Tucked neatly away in the top hand corner of the Sunday Observer magazine was the UK’s ‘life satisfaction scale’. According to this bar chart and indeed several other studies, wellbeing across the lifespan is ‘U-Shaped’. Happiness levels are moderate to high in our late teens and early twenties, plummet in our mid 40’s and then climb magnificently to the happiest age of all, 74[1]. So, while this is clearly bad news for thirty-somethings like myself, with two decades of relatively low life satisfaction to  ‘look forward to,’ this is surely good news for our burgeoning ageing population.

 
However, such research findings do not marry with the images presented before us in the modern media. The situational irony of the placement of the aforementioned bar chart in the Observer magazine cannot be ignored.  The happiness figures nestle next to a full page advert for premium rum, which shows the vitality and glamour of Melissa Ford, a youthful rum technician. The projected happiness of youth is juxtaposed by the sober representations of older people throughout the magazine.  On page 34 snapshots of a mature looking lady are shown before and after her ablutions with a new wrinkle cream, and on page 46 we find an advert for  ‘world famous cords’ being sported by an older man.
 
So if, as Roland Barthes suggests in Mythologies, we live in a ‘society of signs’ of the signifier and signified, then it must follow that all older people are not only miserable and/or vulnerable/isolated/frail, but around half of them spend most of their time worrying where their next pair of cords will come from.  Conversely, the young are portrayed as hedonistic, healthy and, of course, happy. Clearly such images distort the complex reality of identity construction, as we know older people are no more a homogenous group than the younger generation. Such misrepresentations always signify more and are embedded in a system of representation which ascribes false meaning to them.
 
Perhaps the above is a rather long-winded way to labour a point home, but clearly our representations of old and young and assumed notions of their levels of happiness have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the road. Thus contrary to conventional wisdom, as we age, we can in fact look forward to increasing levels of happiness. Contributors to the dubiously entitled ‘Journal of Happiness’ concur with this theory and point to the paradoxical inversion of societal norms surrounding our perceptions of ageing. As the author of a report on happiness, Heather Lacey notes: “Not only do younger people believe that older people are less happy, but older people they and others must have been happier ‘back then’. Neither belief is accurate”[2].

Indeed, while younger people are portrayed in popular discourse as revelling in their effervescent sun-streamed lives, as a generation they are arguably more transfixed with the pursuit of happiness than perhaps any other previously.  When they are not rollerblading down Sunset Boulevard or drinking premium rum, they are in fact locked away, busily consuming and digesting a plethora of books in the pursuit of what has spawned a new discipline termed the ‘Science of Happiness’. In the last couple of years, we have seen books on the ‘The Secrets of Happiness’, ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ and ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ to name just a few. Now it is beyond the confines of this blog to discuss the  science of happiness much further, suffice to say though money does not buy you happiness and I am pretty sure books on the subject won’t either…..
 
What is clear though is until we move away from such descriptive misrepresentation of young and old, our ability as individuals and society to respond appropriately, effectively and sensitively to the needs of these two generations will fall beyond our grasp.  Such stereotypical images of young and old are not only factually inaccurate, but serve to embed and naturalise false representations and erroneous beliefs.  Furthermore they help to legitimate and sustain unequal power relations in our society, fostering discrimination, inequality and prejudice. Promoting intergenerational cooperation and communication will help to challenge such stereotypes and build more cooperative, inclusive and sustainable communities. The potential benefits of intergenerational practice are slowly being recognised, but arguably more pioneering projects are required, if we are to move beyond dehumanising, inaccurate  and potentially stigmatising portrayals of both young and old.
 
Sally Marie Bamford
 
[1] Blanchflower, D, and Oswald, A (2007) ‘Is wellbeing U-Shaped over the life cycle?’ National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper.
 
[2] http://www.webmd.com/news/20060614/aging-bonus-increased-happiness