Happiness Is...Old Age?

According to Lennon and McCartney, happiness is a "warm gun." Jimmy Soul figured that in order to be happy, a man should never marry a pretty woman. Philosphers more erudite than rock 'n' roll performers ahve tried to find the secret to happiness for a very long time. (LSD wasn't the answer, either!) It turns out, in America at least, that happiness is accomplished by nothing more than growing old. While most of us have a somewhat negative perception of that process, Yang Yang, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, has just published his findings on happiness based on interviews of 28,000 people between the ages of 18 and 88 during the years 1972-2004.
His conclusions may be startling to some, but I think it makes some sense. He thinks older people are more happy because they tend to be more content with what they have, while younger people are still in that "gotta have it" mode. Not only were the older people more happy in Yang's study, they were also more socially active. Does that sound hard to believe? Not really...video games and sedentary activities have sapped a lot from younger people. Why, back in MY day, we didn't have...oh, never mind.
You'd think that the aches and pains of getting older as well as the increasing loss of friends and loved ones would make older Americans more unhappy, but 'taint so. They just seem to be better at making adjustments to the fortunes of life because they realize that certain things are inevitable. No use crying over spilled prune juice.
Not at all startling is the statistic that mentions that young black people and the poor were less happy than white people and wealthy people...now THAT didn't take years of interviewing to find out. However, if you are a stats nut, here are some for you:
33% of those interviewed at age 88 were happy.
24% of those interviewed between the ages of 18-25 claimed to be happy.

75% of those interviewed between the ages of 57-85 engaged in a social activity at least once a week.(Perhaps explaining the report last year of an alarming rate of increase in STD's at The Villages in Florida!)
Those in their 80's were twice as likely to engage in social activity than those in their 50's.

OK math geeks, figure this one out. Yang decided that the odds of being happy went up 5% every 10 years. Does this mean we'll NEVER be even halfway happy? What is the standard deviation, the mean, the median and the mode? Is there a degree of happiness that we are born with? (happiness is a dry diaper? Perhaps true for both young AND old!)

The most disturbing fact, for me at least, is that the baby boomers are the least happy, in part because we still believe that WE CAN HAVE IT ALL, AND WE DESERVE TO HAVE IT ALL! The sobering reality is that it will never happen even though we'll cling to the idea like pet hair on a black suit.

I think I have the real reason why older Americans are more happy: they have done it all and survived, as well as outlasting all those other peole who said they'd never make it to Medicare. There's a lot to be said for merely outlasting the competition.
I know I'm going to do my damndest to accomplish it just so I can say "Back in the day" over and over.