“People often believe that happiness is a matter of circumstance, that if something good happens, they will experience long-lasting happiness, or if something bad happens, they will experience long-term misery, but instead, people’s happiness results more from their underlying emotional resources — resources that appear to grow with age. People get better at managing life’s ups and downs, and the result is that as they age, they become happier — even though their objective circumstances, such as their health, decline.” Via Boing Boing
I could not have said it better myself and I am finding this more and more to be the truth in my life. As I age I better learn to cope with my situation and work through my inherited family and emotional drama; or, at the very least, become brave enough to continue to boldly pick up each one, turn it over, and confidently decide which dramas to keep and which to pitch into the refuse tin.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s all true, but I don’t believe that age has any inherent part in the equation.
For a good 2500 years Buddhists have been successfully “managing” their happiness. And it’s not about age and experience, it’s about your worldview and the work you do. By work I don’t mean vocation, but real spiritual work — evaluating what makes you happy, what makes you sad, and reshaping your worldview to better cope. There’s a method to it, and not everyone in retirement in blissed out.
It’s always amusing when scientists present ancient truths as new discoveries.
And the children of healthy, happy, supportive, loving, affectionate, smart, and successful families oftentimes start out happy. Time does heal old wounds, though.