Here’s one good thing about getting older

Simply looking at life expectancy tables, I am in the second half of my life by now. And I can tell. The aches are becoming more common, and parts of my body are starting to fail. But good news for all of us in middle age. There is one thing that we can look forward to (besides raiding the government pension system at the expense of our children).

A group of researchers around Tim Lomas from Harvard piggybacked on the Global Flourishing Survey, which asked more than 200,000 people in 22 countries over five years to rate how they feel about several aspects of life. One item was the question: “In general. How often do you feel you are at peace with your thoughts and feelings?”

Here is the share of the population that states they are at peace with themselves often or always across the 22 countries.

People feeling at peace with themselves

Source: Lomas et al. (2025)

It’s a really weird order. While anyone who ever has read about surveys of best places to live, etc. would have expected Sweden to be near the top, I am surprised to see Egypt there as well. Meanwhile, I am not too surprised to see Turkey at the bottom, but why Spain?

The researchers don’t give any explanation or analyse country-level results at a deeper level, but they do give results based on socioeconomic variables. And they make more sense to me. Most importantly, the older people get, the more they feel inner peace. Religious people also feel more at peace than nonreligious people. And married people feel significantly more inner peace than unmarried and single people.

Inner peace increases with age

Source: Lomas et al. (2025)

There isn’t any information in the paper of what drives these feelings because it is only a first presentation of survey results pending further analysis of causal drivers. But the pattern that emerges is the one that people who no longer compete with other people (whether it is for a job, a salary increase, a spouse, etc.) simply are happier. Or as Lili Tomlin so memorably said: “The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat.”