#97. The Paradox of Aging

As we grow old, we endure many losses, yet we become happier. Why?

Nov 13, 2025

Dear friends.

I am old. Or to be more PC, I am “elderly,” an “older adult.” I was born in 1944. I’ll leave the math up to you.

My self-rating of life satisfaction or happiness would have been high at all stages of my life (I’ve been very lucky), but I have never been happier than I am now. A chart of my psychological wellbeing over time would show it to be high in childhood (the 1950s was a great decade to be a kid), lower in early adulthood and middle age, and ever increasing as I passed middle age on to where I am today. It turns out I am not unique, at least not as concerns the increased contentment that comes with age in the years beyond middle adulthood.

The Paradox

When young people are asked to speculate about the consequences of growing old, they commonly focus on the negative, believing that life must become worse in old age. There is no denying that aging entails loss. We lose gradually our youthful looks and some of our physical strength, agility, sensory acuity, mental quickness, and memory. We lose loved ones who die before us, and, of course, with the passing of each year we lose a year from our future lifespan. And there is no denying that, as we get older, we feel more aches and pains and take longer to recover from injury and illness. No wonder young people think of this as a sad situation. (My guess is that these negative associations with aging are why, in polite society, people don’t call someone “old.” It’s fine to call a young person “young” but impolite to call an old person “old.” I’d like to see that change.)

But here’s the paradox. Study after study, using a wide variety of methods, has revealed that, on average, old people report themselves to be happier than do younger people. This has been found in cross-sectional studies, in which people of different ages are surveyed at a given point in time, and in longitudinal studies, in which people are surveyed at more than one point in their adult lifespan. The older they are, the more content they are. Of course this doesn’t occur for everyone. Nothing interesting that social psychologists find occurs for everyone. But it occurs for the majority.

You can probably think of various ways to explain this seeming paradox, any of which may apply to at least some people. But I’m going to focus on one explanation, which has received much research attention over the past 35 years—the socioemotional selectivity theory.

The Socioemotional Selectivity Theory: Shifting Attention Toward the Present and the Positive

The theory was first proposed by Laura Carstensen in the early 1990s, and she and her colleagues and students have expanded on it ever since. The essence of the theory is this. As we begin to realize that we have fewer years left on the planet, we become gradually more concerned with enjoying the present and less concerned with activities that function primarily to prepare for the future. Young people are motivated to explore new pathways and meet new people, despite the disruptions and fears associated with the unfamiliar. Such activities provide new skills, information, social contacts, and prestige that may prove useful in the future. But with fewer years left, the balance shifts. The older one is, the less sense it makes to sacrifice present comforts and pleasures for possible future gain. According to Carstensen, this idea helps us understand many of the specific changes observed in the elderly.

As people grow older, they devote less attention and energy to casual acquaintances and strangers and more to people with whom they already have close emotional ties. Long-married couples grow closer. Husbands and wives become more interested in enjoying each other and less interested in trying to improve, impress, or dominate each other, and satisfaction with marriage becomes greater. Older adults typically experience less anger than do younger adults, in response to similar provocations, and become better at preserving valued relationships. Ties with children, grandchildren, siblings, and long-time friends grow stronger and more valued with age, while broader social networks become less valued and shrink. Old people, on average, report themselves to be less lonely than do younger people. Loneliness is defeated by the quality of one’s relationships, not by the quantity, and old people focus on quality.

Such changes have been documented not just among old people but also among younger people whose life expectancy is shortened by terminal illness. The crucial timeline in Carstensen’s theory is not number of years we have lived but number of years we believe we have left.

People who continue working into old age typically report that they enjoy their work more than they did when they were younger. They become, on average, less concerned with the rat race of advancement and impressing others and more concerned with the day-to-day work itself and the pleasant social relationships associated with it. One study showed that when workers were offered a choice between a task that involved helping another person or a task that would potentially improve their own status in the company, older workers more often than younger ones chose the former. Helping others is intrinsically rewarding to all of us when we allow ourselves to do it, and older people are more inclined to allow themselves that pleasure than are younger people.

Laboratory experiments have demonstrated further ways that old people accentuate the positive. In one such experiment, for example, young adults (aged 18–29), middle-aged adults (41–53), and old adults (65–80) were shown pictures of positive scenes (such as happy children and puppies), negative scenes (such as a plane crash and garbage), and neutral scenes (such as a runner and a truck). Then they were asked to recall and briefly describe, from memory, as many of the pictures as they could. One predictable result was that older people recalled fewer of the scenes, overall, than did younger people; memory for all information declines as we age. The other, more interesting finding was that the decline in memory with age was much sharper for the negative scenes than for the positive scenes. Apparently, selective attention and memory is one means by which older people regulate emotions in a positive direction.

Concluding Thoughts

I should note, again, that what applies for the statistical majority does not apply for all. Some people grow bitter in old age. Some people fall into poverty or ill health, from which it is hard to find pleasure. I suspect that before we had social security, Medicare, and modern ways of solving some of the physical problems of aging, fewer people were happy in old age than is true today. I certainly owe some of my happiness to the fact that I have had both knees replaced, which keeps me mobile and pain free in that part of my body, and wear hearing aids that allow me to remain involved in conversations despite considerable hearing loss.

I should also note that healthy old age does not involve complete inattention to the future. With old age, many of us become even more health conscious than we were when younger. We do things that are not just pleasurable in the moment but good for us in the long run. We may benefit from our realization that life in front of us is not infinite, but, at the same time, we want to extend it as far as we can and be as healthy in those remaining years as we can. On that score, see my Letter #77 (“Play Out, Don’t Work Out”).

And now, what have been your experiences in progressing along your life path toward its inevitable end, a direction we are all headed regardless of our present age? Does the realization that life is not infinite influence your choices of what to do? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your stories, thoughts, and questions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. They add to the value of these letters for everyone.

Play Makes Us Human

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