The return to routine is also yours: the curve of happiness

There is a moment, in early September, when the air changes texture. Newsstands fill up with collectibles, the bus resumes its winter schedule, someone passes by with a new backpack slung over one shoulder. For decades, that air was yours: school started, work started, everything started. And it is possible that now you look at it from the other side of the glass, with the suspicion that the rentrée is a party to which you are no longer invited.

The data says otherwise. They say, with an urgency that has surprised the researchers themselves, that the years you have ahead of you have a better emotional prognosis than many of those left behind. It is worth looking closely at where that statement comes from, how solid it is, and what nuances it carries. Because it also has nuances, and they are serious.

The economist who counted happiness

David Blanchflower is not a psychologist or a guru of anything. He is a labor economist, a professor at Dartmouth, and for years served on the committee that sets the Bank of England's interest rates. A man of statistical series and fine print. He had been noticing something strange in well-being surveys for a long time: life satisfaction did not drop in a straight line with age, as almost everyone assumed, but rather drew a U-shaped curve. High in youth, it declines to hit bottom toward midlife, and rises again afterward.

In 2021, he decided to check if that was an anomaly of rich countries and published in the Journal of Population Economics the most ambitious examination to date: data from 145 countries, developed and developing, with surveys spanning different decades. The U appeared in almost all of them. The lowest point arrived, on average, at 47.2 years in advanced economies and at 48.2 in the rest. From there, uphill: the satisfaction reported by people in their sixties and seventies exceeds, in many countries, that of thirty-somethings.

Think about it for a moment, because it is one of the most counterintuitive conclusions of recent social sciences. The entire culture—advertising, cinema, table talk—assumes that spirits dim with age. Surveys, conducted among millions of people over half a century, say that after a certain age they tend to brighten.

What Harvard found when asking two hundred thousand people

Blanchflower's curve measures above all life satisfaction. But in 2025 came a finer contrast. The Global Flourishing Study—the study on human flourishing led from Harvard by Tyler VanderWeele, which we have already discussed in this Notebook—published its first results in Nature Mental Health: more than two hundred thousand people surveyed in 22 countries, including Spain. And it did not just ask if you are satisfied: it asked about meaning, relationships, character, health, stability. The whole of life, by dimensions.

The finding points in the same direction and goes further: in the aggregate of countries, flourishing tends to increase with age. The dimensions that mature latest are precisely the existential ones—meaning, bonds, character—which reach their best records in the latter part of life. What classical wisdom has intuited since Cicero now appears in the charts of a study with a sample of millions: there are harvests that can only be gathered late.

The counterpoint: the U is deforming

Here it is best to be honest, because this Notebook is not here to sell you a curve. In August 2025, Blanchflower himself, along with Alex Bryson and Xiaowei Xu, published a study in PLOS One with a rather bleak title: the global disappearance of the unhappiness hump. Analyzing recent data from 44 countries, they found that the classic U is deforming. Not because midlife has improved, but because the well-being of young people has plummeted: today's twenty-somethings report levels of distress that were previously characteristic of the midlife crisis in their late forties. The result is that, in the most recent data, distress no longer draws a hump: it simply declines with age.

Read it with both sides. The good side: the right side of the curve—yours—remains standing; older people continue to report, on average, more satisfaction and less anxiety than the rest of adults. The bad side: this is no longer a story of universal triumph, because those coming behind are struggling to get started. If your current stage comes with serenity as standard, perhaps one of its best applications is to look out for those who are starting.

And one more nuance, which is only fair: all of these are averages of massive populations. Within the average there is everything—health that accompanies you or does not, pensions that arrive or do not, company or solitude. The curve describes a trend; it does not sign a contract with anyone. We already talked about the part of that dispersion that has to do with purpose when discussing the crisis of the 60s: the ascending part of the curve does not rise on its own, it is climbed.

Why mood tends to improve with age

The interesting question remains: what explains the rise? The most solid answer has been given for thirty years by Laura Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. Her theory of socioemotional selectivity says, in short, this: when the time horizon is perceived as long, people invest in the future—degrees, contacts, status; when it is perceived as more limited, priorities automatically reorganize themselves toward what makes sense now. The agenda is pruned. Duty dinners are dropped. Fewer people are called, and those who are called are loved better.

Carstensen and her team have also documented what they call the positivity effect: with age, attention and memory tend to dwell more on the good than on the bad. It is not naivety or decline; in her experiments, older people process negative information just as well when necessary. It is discernment. Half a century of biography teaches what is worth getting upset about and what is not.

Seen this way, the upward leg of the curve is hardly a mystery: it is the statistical result of millions of people who, one by one, learned to distinguish what is important. Which is, probably, what you have been doing for years without naming it.

September, the true new year

January promises much and delivers little: it is cold, it gets dark early, and resolutions are made with the fridge still full of nougat. September is something else. It brings the gesture learned over a lifetime of starting: the new notebook, the new schedule, the city getting back in motion. That gesture does not expire with retirement; if anything, it becomes ownerless and waits for someone to claim it.

The data you have just read suggest that claiming it makes sense. If the stage you are going through is, according to surveys in half the world, fertile ground for mood, meaning, and bonds, then September does not catch you off guard: it catches you at your statistical best. The question is no longer whether it is time to start something, but rather what is worth starting.

In Thenomba's Senior trip, the first stage is called The Map of Your Journey, and it consists exactly of this: stopping to look at the territory before setting off, with the archetype of the hero's journey as a compass and in good company. Every September, new NOMBA members arrive with that mixture of curiosity and shyness of someone opening a notebook again after many years. After two weeks, the shyness is gone and the curiosity remains.

The rentrée was never just for children. It belonged to anyone who had something ahead of them. The data says that you statistically have some of the best years of the series. September is just around the corner and the new notebook is at the usual stationery store.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.