What is your age? And, over the course of your life (past, present, and future), at which age do you think you were/are/will be the happiest? Can you answer the second question? I can’t, but I was curious what people might say. Over the last two weeks, I used Amazon’s crowdsourcing service to ask 672 people these two questions. Here are the results:
圖片參考:
http://www.aiplayground.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/happygraph_blog.png
Each dot is at least one person. If more than one person gave the same answer, the dot is bigger. Click on the graph for a better version, or take a look at the complete dataset.I don’t know what to do with the graph, but lots of people wrote short comments explaining their choices which I really enjoyed reading. Here are some I liked, each with the age of the author and the age at which he/she expects to be the happiest:An 18-year-old: 25
Because that’s when i’ll have a stable job, good income and my own house (hopefully). A 33-year-old: 53
Will have met financial freedom and retirement goals.A 46-year-old: 53
By the time I’m 53, I feel like I will be old enough to truly know myself and young enough to be physically fit.A 53-year-old: 53
I was diagnosed with cancer around 2.5 years ago, went through the chemo and radiation. I’m finally at a point where I am grateful and happy that it was found in time to do something about it, and not worrying every second that it will come back. Not exactly a near-death experience, but as close as I want to come. Makes you REAL happy to be alive and to try and appreciate even the small things.A 24-year-old: 40
I have already had a lot of happiness in my life and am very grateful for said happiness but I noticed that as my father ages, he seems to find more and more joy in the smaller things in life. Even in tough times he seems to maintain a more positive attitude – maybe it’s because he’s retired or he’s realized that worrying does’t accomplish much. I hope to achieve his level of wisdom someday and look forward to more happiness and fulfillment later in life.
參考: which age stage is your happiest times?