A Rising Tide Lifts All Opinions

Neuroticism decreases as we age.  Stated the other way, our sense of emotional stability increases as we get older. Fewer things bother us. We give a rat's ass about less and less stuff.  Put it however you want to, we calm down.

This reverses slowly in the 8th decade, strongly correlated with physical health. Because of this, the fit cheerful people insist that you, too, could be more cheerful if you would just get more fit.  There isn't actually any evidence for this when you put it that way. It looks like a mere correlation, that if anything flows in the opposite direction.  Cheerful people stay more fit, but getting more fit doesn't seem to make you more cheerful.  Being more cheerful seems to help you go do stuff, which often has the effect of becoming more fit. It's like saying "Getting married makes you more handsome." No, that works in the other direction. (Though there is the odd intrasexual competition thing that women signal to each other which males are more worthy, so if some other woman has given the guy a passing grade and married him, he becomes more attractive to the pack. Also true for males, but much less so. A slight counterflow to the principle I just described.)

I am going to guess that something this interactive is going to turn out to be more complicated than how I just put it. But in discussing isolation , there is clear evidence - hardly shocking, really - that when we have fewer nice, cheerful people available to us, we are less happy. 

Though that's not what I came to talk about. Because we are all moving in the direction of improved mood anyway - your 50s will likely be your happiest decade and your 60s your second-happiest - it gives us the impression that "when all is said and done, I made mostly right choices."  People who married feel vindicated because they feel emotionally better at 55 than at 25. But people who did not marry are also quite sure they made the right choice. See, all those people who said I'd be happier if I married, they were wrong, weren't they?  It might work for them but... As women especially are defensive about the married/not married question, they are particularly likely to mention that they believe they chose correctly.  Those who married late, that was the right decision; those who married early will sometimes have a qualifier I used to regret getting married so young, but now my children are all grown and I have all this feedom while I still have my health and energy.  Having children, same thing. People tend to be glad they did what they did, and point to their improved mood - which was likely to happen anyway - as proof. 

There is consistent research that shows that married people are happier, and I would love to tell you that this means you should try hard to get married, but there are some cautions with statistics like that.  It may be that happier people are more likely to marry, after all. We don't say that wet streets cause rain. Also, you may remember that I have suspicions of all happiness research right out of the gate. We can find some objective measurements of groups, like suicide rates, drug addiction, number of friends, and the like, but a lot of it is always going to come down to "On a scale of one to five, with one being not happy at all..." And people see through what is being asked with the other questions. They asked a lot of questions about religion.  I don't want to make it look like my religion is wrong by saying I'm not happy. Or the opposite, that you suspect they are trying to show that you, Mr. Atheist, are miserable. Hahaha, I see through their little game.