Hey, if I could stab people with a cane and get away with it I'd be happy too.

Shouldn't it be- NOW GET ON MY LAWN?

That's because as you get older, so do kids, so that by the time your kids are adults, you can enjoy life again.


Or maybe it's because you become more confident and secure financially and emotionally as you age. But I'm going with "because kids suck"

It's true. As my father-in-law gets older, he realizes that he never did anything wrong in his life and it's all the fault of the libruls and the ni--ers. This makes him happy. So, he's got that going for him, which is nice.

For a lot of old people, just waking up in the morning is a win. Getting to yell at kids and abuse your family is the icing on the cake.

I DNRTFA but how do you measure "happiness". As I grow older there are certainly a number of things which I used to view as negatives that I don't give a flying fark about anymore.

There's also the aspect that when you get going in your chosen career you just might be better off. But then economic success does not equal happiness.

So what other factors could be involved? Reading the Daily Fail?

FredaDeStilleto: AbbeySomeone: As people age their priorities become different and they are less likely to put up with bullsh*t that is draining or time wasting. This makes everyone happier.

Well said. There are young sociopaths out there that will grow into the miserable bastard class as they age. But then there are the rest of us that start out pretty happy, get disappointed that things didn't turn out as well as hoped for, change priorities, and mellow out.

I'd never want to be in my 20's 30's or even early 40's again.

This. When I was young, and full of angst and melodrama, I tortured myself endlessly over shiat that makes no more difference to me now than pigeon crap on the sidewalk.
Of course, there are old people who can't let go of their youthful delusions as they grow old, and they are usually not happy people. And since this sort of research grades on a curve, and most people don't make that mistake - you get these results.

AU24K: Now that I'm older, I'm enjoying telling "kids" boring stories about "way back in the 60's" that they don't give a fark about; just like some of the BS stories I had to listen to as kid from the old fahrts. So, yeah, I'm generally happier....

FYI - "fart" passes the filters just fine, if that was what you were doing.

riverwalk barfly: It's strange, I'm 47 and completely miserable with my life. Bad Marriage, Bad job, bad. bad. bad. And yet, I seriously feel a change. And it is the Fark it attitude. I saw a "help wanted" sign in a restaurant two blocks away. I stopped in to talk to the manager. She wasn't there. She will be at 10:00 a.m.today It's a dishwasher position. I'm seriously considering cutting work just so I can go talk to her at 10:00 - I'm just tired of the Bullshiat (I'm an accountant, so that tells you all you need to know, boring and secure job). But as I've gotten older, I've realized what a farkin' waste all that effort and energy in your 20's and 30's was. I can only imagine what I will feel if I make it to 70. I think that is the point of the article.

^^ Lester Burnham's wife is about to get served.

Maybe the people doing/experiencing things that are guaranteed to bring unhappiness - drugs, crime, risky sexual behavior, untreated mental illness - are less likely to make it to old age? After all, if you've made it to age 70 or so, you have to have done a halfway decent job of taking care of yourself physically and mentally. There are exceptions, of course, but it seems to me that by that point, the depressed or alcoholic (my grandfather) would have pulled the plug, and those who are extremely obese (my grandmother) would have suffered the ill effects.

riverwalk barfly: It's strange, I'm 47 and completely miserable with my life. Bad Marriage, Bad job, bad. bad. bad. And yet, I seriously feel a change. And it is the Fark it attitude. I saw a "help wanted" sign in a restaurant two blocks away. I stopped in to talk to the manager. She wasn't there. She will be at 10:00 a.m.today It's a dishwasher position. I'm seriously considering cutting work just so I can go talk to her at 10:00 - I'm just tired of the Bullshiat (I'm an accountant, so that tells you all you need to know, boring and secure job). But as I've gotten older, I've realized what a farkin' waste all that effort and energy in your 20's and 30's was. I can only imagine what I will feel if I make it to 70. I think that is the point of the article.

I think what you are going through hits most of us somewhere in the mid-point of life. For me, it ended in my late thirties when I met the right woman for me, and all the petty shiat in life stopped mattering. it will happen for you, too - though there's no telling when or how. Take my word for it, Bucky - the sun'll come out tomorrow (now EVERYBODY SING!)


(Ducks, runs away)

riverwalk barfly: It's strange, I'm 47 and completely miserable with my life. Bad Marriage, Bad job, bad. bad. bad. And yet, I seriously feel a change. And it is the Fark it attitude. I saw a "help wanted" sign in a restaurant two blocks away. I stopped in to talk to the manager. She wasn't there. She will be at 10:00 a.m.today It's a dishwasher position. I'm seriously considering cutting work just so I can go talk to her at 10:00 - I'm just tired of the Bullshiat (I'm an accountant, so that tells you all you need to know, boring and secure job). But as I've gotten older, I've realized what a farkin' waste all that effort and energy in your 20's and 30's was. I can only imagine what I will feel if I make it to 70. I think that is the point of the article.

