It’s more a radius of curvature effect. People are born with sharp personalities and views on how the world should be.
Eventually, you run up against the weathering affects of reality, your sharp edges smooth to a gentler polish, and you become far more stable and content.
Meh…. Idk babies, toddlers, children all have expectations, many of them unreasonable.
Not saying nurture doesn’t give them different ones or modify existing ones, but I find it highly suspect and in direct contradiction of my empirical experience to assert that children aren’t born with expectations.
Having three, I still think that the tabula rasa might be the proper was to look at it. The expectations of infants follow from their interactions with the world. And those are firstly the interactions with their parents and family. Outside of the very basic needs (food, drink, emotional comfort) you get the children you make. Not to say that all children react the same way to the same parenting, or have the same expectations. But you do mostly create their value system that governs their expectations.
Fair enough. I guess I was prompted to post a reply because of the claim that "the suicide rate is not that high". I had heard the 50k figure in another recent story and found it quite shocking.
The point was just that it's not high enough to explain "Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older" or to support the claim "those who are happy enough not to off themselves in one given way or another will scew the statistics".
Id like to specify that i never stated that people “off themselves” purely from suicide. Drugs, alocohol, suicide, social isolation are all fair gain when combating the strugles of humanity
I suggest you take a second look at that article you reference. They haven't calculated the rate for this year so you have no evidence for your claim.
Straight from the article:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posted the numbers, has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II.
> Last year, according to the new data, the number jumped by more than 1,000, to 49,449 — about a 3% increase vs. the year before. The provisional data comes from U.S. death certificates and is considered almost complete, but it may change slightly as death information is reviewed in the months ahead.
The CDC hasn't calculated an exact final rate yet, but we already know the suicides are approximately 50k and that the US population is approximately 30M, so yes, I have a lot of evidence for my claim.
The data may change "slightly". You're making a mountain out of a molehill with the conceit that the rate may somehow magically become huge when the data is all counted.
He's right, include deaths of despair by overdoses and alcohol. It's way over the 'norm'.
68k in 1995. 158k in 2018.
Measuring a societies' success by the suicide rate has sent the wrong signal. Even the authority whispers disbelief in it's own populace into the headlines.
> He's right, include deaths of despair by overdoses and alcohol. It's way over the 'norm'.
> 68k in 1995. 158k in 2018.
Yet it's still not high enough to explain "Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older" or to support the claim "those who are happy enough not to off themselves in one given way or another will scew the statistics".
Since the vast majority of people don't "off themselves" at any given age, with being past middle age included, that's one hell of a broad survivor bias you're talking about. Even among the most absolutely suicide-prone age cohort in the U.S.A, (those 45 to 54) the rate is no higher than 20 per 100,000. Like I said, survivor bias where the survivors represent 99.995% of the group?
I'm not sure survivorship bias applies when the topic of discussion is, literally, all people who have survived beyond a certain age. How else are we to make age-based observations?
I would say a big reason for the U-bend in many cases is that as you get deeper into middle age you can actually see retirement on the horizon, and then eventually you get there and aren't shackled by a job.
The curve starts to go up right around five years before retirement age.
If I knew that I wouldn’t go to work ever again in five years and I’d probably be pretty happy too.
I bet it’s nice to not have to think about the long term career implications of coasting at work. I think I could get away with quiet quitting for 5 years.
