The Perfect Age

On a recent edition of The Chew, the studio audience was asked ” What do you feel  is the perfect age… The age that you look back at fondly if you are older, and the one that you look forward to if you are younger ?”

What would YOUR answer be ?

Knowing how much youth is valued in America, I thought they would pick ” Twenty-five” or perhaps ” Twenty-nine”. At either of those ages, one is setting out on one’s own, independent and still young with the endless future stretching out ahead. Either of those answers would not have surprised me. The audience’s actual response was unexpected. Are you ready for this ?

Their perfect age was ” Fifty”. Their reasons were varied. Being comfortable with who they were. Enjoying the company of the generations on either side of them, both their parents and their children. Stable family life. Etc., etc.

I was very impressed with the maturity of the response. This is a subject I had touched upon in an earlier post four years ago after reading an article in The Economist that described how happiness changes with one’s journey through life. According to it, happiness rises slowly throughout our early years, peaks at age forty-six and then decreases only slightly all the way till the end of life . Kudos to the studio audience for knowing that youth is not all it’s cracked up to be.