IT WILL be June in a couple of days, and I will turn a year older. Fancy that! Reading the U-curve while writing this column, I should ask myself: how’s my U-curve so far, and yours? But before that, let’s revisit the exciting first five months of 2022.
Genuinely exhilarating highlighted by the Armed Forces of the Philippines Service Aptitude Test taken in February, this year – not by me though haha; too old for that; the invitation to apply for the Rotary International Peace Fellowships also in February coursed through my LinkedIn account – thank you LinkedIn; the immensely enjoyable campaign period for the May 9, 2022 elections; accomplishing and submitting all requirements for the Rotary International Peace Fellowships on May 14, 2022, to beat the May 15 deadline – with special thanks to Rotary Club GenSan Tuna Port President Lawrence Carandang and Past President/Board of Director Paris Y. Ayon, for the optional but highly recommended local Rotary Club recommendation; readying and complying with all Clearances for the service – not me again, I just live vicariously through the applicant; and of course, my birthday travel to Iloilo City. I am doubly grateful to my host family – Grace Bayoneta Solis, for welcoming me.
Writing from another place – although not another time (I wish! That’s my romantic side coming through!) – is always exciting. There’s always another source of inspiration, motivation, adventure, and romance. I want to be more prolific while I’m there although I also need to prepare two presentations for two clients: one a long-time friend based in Malaysia, and the other, feature-writing training for the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) XII when I return to base. I have two trainings for DSWD XII when I return: public speaking and feature-writing on top of the editorial services I provided for their 2021 Yearend Report this month.
Happy to be of service to DSWD XII. Thank you, Drey Amarante-Soliva, Patrick Villas, and Jerry Dumdum. I hope to be of brilliant service to the agency.
Meanwhile, I will keep you posted on the Rotary International Peace Fellowships. For more information about it, please click https://www.rotary.org/en/our-programs/peace-fellowships.
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I have been reading about midlife crisis and what brings it on. Some people dismiss it; others don’t. But I would rather hear from the experts since they did extensive research on the subject. As I read, I came across the U-curve. What is it?
Let me quote from the article written by Jonathan Rauch, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Rauch said, “I was about fifty when I discovered the U-curve and began poking through the growing research on it. What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better – something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom. I wish someone had told me what I was able to tell my worried friend: nothing was wrong with him, and he wasn’t alone.”
“In the 1970s, Richard Easterlin, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, learned of surveys that gauge people’s happiness in countries around the world. Finding this intriguing, he amassed and analyzed the data, in the process discovering what came to be known as the Easterlin paradox: beyond a certain point, countries don’t get happier as they get richer. Today he is at the University of Southern California and is celebrated as the founder of a new branch of economics, focused on human well-being. His findings, however, were for many years regarded as a curiosity, more a subject for cocktail conversation than for serious research.”
“A generation later, in the 1990s, happiness economics resurfaced. This time a cluster of labor economists, among them David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, got interested in the relationship between work and happiness. That led them to international surveys of life satisfaction and the discovery, quite unexpected, of a recurrent pattern in countries around the world. “Whatever sets of data you looked at,” Blanchflower said “you got the same things”: life satisfaction would decline with age for the first couple of decades of adulthood, bottom out somewhere in the 40s or early 50s, and then, until the very last years, increase with age, often (though not always) reaching a higher level than in young adulthood. The pattern came to be known as the happiness U-curve.”
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Writer can be reached at belindabelsales@gmail.com. Twitter @ShilohRuthie./PN
