Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

by John Leland

Being an expert is exhausting. Being a student—letting go of your ego—is like sitting for a banquet at the best restaurant you’ll ever visit.

The answer, I began to realize, was one that ran counter to all my expectations. If you want to be happy, learn to think like an old person.

A long-term survey of people in Ohio found that those who had positive perceptions of aging, measured by whether they agreed or disagreed with statements like “As you get older, you are less useful,” went on to live an average of 7.5 years longer, a bigger boost than that associated with exercising or not smoking.

As Helen Moses often tells her daughter, “I was your age, but you were never my age.”

Of the six, five needed a cane or walker to get around, which meant they had to rely on others to visit them.

strangers looked past them on the streets or in stores, not wanting to get entangled in the life of an old man or woman.

And if they complained, well, they ran the risk that their children would shut them out.

Fred described instead a view from old age—taking satisfaction in what was available right now, not hitching it to the future. My definition looked forward; Fred’s found fulfillment in the present, because the future might not come.

After seeing the suffering caused by human drive, he found happiness not in striving for conquest but in relations with other people.

Ecclesiastes 4:4 And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person's envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

“I’m not happy if I see something or eat something that I like—I’m not happy unless I’m sharing it with others,”

Each of the elders I spent time with applied this selective memory to their lives. All minimized any hardships of their earlier lives, even if they were struggling with the last chapter.

We forget and we remember because we need to. This means there can be quality of life even with memory loss, a prospect I had never considered. An element of wisdom, then, is learning how to use memory loss as an advantage.

“When I think of my life, I think of it as a happy one,” Ruth said, as if past happiness, too, was a choice we can make.

The hardships they did remember provided leverage on the present. Didn’t they make it through the Great Depression or the slow and grinding death of their spouse?

Most of us live with this future every day, laboring under its weight. To think like an old person is to journey unencumbered.

Ardelt created what she called a three-dimensional wisdom scale, or 3D-WS, which plotted wisdom on three axes: cognitive (the ability to understand life); reflective (the ability to look at life from different perspectives); and affective (emotional wisdom).

A starting point for wisdom at any age might be to accept that you’re going to die—really accept it—and to feel more contented by the limits, not less.

Teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom- Psalms 90:12

In numerous studies, researchers have found that seniors who feel useful to others live longer and better, with fewer disabilities, greater mobility, and more resilience to arthritis pain.

The British cultural critic Terry Eagleton writes that the meaning of life lies in learning how to form mutually enriching relationships, like musicians in a jazz ensemble,

They responded not to each other’s perfections but to each other’s gaps. Each flourished by giving the other what he or she needed—that is, by enabling the other to flourish. It wasn’t an easy formula, but it was one that I could strive for in my own relationships.

Accept whatever kindnesses people offer you, and repay with what you can. Let a friend buy you lunch, then do her a solid in return. You’ll benefit from the favors you receive, but even more from the ones you perform. Don’t begrudge the people who need you; thank them for letting you help them. Give up the obsession with self-reliance; it’s a myth, anyway.

In the past, old people who outlived their spouses could count on their children or other relatives for companionship, but these days only one in five people ages eighty-five and up lives with family members.

Contentment had been there for the grasping, if only I had recognized it. Probably it’s there for you. The elders would tell you to grab it while you can, not agitate for something better.

Instead of dwelling on loss, or clinging desperately to the idea that we still play tennis or clean our own house, we can think of aging as a process of change, learning to appreciate rewards as we find them. Loss is one of life’s great instillers of wisdom, including the wisdom that finds compensation for the capacities we think we can’t live without.

In a culture that constantly tells us to overcome our limitations, sometimes it is more productive to find ways to live with them.

For people on short time, short-term fixes—or acceptance—are sometimes the best answer. And we’re all on short time; older people just understand this more viscerally.

In the moment, that’s the happiness. I think sadness is when you’re concentrated on one particular bad incident that’s happened.”

More than almost anyone I’ve met, Fred lived in the moment, in gratitude for the pleasures he could still enjoy.

Gradually, I began to understand gratitude the way Fred saw it, less as a reaction to this or that circumstance than as a way of looking at the world.

The experience taught him early on that problems were only problems if you thought about them that way. Otherwise they were life—and yours for the living.

If you believe you are in control of your life, steering it in a course of your choosing, then old age is an affront, because it is a destination you didn’t choose. But if you think of life instead as an improvisation in response to the stream of events coming at you—that is, a response to the world as it is—then old age is more another chapter in a long-running story.

He had made a mess of his life, but it was his mess, so his good fortune to live it. It beat living someone else’s mess.

G. K. Chesterton wrote that “thanks are the highest form of thought, and … gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder,” and made a habit of saying grace not just before meals, but “before the play and the opera, and grace before the concert and the pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

In each study, the subjects who wrote down something they were grateful for reported greater levels of well-being and more optimism about the coming weeks or days. The more often they wrote, the stronger the effect.

One finding from the 2003 studies was that just writing down ways in which one is better off than others did not produce the same benefits. It was not enough to be conscious of one’s advantages; one had to be grateful for them.

“Don’t stay home,” she said. “Learn something.”

Troubles are always with us, and getting rid of this one or that won’t make us happy; it’ll just move another hardship to the head of the class.

Karl Pillemer of Cornell makes the distinction between “happy in spite of” and “happy if only,”

The lesson was to find happiness not in the absence of pain and loss, but in their acceptance.

In my year with the elders, none spoke of their professional accomplishments—a surprise, given how much of our lives we spend either working or obsessing about work.

The elders also never mentioned obstacles they had overcome.

But there is some evidence that we are not slaves to our set point—that we can nudge it upward by regular acts of gratitude or altruism, and by not brooding on our troubles.

“Work is happiness, to make you live longer,”

Even as the disease advanced, paring away more of their memories and cognitive powers, their assessment of their quality of life remained unchanged.

She was doing what she always did, rescaling her expectations to the world as it came at her, rather than fighting against it. This was her way of choosing happiness.

The lesson of John Sorensen was that to accept death was to accept life, and to accept life was to live in joy, however dire the circumstances around you.

She had two people who loved her, each in a different way. Her wisdom was to figure out what they wanted to give her, and to create the circumstances that enabled each to give it.

Old people without family support went to crude public almshouses, which provided a roof and minimal sustenance for orphans, people with mental illnesses, alcoholics, widows, and people who were too poor or frail to care for themselves.

Too often we think that if only we undo the impediments to our happiness, we can be truly happy. But there are always more impediments, more reasons not to be happy now. Helen chose instead to embrace the life she had. She didn’t resent her daughter’s meddling or feel sorry for herself because she wasn’t getting married; she didn’t magnify her unmet desires by treating them as a punishment. They were life, her life. Impediments are the circumstances in which we find happiness.

Receiving is much harder than giving, but this fact is seldom recognized in mainstream American society. Dependent people are often deprived of chances to give, finding that they must endure a state of almost constant relinquishment and passivity.