What To Do When You Hit 47.2 & How To Combat Unhappiness In Life

Dianna Lesage
7 min readFeb 6, 2020

Here is a riddle for you, what is the same across 132 countries all over the world including 95 developing nations and the United States?

Is it the unemployment rate?

Is it the consumer price index?

Could it be the real GDP?

No, of course not. How could anything possibly be the same when contrasting a country with an obesity problem and one where humans are dying of starvation? Well, according to Dartmouth University professor David Blanchflower, one thing comes to mind and that is unhappiness.

In his brand new published study on age and subjective well-being, Blanchflower not only establishes data that prove unhappiness exists in all 132 countries he researched, but he also claims that nearly the exact same “Unhappiness Curve” exists in every nation from the richest and freest to the poorest and worst off.

“The curve’s trajectory holds true in countries where the median wage is high and where it is not and where people tend to live longer and where they don’t,” Blanchflower wrote in the “Age and Subjective Well-being” study

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Dianna Lesage
Dianna Lesage

Written by Dianna Lesage

Venture Studio expert. Creator capitalist. Lover of innovation.

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

I am not sure “mid life crisis” has much to do with these numbers. I find it strange that unhappiness would go down so much with age. There are A LOT of bad physical and mental things that happen as you age. One big thing that happens to most people…...