Here's The Age Where You're Most Likely To Be Miserable
Every stage of your life features ample opportunities to be miserable. As a child, you have all sorts of restrictions and rules, not to mention all that school stuff that keeps getting in the way. As a teen, it's just everything, man, uggh. And then there's your adult life, which ... well, you know what we're talking about. Bills. Responsibilities. Work or lack thereof. Family trouble. Stress, stress, stress, stress, stress ... uh, but we digress.
Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there was some way to find out just which particular age is the most miserable? That way, even if you happened to be precisely at that stage of your life, you could at least console yourself with the thought that things are statistically likely to get better in a year or two. Fortunately, Fox 4 News suggests that a recent study might have discovered the answer to this eternal dilemma. So, are you at your most miserable age right now? Have you already brushed happily past it, or is the worst yet to come? Let's find out!
You might be most likely to be miserable at 47
In a study that involved well-being/age ratios in 132 different countries and a bunch of supporting data from "500,000 randomly sampled Americans and West Europeans," Dartmouth College Professor David Blanchflower has discovered that the most likely age to experience thorough misery is 47 — or, more specifically, the median age of 47.2. The "happiness trajectory" is similar in all countries regardless of wealth and life expectation, so there is some slight variance when it comes to individual countries. However, in the U.S. the biggest variance seems to be between male and female experiences of happiness: A man might live his worst life in his early 50s, while a woman might go through "peak unhappiness" before she turns 40.
While a single survey is hardly enough to make concrete conclusions, Blanchflower's data reportedly suggests that the famed and feared mid-life crisis might be a "response to life's peak of misery." So, uh ... there's something we can all look forward to.