiness is more about feeling calm.