In the play Songs for Nobodies, currently on in London’s West End, the remarkable Bernadette Robinson plays Beatrice Ethel Appleton, a young powder room attendant working in New York on a night in 1961. Her husband has walked out on her and, tearful, she is about to meet Judy Garland, whom Robinson vocally mimics in the musical. “Happiness,” Beatrice remarks dolefully, “is the temporary illusion that nothing is about to change for the worse.”
Last week, the Resolution Foundation thinktank published a report that analysed seven years of wellbeing surveys run by the Office for National Statistics since 2011. Respondents of a variety of ages rated their life satisfaction, self-worth, happiness and anxiety levels on a scale from one to 10. In a U-shaped curve, it showed that being in one’s 50s is the pits, while the ages of 16 and 70 are the twin peaks of happiness. Bearing in mind that the average is indicative of a trend, not a universal truth – and that 16 and 70 can also mean, for some, poverty, loneliness and regret for what is lost or hasn’t happened – according to the report, what contributes to happiness at 70 is, predictably, the good fortune to have health, a degree, a job, a partner and to own your home.
I know seventysomethings who have all these in their lives and still rage – as if ageing can be shaken into submission, youth restored and mortality avoided. They resist change. Even for them, however, the face eventually pleats into wrinkles, friends and family die and invisibility becomes the norm. Whatever the surveys say, there is no illusion, at 70, that decline is not at hand. As American comedian George Carlin once said, “Age is a hell of a price to pay for wisdom.” So where is the joy?
For feminist Lynne Segal, it lies partly in resistance to how society expects women to age, while, ironically, how we choose to live the final decades of life can bring a kind of liberation. Mark Twain was right. If we could be born at 80 and live our lives backwards, happiness would hit not twice over the decades but many more times in a less materialistic (though fairly paid) and more philosophically purposeful life. Hindsight is grand.
Sir Richard Layard, “happiness tsar” under New Labour, diagnosed us, as a nation, as suffering from lack of trust and excessive concern with status, materialism, envy and winning the rat race. This view is endorsed by Professor Paul Dolan of the London School of Economics: “To be happier we need to move from a culture of ‘more please’ to one of ‘just enough’.”
Another thinktank, the New Economics Foundation, has proposed five ways to boost wellbeing – take notice, be active, connect, keep learning and give. At least two of these – connect (death of community services and public spaces) and keep learning (demise of adult education) have been hammered by cuts, and still wellbeing continues to rise – if only just. In April 2011, the ONS said the nation’s average out of 10 for happiness was 7.29. Last year, it was 7.52. Eight years ago, the 16-19 age group (in spite of an anxiety epidemic) had the highest levels of satisfaction. Now, it’s the 70-74s, with women slightly higher than men.
So what seems to be happening?
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.” But what lies within us is difficult to establish when life is one headlong rush. Family commitments multiply, and work and stress are too often twin companions. In contrast, at 70, for some, time may suddenly and unexpectedly become “free”, less squeezed, less throttled by ambition.
When I was in my 50s, I read a remarkable book, Rowing Without Oars, by a Swedish television presenter, Ulla-Carin Lindquist. In it, she magnificently celebrated her final months, having been diagnosed at the age of 50 with a form of motor neurone disease. She died in 2004, leaving her husband and four children. “It is now for the first time that I feel myself to be living in the present,” she wrote. “Death brings me closer to life.”
On reading it, I felt gratitude for the profound meaning she drew from her existence – in spite of a body that had lost almost all function – and for her bravery. Fifteen years later, I’m still grateful, but the sagacity of Lindquist’s words now has a greater resonance: living in the present in the – hopefully long – shadow of death can make you infinitely more appreciative of the magical “ordinary” incidents in everyday life.
Ageing is problematised. Yes, it may mean less money, autonomy and energy, and poorer health. But, with luck, the failures and tough lessons over the years have also taught resilience, perspective, tolerance and patience. (Though they might equally have taught you to be grumpy, narrow-minded, tight-fisted and reactionary.)
Best of all, perhaps, the true luxuries in life that we have less time to value when younger – relationships, family, community, giving back, the changing seasons, doing nothing, caring less what others think – will, if we are fortunate, finally receive due care and attention. And long may it last.
