The age of happiness
Anti-ageing medicine is big business and implicit in that phenomenon is that people these days don’t like the thought of ageing. As a society though, we need to be careful of jumping on the anti-ageing bandwagon too readily because ageing isn’t all bad. This has been shown starkly in a new study which has shown that as we age a psychological change takes place that allows for happiness to manifest.
The new study involved evaluating differences in levels of life satisfaction between older people living in residential care and older people who live in the wider community. The study also evaluated how these two groups of people expected their wellbeing to be later in life. As part of this, the researchers assessed standard of living, health, achieving in life, personal relationships, safety, community connectedness, future security and spirituality/religion.
Results of the study showed that the relationship between having control of their environment and life satisfaction was much stronger for people living in the community. Equally, but oppositely in a sense, the relationship between “secondary control” and life satisfaction was much stronger for people living in residential care. “Secondary control” is your capacity to change yourself to become more compatible with your environment.
The suggestion here is that people living in the community still like to have a sense that they control their lives but that once people move into residential care they “unhitch” their sense of happiness from their level of external control. In other words, they adapt and accept what cannot be changed in order to be happy.
Just imagine if you could transfer that level of understanding and acceptance to the early years of life. What a peaceful and enlightened soul you would be and, if we all did it, what a wonderful world.
