Context is everything. A knife in the hand of a drug-fuelled loon is a scary thing, but in the hands of a master chef can have a mouth-watering quality. A worm working its way through loamy soil in your garden is a heart-warming vision, but half a worm found in your salad can make your blood run cold. Yes, the circumstances determine perception and this is true of a human life as well, according to a new study.
The research involved evaluating data collected on thousands of people over a 30 year period. The subjects had completed surveys reporting their subjective experience of wellbeing. It is quite well established that perceptions of wellbeing are tied to career success, relationship satisfaction, and health. In some senses what these researchers found was not astounding but there were some additionally interesting observations.
Firstly, they found that generally life satisfaction increases over a person’s lifetime. This is not surprising if you consider that career and relationship issues probably find resolutions over the course of a life. Health of course can start to present problems but these findings held true despite changes in health.
What was really interesting was that while individuals did tend to experience greater wellbeing as they aged baseline levels of wellbeing were different for different age groups, so baseline wellbeing was lower for 80 year olds than for 50 year olds. What these researchers believe this shows is a response to the context that each generation grew up in.
So for example, generations who grew up during the depression era of the 1930s shows substantially lower baseline levels of wellbeing compared to people who grew up during more prosperous times like the 1960s. All of that of course begs the question, what will the baseline wellbeing be for people who are growing into adulthood during post-GFC times of economic uncertainty? Maybe we need to do more than ponder this and as a society intervene to ensure that the wellbeing of this current generation and all generations is all that it possibly can be.
