Download The Happiness Curve Why Life Gets Better After 50 Jonathan Rauch Books
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"In this warm, wise, and witty overview, Jonathan Rauch combines evidence and experience to show his fellow adults that the best is yet to come.†―Steven Pinker, bestselling author of Enlightenment Now
This book will change your life by showing you how life changes.
Why does happiness get harder in your 40s? Why do you feel in a slump when you’re successful? Where does this malaise come from? And, most importantly, will it ever end?
Drawing on cutting-edge research, award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch answers all these questions. He shows that from our 20s into our 40s, happiness follows a U-shaped trajectory, a “happiness curve,†declining from the optimism of youth into what’s often a long, low slump in middle age, before starting to rise again in our 50s.
This isn’t a midlife crisis, though. Rauch reveals that this slump is instead a natural stage of life―and an essential one. By shifting priorities away from competition and toward compassion, it equips you with new tools for wisdom and gratitude to win the third period of life.
And Rauch can testify to this personally because it was his own slump, despite acclaim as a journalist and commentator that compelled him to investigate the happiness curve. His own story and the stories of many others from all walks of life―from a steelworker and a limo driver to a telecoms executive and a philanthropist―show how the ordeal of midlife malaise reboots our values and even our brains for a rebirth of gratitude.
Full of insights and data and featuring many ways to endure the slump and avoid its perils and traps, The Happiness Curve doesn’t just show you the dark forest of midlife, it helps you find a path through the trees. It also demonstrates how we can―and why we must―do more to help each other through the woods. Midlife is a journey we mustn’t walk alone.
Download The Happiness Curve Why Life Gets Better After 50 Jonathan Rauch Books
"In this beautifully written book, Jonathan Rauch explains that we fundamentally misconceive "getting older". Patiently, with dozens of life stories (including his own), he shows how midlife crisis is less a reconciliation to dispair than a necessary step to a broader happiness. He also translates academic research to show that his anecdotes are not exceptions, but exemplars.
Far too much of what we read today serves only to reinforce what we already think. Try this book to reopen your eyes -- and get a more hopeful view of humanity."
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The Happiness Curve Why Life Gets Better After 50 Jonathan Rauch Books Reviews :
The Happiness Curve Why Life Gets Better After 50 Jonathan Rauch Books Reviews
- Interesting and heartening premise that life satisfaction dips in one's 40s then goes back up, and that this is true across gender, income, nationality, and even primate species. However, he acknowledges that his sources are skewed toward the high achieving and professional American and is this ever true.
If ambitious and fun-loving in your 20s, busy and very successful in your 30s, a bit disappointed in your 40s, but increasingly content and suddenly aware of the rest of humanity beyond 50 isn't your life trajectory, you may feel this book is a bit shallow and obvious. However, if your life has always been pretty fab and you find yourself concerned at 48 that you are sliding into a never ending funk with diminishing reason to live for the rest of your life, then hold off on the divorce/motorcycle/alcohol for at least as long as it takes to read this book. - This is without question the most important book I have ever read (and I've lost count at my age of how many books, thousands...). Written like a detective novel, but non-fiction, Rauch cleverly and powerfully combines insights from economists, psychologists and other experts to address a question that has baffled mankind for ages -- which is why so many people feel worse as they age (having nothing to do with their health, income, social status) and then more or less around 50 begin to feel more satisfied with their lives. Everyone, regardless of age, should read this book. If you're well under 50, it will warn you of potentially rocky times ahead, and if you're OK, you'll finally understand what you very likely have lived through but couldn't explain what or why you felt the way you did. This book is a masterpiece, and one you can't put down once you start. To say it's a tour de force is not to do it justice. Whatever prizes this book should win, it should win (though the author will tell you why the good feeling he will earn from this will be fleeting). There are similar lessons for the rest of us. Don't wait, buy this book, read it, and bask in the glow.
- From one of our leading public intellectuals who has written path-breaking books to defend free inquiry, promote gay marriage, and propose ways to improve our fractured politics comes perhaps his most important work of all -- a clear, concise, cogent, and compelling exploration of that most elusive of goals happiness. From his own experience and that of many others with whom he spoke, Jonathan Rauch explains why we endure a mid-life slump in our outlook, but one that's thankfully followed almost invariably by a happier mood after we pass age 50. Rauch reassures us that our slump has less to do with objective reality -- the accomplishments of our lives to that point -- and more to do with the normal rhythms of human existence. And he offers us hope, backed by extensive research, that better days are ahead for us as we age. This is a marvelous, beautifully written, uplifting work of research and reality, passion and humanity. Read it -- now. You'll be glad that you did.
- Thrilled to see my pre-ordered electronic copy appear in my library early this morning, I started reading The Happiness Curve over coffee before work and will be sneaking into a conference room to read more over my lunch hour. I have needed this book. I am currently in the trough of the curve, eager to be on an upward trajectory but aware that I am being changed in necessary ways. I'm grateful for the research but particularly for the encouragement Rauch offers in his candor about his own experiences.What our culture has historically called "midlife crisis" has for me been more of a slow, steady sloughing away of the habits, beliefs, and preoccupations of the first half of life as the gifts of the second half beckon to me in dreams and precious moments of insight. Having patience with the process has been challenging for me. What is wrong with me? is a frequent thought. Wise authors have helped me know the question itself is simply a sign of significant natural change. The Happiness Curve is a welcome addition to my library of midlife handbooks, sources of comfort and inspiration. Thank you, Mr. Rauch, for such a great gift!
- In this beautifully written book, Jonathan Rauch explains that we fundamentally misconceive "getting older". Patiently, with dozens of life stories (including his own), he shows how midlife crisis is less a reconciliation to dispair than a necessary step to a broader happiness. He also translates academic research to show that his anecdotes are not exceptions, but exemplars.
Far too much of what we read today serves only to reinforce what we already think. Try this book to reopen your eyes -- and get a more hopeful view of humanity. - It’s hard to put into words, especially within the confines of an review, exactly what is so wonderful about this book. The writing, of course, is sublime – Jonathan Rauch is one of the best journalists of his generation, and he has an almost preternatural ability to write compellingly about even the most complicated subjects. But the subject matter, of course, is what really makes this book required reading for anyone approaching, in the middle of, or leaving middle-age. In a word, what this book has to offer is hope – hope for people who are going through hard times in middle-age, hope for people who find themselves doing OK in middle-age but nervous about what old age may hold, and frankly, hope for anyone who thinks or worries at all about how life changes as you get older. The message Rauch delivers is comforting, smart, insightful, and relentlessly optimistic. There’s not a lot of optimism in our world today, and cynicism seems to be the coin of the realm for many people. Not so with Jonathan Rauch. His book is a welcome antidote to that corrosive mindset. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s the kind of book that you will not only find yourself underlining constantly, but that you will tell friends they have to read with such pestering insistence that they might think something’s a little bit wrong with you. The book is just that damn good.
