Research says that your 40s are your unhappiest age. It’s worse for millennials

‘I am, it seems, statistically fated to languish in the nadir, next to other sad, anxious, sleepless swamp creatures also living in the squeeze, with ageing parents and young children, and a veritable potpourri of stressful situations.’ Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images

All indicators to the contrary – the three children, the mortgage, the gray hairs, that little immutable fact that I was born in 1984 – the idea that I am approaching 40 is as discordant to my identity as is my bra drawer, which, since the pandemic and the birth of my one-year-old, consists mostly of slings. No, I think whenever I’m forced to confront my reality as an almost-middle-ager, I am still 22 and my silky, lacy undergarments would be more at home on a Victoria’s Secret billboard than in Ma’s closet on the prairie.

Yet here I am, along with vast swaths of other millennials who are starting to approach our most unhappy period of life. Oh, haven’t you heard? Happiness is U-shaped – it declines and bottoms out in your 40s, so report countless studies, until it starts to inch its way up again in the 50s. This is a remarkably consistent finding, across countries and cultures.