In his novels, Daniel Defoe’s eponymous protagonists travel far and wide and then yearn for a return to English shores. Robinson Crusoe hopes to be rescued from his ‘Island of Despair’. Moll Flanders craves a change of scene when married life in Virginia doesn’t work out: ‘I hankered after coming to England, and nothing would satisfy me without it.’ And, after passing from one protector to another in continental Europe, Roxana sails past the country she was ‘bred up in’ and is filled with a desire to break free and settle there: ‘I secretly wish’d, that a Storm wou’d rise, that might drive the Ship over to the Coast of England, whether they wou’d or not, that I might be set on Shore any-where upon English Ground.’
It’s long been assumed that happiness across the lifespan shows a distinct “U” shape. When we’re young, and in relatively good health, we have high levels of happiness. In mid-life, happiness slumps as people grapple with the demands of adulthood and responsibilities of family life. As those responsibilities lessen with age, and as people gain more wisdom and perspective, their levels of happiness rise again. Decades of research had borne this out. U-shaped happiness curves seemed to be integral to the human experience. One study even reported that the pattern held in nonhuman primates in captivity, including chimpanzees and orangutans.
But new research points out that most of the popular studies in humans (and in fact, even the nonhuman primate study) were done in well-resourced countries and regions, such as the United States and Europe. Lifetime happiness assumptions, it turns out, might have a WEIRD problem. That term was coined in 2010 by social scientists to describe a bias found in many studies of human behavior, which have historically recruited participants primarily from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic populations—abbreviated as WEIRD.
You need nuance, persistence, flexibility, firmness, attention to detail—almost a love of the problem. You’ll have to become old friends before you can say goodbye.