Do We Experience Less Joy as We Grow Older?

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This summer I took my kids to see the movie Inside Out 2, thinking I was in for another happy-go-lucky story about the emotional life of a young child. Although there were definitely some happy moments, the story focused less on the main character of Joy and more on a whole new cast of characters—like Anxiety, Embarrassment, and Envy—that emerge when the main character, Riley, enters the trials and tribulations of adolescence. As Riley is feeling these new emotions, happiness gets pushed aside to make room for teenage angst. As I watched my 6- and 9-year-olds absorb this message, I already found myself getting weepy over Joy’s lament: “I guess that’s what happens when you grow up; you feel less joy.”

But do we really experience less joy as we get older? My first intuition was definitely yes. There were countless times this summer when I was watching my children swim joyfully in the town pool, jump waves in the ocean, and bury themselves in the sand. I wished I could get as excited about anything as my kids get about these regular seasonal activities.

Luckily, my intuitions about these things are often wrong.

Scientists are incredibly interested in studying changes in happiness, or what they call subjective well-being, over time. Subjective well-being includes happiness but goes a bit beyond how we are feeling right now and includes more stability. And different researchers have put forth different theories about what happens to happiness and well-being as we age.

Some theorists suggest that it’s mostly about personality, and that happy people are going to stay happy throughout life, just as depressed people are likely to stay depressed. Others believe that happiness actually increases with age. For example, a well-known researcher named Laura Carstensen has suggested that as we get older, we become more motivated to find meaning in life events and to experience as much happiness as possible before we die. The central part of this view is that, as humans, we are highly aware of time and the idea that “time is running out,” which might drive us to look for things in life that make us happiest as we get older. In support of this idea, Carstensen and colleagues have found that older adults are more concerned about the present than the future, and that, contrary to popular belief, they are also less likely to dwell on the past and instead live in the moment. They interact with fewer people overall, saving their social battery for the people they know and love the most (see Carstensen et al., 1999, for a review).

Although this theory makes sense, research has suggested that it might be overly simplistic, and that changes in happiness and subjective well-being might reflect more complicated patterns of change. For example, some researchers have reported that happiness decreases as children get older and then increases again as adults approach their later years. One study of over 500,000 Americans and Europeans looked at happiness and well-being from the early 1970s to the early 2000s and reported that well-being indeed decreases from childhood into adulthood, bottoms out in middle age somewhere between the mid to late 40’s, and then starts to increase again until old age (Blanchflower & Oswald, 2008).

A more recent meta-analysis of over 400 studies reported a similar but slightly more complicated pattern. In this sample, life satisfaction decreased in adolescence (between 9 and 16) then increased until age 70, with only a slight downturn between age 40 and age 50 (Buecker et al., 2023). This study and others reported that, after 70, well-being decreases again, relative to a number of factors. For example, in a study of nearly 2000 men over a 22-year period, researchers reported that life satisfaction peaked at age 65, and then declined as individuals grew closer to death. Other factors like marital status and physical health also played a role, suggesting that there are some nuances to consider, like personality traits, major life changes, gender, and socio-economic status (Mroczek & Spiro, 2005).

All in all, while this body of research is a bit mixed, two things do seem to be clear: We might indeed experience less joy over time in some ways, but at the very worst, it should begin to turn around somewhere in middle age, when happiness starts to actually increase again. This actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it: We lose some of the joy we experienced as children as we age, especially as we struggle in middle adulthood with establishing ourselves in a career, having a family, and coping with debt. But it does eventually turn itself around for a lot of people. Most of my friends now are middle aged, and I can see the uptick in their happiness beginning. We have shed our youthful insecurities and are comfortable in our own skin; we have had our children and watched them get old enough to have some independence; we have our careers established, our routines set, and old friends to call on. So maybe while we do experience less joy as we grow up, we can all have hope that it will come back to us as we grow old.