Historians have argued about that question for years, but now a team at Warwick University claim to have cracked it. The best year in our modern history, they claim, was 1957.
It found that happiness levels rose after 1945 and peaked in 1957 before de- clining during the 1960s and 1970s until a nadir in 1978's Winter of Discontent. There was then a recovery but never to the levels of the 1950s.
A recent study by the Social Market Foundation has found that 1957 was the happiest year of the twentieth century. Plus the Victorians were happier than we are today. Seriously?
"The probability increases sharply from childhood to the ages of 30–34, when it reaches the maximum. At this point it is important to remark that individuals' happiest periods are long on average: for half of respondents this period lasts two decades or longer."
There have been no real "Golden Ages" in human history. Our ancestors may have led simpler lives, but they were not any happier than humans today.
(And the answer is: people in the US are probably happier now than they've ever been, despite what you might think.) The study: A team of researchers, led by Thomas Hills at the University of Warwick, analyzed 8 million books and 65 million newspaper articles published between 1820 and 2009.
Americans identifying as lower or middle class report a modest decline in happiness since the 1990s. But the picture is drastically different among the upper class, for whom happiness plateaued in the 1990s, dropped steeply around 2008, and has been rising steadily ever since.
The study in Germany that found 23 year olds were particularly satisfied with their lives found that, following a dip in middle age, life satisfaction peaks once again at age 69.
The most unhappy time of your life is your forties, according to a phenomenon known as the “u-shaped” curve which states that happiness bottoms out around your forties then trends back up as you grow older.
Life satisfaction peaks again at 69.
After a dip in middle age, life satisfaction peaked again at about 69 years old. Even more intriguing, people over 60 had better life satisfaction than people 55 and up predicted they would feel five years down the line.
In conclusion, childhood is the best period of one's life as during childhood you are carefree, you learn new things and get lots of love and memories with the family. Childhood never comes back even if you wish. Childhood is the most relaxing and enjoyable phase of life.
Older people are much better able to brush off life's small stressors and accumulate a valuable thing called wisdom: being emotionally stable and compassionate, knowing yourself and being able to make smart social decisions, Jeste says.
One of these is the relationship between age and happiness, a chart of which resembles, remarkably, a smile. As Graham notes: There is a U-shaped curve, with the low point in happiness being at roughly age 40 around the world, with some modest differences across countries.
Having gained a PhD degree in molecular genetics, Matthieu Ricard changed his path from science to become a Buddhist monk, and was declared to be the “happiest person on the planet” after a 12-year study by the University of Wisconsin.
1. Finland: For the sixth year in a row, Finland is the world's happiest country, according to the World Happiness Report.
Here's Why. Finland has been the happiest country on Earth for the past six years, according to the World Happiness Survey.
According to a study from the US's National Bureau of Economic Research, 47.2 is the unhappiest age you can be. What happens after that? You start to feel a bit better.
One's late twenties and early thirties, from an emotional perspective, are therefore the worst part of life. It's during these years that people experience the most negative thoughts and feelings and experience the most mind wandering, a psychological state that has been shown to be detrimental to well-being.
Loneliness and unhappiness can age you faster than smoking, new research shows. Psychological factors add up to 1.65 years to your biological age.
In summary, Women are the strongest between 26 and 37 years of age. Men are the strongest between 26 and 35 years of age. But of course there are individual differences between athletes and some people peak before or after that age window.
Most males and females are fully developed by their 17th birthday. They have completed puberty and reached their full height. 1 However, males may continue to develop physically, especially if they are late getting started.
Is there a moment in a person's life when they feel most fulfilled, happiest, or in their prime? Again, the most obvious answer to some might be somewhere around 25. But survey data from YouGov suggest that many consider the prime age to actually be 37.
Even after adjusting for factors like illness, finances and depression, people who were the happiest still had a 35% lower risk of death. Another study of older adults found that happier people retained their physical function better than those who weren't happy; their walking speeds even declined more slowly.
The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people who had higher levels of optimism had a longer life span. They also had a greater chance of living past age 85.
We tend to romanticize memories
The longer we are removed from a situation, the more likely we are to forget the bad parts. We remember the good things that happened and build them up in our memories as greater than they actually were. This makes us feel as if those times were better than they were.