Forty seven was not the best age for Judy Garland, Frida Kahlo, Edith Piaf, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Goebbels or Rasputin. They all died three years shy of their 50th birthdays. But is it really the unhappiest age? Or just a random point in life, as likely to be miserable or joyous as any other?
According to a new study from the US’s National Bureau of Economic Research, 47.2 is the unhappiest age you can be. This is worrying for me personally as I only have a few months to prepare for the abyss. The work is the latest publication from David Blanchflower, Dartmouth economics professor and former Bank of England policymaker, who first postulated that personal happiness follows as “U-shaped” curve and has now determined that the low point comes at 47.2 years.
He studied the relationship between wellbeing and age across 132 countries. His investigations used different measures of unhappiness; despair, anxiety, sadness, depression, bad nerves, phobias and panic, being downhearted, having restless sleep, loss of confidence, tension, feeling left out, “thinking of yourself as a worthless person” and — a personal favourite — “strain.” A word which is surely a mysteriously useful catch-all to describe both the physical and mental slump of midlife.