How to avoid being a middle-aged grump

Everyone knows that sensible people invest in a pension, but a new bestseller argues that what we really need from our 50s onwards is an emotional investment plan. Although its author, Arthur C Brooks, is an economist at Harvard, his book Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, ignores the usual monetary tips about putting aside 10 per cent of your monthly salary in favour of auditing the soul. He’s not The Atlantic magazine’s chief happiness correspondent for nothing.

Brooks divides the post-midlife decades into four areas called the four Fs. No, not the usual horsemen of old-age apocalypse – frumpiness, fragility, fussiness and foul temper – but faith, family, friendship and function. In an online video, he tells us, “The sooner you start investing in your ‘Happiness 401k’ [401k is a US pension plan], the better off you will be. You can change the odds of being happier at 75 than you were at 25, but you have to make the investments.”

If our adult lives are from 20 to an optimistic 90, 55 is the midpoint whereby we need to be putting the work in to ensure that we don’t end up turning into Victor Meldrew, or sulking in the garden dreaming of our glory days as a CEO. His advice veers from the prosaic (don’t smoke, don’t drink too much, go on a daily walk) to the most important of all, cultivating stable long-term relationships.

His advice should find fertile ground in the statistically miserable UK (an ONS personal wellbeing survey records that levels have deteriorated more sharply than ever before). At home, 15 per cent of Australians experienced high or very high levels of psychological distress in the past two years.

Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at the LSE and author of Happiness by Design and Happy Ever After, says: “The only robust finding we’ve got from our happiness data is that when you hit middle age, it increases. When you’re 50 and you look at someone who’s 30, chances are that they’re going to spend the next 20 years getting less happy and you’re going to spend them getting happier.” That said, there are small things that “if we did more of every day I’m pretty confident we’d be happier”. These include listening to music, getting outdoors, helping others, spending time with people you like and laughing. “If you did 15 minutes more of any or one of those things every day, you’d be happier.”

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One of the reasons we’re happier as we get older is that we start to do these things naturally – eschewing the pursuit of success and money in favour of those life-enhancing clichés of lockdown, like listening to birdsong and baking bread.

But we shouldn’t rely on a natural segue into contentment, he says, but still need to “make happiness a habit by building in these activities day to day.” Dolan, 53, has been weight training five times a week for more than 20 years and it is central to both his identity and wellbeing, yet he recognises that even healthy, happy habits like this are weak enough to be broken by a holiday or illness. “I put weight training in my diary,” he says, “in the same way as a Zoom call.”

This planning, he says, sounds effortful but it actually makes it effortless to achieve your goals. “My mind is packed and ready to go to the gym.” Dr Tom Cotton, a psychotherapist and founder of development consultancy Mind Environment, can’t bear the way that the word “crisis” comes after “midlife”. “I prefer to think of it as a midlife opportunity,” he says.