Bad marriage (ended yonks ago), shiatty car, great job, great kid, great girlfriend, great sex, great pay... And personally I'm VERY happy to say I've only gotten more irritable over the years. Personally I think if you age and you DON'T get more grumpy you should be sent to professionals right away for a mental evaluation. If you're found to be too happy, an angry wombat should be put in your pants and forced to watch "Ishtar" until blood begins to pour out of your ears (I can only imagine how much more angry a wombat will become if forced to sit through Ishtar). Of course, my mom is one of those people who have only gotten happier and nicer with time, so I'm first in line to hand the wombat over to the professionals.

It's entertaining. I sit back and I think about it, and I remember all these liberals losing their damn minds over Dubbya during his tenure, and how he was going to destroy the world and how everything was going to end and dogs and cats would be living together, mass hysteria, and it didn't happen (though the economy went in the hopper). Now I sit and I watch all the conservatives lose their damn minds over His Lord and Savior Obama, and how he's the Anti Christ, a Muslim, and he's the cause of the economy being in the hopper. What's even more entertaining is it is EXACTLY the same shiat I watched during the 80s with Reagan, then the first George, then with President Who Didn't Inhale. So I would say part of why I'm more irritable is because people are so mind bogglingly, staggeringly farking stupid with the attention span and memory of a gnat. The more I get to watch humanity, the more grumpy I become.

Hence why I proudly shake my walking stick at the young'n's and tell them to get the fark off my lawn, and why I look at older generations and my own contemporaries and say "Christ, shut the hell up already."

It's the simple things that make me happy now. A good cup of coffee, an afternoon nap....cooking dinner and hearing my daughter say "thanks Dad!
Life isn't much easier than it ever was and in some ways it's a bit harder, but it is definitely more peaceful.

This message proudly brought to you by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of Planet Earth: "Because 'fark it,' that's why!"

Snakeophelia: Maybe the people doing/experiencing things that are guaranteed to bring unhappiness - drugs, crime, risky sexual behavior, untreated mental illness - are less likely to make it to old age? After all, if you've made it to age 70 or so, you have to have done a halfway decent job of taking care of yourself physically and mentally. There are exceptions, of course, but it seems to me that by that point, the depressed or alcoholic (my grandfather) would have pulled the plug, and those who are extremely obese (my grandmother) would have suffered the ill effects.

You make me laugh, really. Everybody dies, but you may have missed the memo. You're going to die too. Yes, yes, you are, and you can't escape it no matter how many miles you jog (see you in the hip replacement center) or the fact that you have never smoked anything or drank anything containing alcohol or caffeine. You're going to die even if you have only had sex with a virgin, one virgin, in all your life. There is no escape.

You're going to die. Here's the memo.

FTFA: "[A]s the brain ages and loses some of its memory, there is a subconscious choice in what to remember and what to let go, and the positive memories are more likely to stay."

That makes sense. If you focus on all the things you've completely farked up in your life, you'll wanna die. If you remember every slight, you'll hate every person you've ever met.

hurdboy: FTFA: "[A]s the brain ages and loses some of its memory, there is a subconscious choice in what to remember and what to let go, and the positive memories are more likely to stay."

That makes sense. If you focus on all the things you've completely farked up in your life, you'll wanna die. If you remember every slight, you'll hate every person you've ever met.

Or you just put them on ignore with sad comments that the mods probably laugh at.

You're welcome to step on my lawn, just stay off of my cloud.

Hawnkee: Bullshiat. Now I'm older, I hate my life now because I was such a farking goodie-two-shoes in my youth. I should have spent the time drinking, screwing anything that moved and enjoying my life instead of wasting it on going to school, working 60-80 hours per week saving up for school/car/house/etc, and trying to "do the right thing." Yeah, I guess things are ok that I have a roof over my head and beer in my belly, but I'll never get another chance at going completely & utterly apeshiat like that again. Life is for living, not saving.

Dude, I really think you are mistaken - it's never too late to go crazy - f**kin' go for it.

dragonchild:

Where have you been? Did you kind of forget how much better off we were in the mid-90s?

unchellmatt: people are so mind bogglingly, staggeringly farking stupid with the attention span and memory of a gnat.

Well, that explains a lot.

I didn't say we weren't better off. Hang on, let me read what I wrote.... Hmmmm... nope, didn't say that. Let me try again.... errrrummmmmmmm... noooo, still don't see where I wrote that we weren't better off economically in the 90s. Once more unto the breach but... nope. I didn't write that. I wrote that conservatives lost their damned mind over Clinton and suggested the world was about to end. Which it didn't.

While our debt did increase, there was however very similar conservative backlash as we saw not long ago, though it lacked the vitriol we've seen from the Tea Party. We had the "Republican Revolution", which IMO we needed as I dislike a sitting president of the same party as the majority in house and senate. However, during that time we did see some of the precursors to our current financial crisis. That said, had politicians NOT been so repulsively short sighted and determined to just say "NO" to anything Obama said rather than work with him on finding a middle ground as we saw during the 90s, our current financial problems wouldn't be quite so pronounced.

happier? hard to tell. bar was set pretty farking low. happier does not equal happy. not even conteny really.