Dear LPG, 

I found an online article recently which tells that people start life being more tolerant, are at their most angry in middle age and then become happier people in older age, although I am not sure it is absolutely true.  I wonder if the truth is that we just get wearier of trying to put our points across by then.  

As we get older there are still many things that happen, but it appears that we let most of them pass us by more readily.  There are many ways to deal with our anger, and I think that many of us get worn down by all the things that have happened during our lives that, once we can ignore most of them, we just do. 

I suppose we have to take into consideration that the article is very general.  No two people are the same and many of us pensioners do keep fighting for our rights and so that our principles can be heard, and I don’t necessarily mean with harsh words or extreme actions, but the people around us, both those who affect our lives in an official capacity and those family members that sometimes feel the need to take over, need to know that they are not always right about the best way that we should live our lives.  We really do need to tell them what we think even if we have to depend on them to some extent.  

But I truly hope that we are not letting them miss the real way we feel and perceive it as ‘happiness’ rather than a state of surrender or of ‘giving up’.  In every stage of life there are situations that we need to improve. Many of them have something in common with our children; to me problems don’t get easier to deal with, they just change as time goes by, and we still need to make our thoughts known.

Articles like the one that I found are often written by people who are somewhat younger than we pensioners, and who have done extensive research into the subjects they are discussing.  But there is one aspect of the thing that they just cannot research and that is the experience of actually being an older person and living an older person’s life. 

I noted that the age of the ‘older people’ referred to in this piece seems to top out when they get to the age of 50.  So perhaps the writer has not considered those later decades that so many youngsters will experience sooner than they think or perhaps, as usual, they see life after 60 as not worth considering when making a general internet observation?

PF, Catford. 

PF shares the post that sparked her thought today…

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