re: Are you happier now than your younger days?

Yeah, I'm happier. I'm approaching 60, and both my wife and I are in excellent health. Our four children are in their late 20's and early 30's, and they are all happy and productive. We have a fifth grandchild on the way. Our finances are set. And we have plenty of time and money.

Of course, my conscience is a mess because we built this great life off the blood and sweat of African slaves.

In my late 40s. Never been more satisfied and content. The highs aren’t as high but the lows aren’t as low.

I would like to go back to last year pre-COVID but other than that, I wouldn’t trade anything.

I was until this shite hit.

I never understood the people who told me that I was in the best days of my life when I was in High School/college... I’m mid 30s, married, lots of kids and life is way better/I’m way happier than I was in high school.

My assumption is that anyone who says that to a young person is a loser that peaked in High School. Just my $0.02.

no

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You can't be a carefree kid forever.

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I used to believe that until recently. A lot of these rioters, err, protesters seem to be mid to late 20’s yet they’re out there, all hours of the night, day after day. Seems like they’ve turned shirking responsibility into a profession. Even in my most rambunctious days, I could only string together 2 nights max before life would give me a reality check.

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You're right, but don't worry, because they got theirs coming. I'd rather have life whip my arse with a dose of actual reality after 2 days of skirting it than to have it build up over months and years. At that point there's a literal mountain of shite that's running out of head space, and the fan on the ceiling is running wide arse open. We know the rest of the story.

My disclaimer is that if I could use one word to describe myself it'd be, "jaded." With that said, the entire premise of the OPers thread topic of (paraphrased), "Why not choose happiness instead of social expectations and be happy all your life like you were when you were young" is deeply flawed for 2 reasons, with #1 being that you will never be in a static state of "happiness" if you're not in good physical shape like you were in your younger days, and since we age, well, you know the rest of the story. Life begins to suck a little more and more when morning after morning you wake up with more and more nagging aches and pains.

#2 is that life is not about being "happy." As human society became more and more proficient at freeing ourselves from the realities of trying to survive, so too did we increase our beliefs that the ultimate purpose in life is to find and attain perfect happiness.

The monumental moments of life are not the happy times, aka the "normal" humdrum days of our lives, the parts of life that shape us as individual living human beings are the hard times: Death, destruction, chaos, tragedy, disappointments, failures, etc. are the things you remember and that shape who you were when the sun rises on the day after your dying day, not the raises, the weddings, the parties, etc. Those times fade, but the death of a loved one never stops affecting your subconscious mind.

Life is guaranteed to be hard AF, and when those times come we essentially have 2 choices on how we take them on: We can add what we learned from it to our arsenal to help us trudge along in life and survive and, hopefully if we do it right, thrive and grow in the wisdoms of life, or we can let it destroy us. The latter can happen acutely or chronically over months and years, but life is not about "the happy," life is about "the hard."

Regardless of age (regardless period), not a single human being who'll ever live will escape the reality that their life will, hopefully and with some luck, not have as much hardship in it as others, but it's going to be a brutal bitch, and the difference between being young and old is that many young people haven't experienced it yet.

You lose that youthful happiness because life has whipped your arse a few times (at best) by the time you're a grown man, and so OPer, my answer to you is that your ignorance was your bliss when you were young, but when you become a man you must put away childish things because you have to - you can't help but NOT to, and if you choose to ignore it, then life will become like the rioters whose problems are going to hit the fan all at once one day. You learn and see what life expects of you because life takes no prisoners, it kills us all on the spot, and as an adult you see and know that. You're no longer ignorant because you can't be, not because you choose to be, but if you take the latter route, life is going to be, on average, much worse (especially in the long term, and there's no pain like chronic pain) than if you'd of paid attention and realized, "Hey, maybe life isn't ultimately about attaining happiness since attaining ultimate happiness is bullshite and impossible."

And besides, it's ridiculous to believe that you (the OPer) can go back and reacquire total happiness from when you were young and hold onto it for any length of time when you know for a fact that you are going to die. When you know the outcome of the game is going to be your team losing, regardless of the glimmers of hope during the actual game, you still have it playing in the background of your mind that it is all futility, and that conscious (and subconscious) reminder to your conscience is what makes you grow and shed childish things and have a sense of urgency: Because you should. You don't have all the time in the world, and neither do the people around you, and with that reality "happiness" is always an arm's length away.

Life is hard AF, and anything that's hard AF cannot be happy and hunky dory. It just cannot be, and that is why youthful happiness fades: It's not because we choose it to be, it's because it cannot be (and be, and be, and be, and be).

College was generally pretty fun, but I spent a good chunk of my prime years either in combat, preparing to go to combat, or in other far flung shitholes training others how to fight in combat. My life had a more urgent teleological purpose and a consequence that is difficult to replicate anywhere else in the civilian world, but "happy" is not necessarily the word I would use.

When I left that life, I tried to replicate what my friends in major cities had lived in their early and mid-twenties, but it just wasn't the same. Grad school was quite fun, though. I had a great time there.

Life is really good now, if stressful, and about to be better.

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Wow, you were very fortunate. I don’t know anyone whose parents paid their living expenses in college and gave them an allowance, and I went to Loyola.

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My little sister went to LSU med in Nola. My dad paid for her an apartment in River Ridge and all of her expenses.

Me and my older sister were in college before TOPS existed. He paid for our tuition, books, fees etc out of pocket so we wouldn't have student loan debt.

Thanks pops

I was real happy in 2011 until I almost flunked out of LSU, but I was having a ton of fun. 2012 was pretty cool too, but not without headaches. It’s easy to look back on those days and forget all the stressful nights, arguments, and long phone calls back when my ex-wife and I were first dating.

Tbh, I don’t remember any times since puberty when I have really been consistently happy, but those two years were probably the most consistently good.