Abstract
Among the most common tropes in wellbeing research is that it is U-shaped over the lifespan, declining into middle age before rising again into older age. However, the thesis has come under critique or re-appraisal, including even from its original proponents, with claims the pattern is now eroding (possibly due to younger people doing worse lately compared to peers in earlier eras). To explore this question we examined Gallup World Poll data spanning 19 years (2006-2024), covering nearly 3 million participants across 169 countries/territories, exploring the age-related distribution of two forms of subjective wellbeing: evaluative (Cantril’s ladder) and affective (Positive Experience Index). With the ladder, although a very vague U-shape was evident if combining all years and regions, when analyzed individually, few years or regions came close to a simple U-shape pattern—as judged by a proposed rubric for ascertaining “U-ness”—although some did bear some resemblance. Additionally, to complement the heuristic U-score, we also developed a statistical system for assessing structural U-shaped scores that quantify the geometric coherence of age–wellbeing profiles, which indicated that the strongest U-dominant years globally occurred in 2018 and 2019, which reflect relatively deep and coherent midlife troughs. As for positive experience, this instead tended to simply decline with age, albeit with a slight uptick around age 60. But any general patterns were subject to considerable variation, both in terms of year and region. With the year, there was a general trend of both outcomes improving over time, but especially for older people, meaning the general U-shape curve (vague and imperfect as it was) was becoming more “J-shaped.” And with regions, there were striking outliers to the general trends, such as the EU with respect to the ladder (with a simple decline with age), and North America with regard to positive experiences (which did have a U-shape, with older people doing as well as younger people). The data show the complicated nature of age-related wellbeing trends and point towards the need for more research.