Happiness is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old, by John Leland
Why are old people so happy? With their bodies falling apart and their friends starting to die, you’d think otherwise. Leland, in his short, excellent book, shows us why.
The answer in one sentence: old people don’t much time left, so they focus on being happy and enjoying the moment as opposed to worrying or planning for the future. If you’re in your 20s or 40s, it’s likely you spend plenty of time doing things you don’t want to do in hope of a future payoff. Old people don’t need to worry about networking for future jobs or eating kale at every meal.
But that’s kind of obvious. The more interesting point is that actions aside, old people are more likely to simply focus on the positive. Experiments show this. Let’s say you show old and young people a series of positive and negative images. Old people will remember more positive images than negative ones; young people will remember the same amount of both. Researchers believe this is because if you’re young, you want to store as much information as possible, as it might be useful over the course of your life. But if you’re old, you just want to focus on what pleases you.
In the book, Leland spends a year hanging about with 6 people who are 85+. Some other lessons:
Young people tend to think in terms of “happy if only” (I’ll be happy if only I get this); old people tend to think in terms of “happy in spite of" (I don't have everything I want, but I can still be happy).
One struggle people face as they get older is the feeling of uselessness; if you’ve spent your whole life as a parent, provider, or caretaker, and that’s all taken away from you, who are you? Leland poignantly shows how some elders try to deal with this: one woman finds a boyfriend in her nursing home, somebody she can take care of. It’s important to feel needed. Dependence is bad, interdependence is better. David Foster Wallace puts it best in The Pale King: "true decency was very different from pathological generosity, because pathological generosity (does) not take into account the feelings of the people who were the object of the generosity."
Some of his subjects are focused on death or don’t necessarily want to live another 20 years. Counterintuitively, this makes their remaining days more meaningful, as they recognize the finiteness of time. Every day counts.
The happiest old people tend to focus on what they can do, as opposed to what they can’t anymore. In addition, they tend to have “attitudes of gratitude,” enjoying the small moments of life and focusing on the positive.
I really enjoyed this. A lot of the lessons – be positive, be grateful, realize happiness is…a choice that you make – aren’t particularly relevatory, but I had never thought of them in the context of old age and old people. Especially since we live in a culture that views aging as bad – antiaging creams, wanting to stay “forever young,” etc.
The most powerful point to me was about how old people simply focus on happiness and seeing the positive. True, if you’re 25, quitting work and eating cheesecake for every meal is not a good idea. But I do think there is a point around focusing on the positive and embracing joy. We’re encouraged to “hustle,” find ways to “hack” and optimize every moment of time, and stay “hungry.” All of that is great, but at what point do we start living for ourselves? Or even simply paying more attention to the good stuff? If you’ve ever gotten a performance review, you might have noticed that you immediately focus on the negative feedback and ignore all the nice things that were said about you. Does it have to be like that?
I took a class in which one assignment was to write our own obituary. When the professor summarized the 100 or so responses, one thing struck me: many people saw their remaining lives in 2 stages: First, they’d spend 10-20 years achieving conventional success: selling their startup, becoming CEO, making partner. Then, they’d spend the rest of their life doing what they actually wanted to do: traveling, mentoring junior people, starting organizations for causes they were passionate about. How can we be like old people, and live the lives we actually want to, now?