The Time of a Life

Ah, the joy of this task that nobody ever completes: living!

—Christian Bobin

“Are you happy?” Formulated in such an abrupt manner, this question always makes me uneasy. If it’s an inquiry about my current state, it’s not of any real interest: I may be feeling ill at ease in the television studio where this question is fired at me and feel like replying “no” because of this temporary malaise, even though I am, overall, happy in my life, and vice versa. If it’s a question about my general state over a period of time, it has the problem of being too either/or, as if we were completely happy or, conversely, totally unhappy. In fact, we are almost all “more or less happy,” and our impression of happiness fluctuates with time. I may decide that I’m generally happy today, in other words satisfied with the life I’m leading, and certainly much happier than ten or twenty years ago; but perhaps I will be happier or unhappier in ten years. The aim is to be more deeply and enduringly happy, as much as life allows us.

The researchers who have analyzed the different parameters of subjective well-being note that there is, in each individual, a sort of “fixed point” of happiness linked to his or her personality. Each individual possesses, as a matter of nature, a certain aptitude for happiness. People will find themselves below their fixed point when they have to confront a difficult situation (illness, professional issues, emotional problems), but above this point when they experience a positive event (marriage, promotion). However, they will almost always return to their fixed point. Some studies have even shown that most of the people who win the lottery experience a peak of happiness for a few months, before gradually returning to their previous level of well-being. Conversely, many people who become handicapped as a result of a serious accident are extremely unhappy for a certain period of time, and often even long for death; but their enjoyment of life and the feeling of getting better gradually take the upper hand and, after an average of two years, they generally go back to their “fixed point,” the constant level of happiness that they felt before their accident.²

The interest of working on ourselves and seeking wisdom consists entirely in managing to raise our “fixed point” of satisfaction so that happiness becomes more intense for us, deeper and longer lasting. I myself have discovered that it is possible to break through to new levels in my ability to be happy. These are so many “hands” in the game of cards we are dealt that constitute the new “fixed points” in our aptitude for happiness.

In addition to this subjective development, linked to our inner work on our own individual selves, there is also a life-long rise in the index of satisfaction that is found to a somewhat similar degree in a majority of people. Indeed, statistical studies show that most people share an index of satisfaction that varies in a regular way with age. In France, for example, drawing on surveys that have asked people every year since 1975 to rate their levels of satisfaction with life, researchers at the National Institute of Statistical and Economic Information have demonstrated that there was a real “age effect,” whatever generation was being canvassed. Generally speaking, the overall index of satisfaction with life continues to diminish from the age of twenty until people start to enter their fifties, after which it experiences a notable rise until around the age of seventy, when it undergoes a new phase of decline.³ The statisticians can’t really give any explanation for this phenomenon. In my view, we could hazard the hypothesis that the lowering of overall satisfaction until one’s fifties corresponds to the loss of illusions and the need to confront the difficulties of adult life and the host of questions about the shape one’s life has taken that can be observed in most individuals between thirty-five and fifty. The sharp rise that follows, from around age fifty to around age seventy, can be explained by the mellowness of maturity: we are increasingly satisfied with our professional lives and, with experience, we have acquired a knowledge of ourselves and others that enables us to live more fully. Sometimes we have reestablished our lives on new values or new desires. Some people have even “remade” their lives. The gradual decline in the index of satisfaction from the age of seventy on could be explained by the rigors of aging—increasing health worries, the loss of our physical and intellectual abilities and the approach of death—as well as the death of friends and sometimes of our partners.

In fact—and we have so far not emphasized this enough—our happiness depends to a great extent on our relationship with others.