But Are You Satisfied?

What matters most in life shifts as we age.

Photo: Getty Images

What got me thinking about satisfaction with life was a report by Fidelity International (of Australia), which found that elderly Australians were generally more satisfied with their lives the longer they had been retired. That got me thinking about satisfaction, and how we know when we’ve reached it.

Satisfaction is not the same as being happy, according to those who study these things. As social scientists define the terms, happiness is that momentary joy you feel at a particular moment in time. It’s delightful, but it’s fleeting. Satisfaction is the overall sense that your life is sailing in the direction you want it to go. It’s a stable, longer-lasting emotion – more like happiness in a time-release capsule.

Social scientists agree that satisfaction is subjective, and one man’s satisfaction may be another man’s hell. They even acknowledge that subjective experiences are hard to define and harder to measure, but that hasn’t stopped courageous social scientists from trying to do both.

The broadly accepted view, according to the positivepsychology.com website, is that satisfaction falls into four categories:

1.       Your life chances – circumstances influenced by the society you live in, your wealth and social status, family bonds, and personal mental, physical, and psychological fitness. For example, were you born on third base and convinced that you hit a triple?

2.       Your life events – challenges you may confront in life, positive and negative, that cause you to lean toward greater or lesser satisfaction. Did you win most of your battles? Did life beat you up a lot?

3.       Flow of experience – your feelings and responses to what happens, including yearning, anxiety, loneliness, and rejection on the negative side of the scale, or love, safety, excitement, and rapture on the positive.

4.       Your evaluation of life – your assessment of all these factors, how you compare your life to your conception of “the good life,” and whether you’re more an optimist or a pessimist.

And This Matters Because…?

Naturally, when we are highly satisfied with life, we tend to be happier and enjoy life more. Beyond that, research has shown that life satisfaction and health are closely related. If one improves, the other follows, and the same in reverse. Another study has found that a high level of life satisfaction even correlates to a reduced risk of mortality.

But how do you know if you’re satisfied? To me, it seems obvious: You just know. But I am not a social scientist. Social scientists develop tools to measure things. The first popular instrument was a five-statement assessment called the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), created in the 1980s. There’s also the Life Satisfaction Index, which has 20 questions, and other scales developed more recently.

According to these tools, older adults generally have higher satisfaction with life than other adults. That’s good to know. But the research breaks it down further.

Meanwhile, Back in Australia…

The Fidelity report that first attracted my interest in life satisfaction looks at older adults in four segments: pre-retirement, semi-retirement (working part-time in anticipation of full retirement), early in retirement, and late in retirement (retired for 10 years or more). The least satisfied of the four are the pre-retirees, mostly because they are stressed about retirement finances. In general, life satisfaction increases as people move through retirement. What was a major factor in one stage becomes less significant at another stage. Satisfaction with health declines with age, as might be expected, but retirees also give it less weight than before. Veteran retirees report high satisfaction with other aspects of their lives – connection to community and family, sense of control, high confidence, and positive experiences day to day.

The only segment more satisfied than the experienced retirees is the semi-retirees, who are bullish on their health, their sense of purpose, and every other measure except wealth.

The report was written for financial advisors and emphasizes that wealth and health – the dominant discussion topics between planners and clients – are not the sole measures of satisfaction, nor even the most critical ones. Further, it presents evidence that what matters to clients most changes, depends greatly on where they are on their life journeys.

How You Know

For myself, I feel quite satisfied. No debts, few responsibilities, strong marriage, successful children, happy grandchildren, good friends, good health, enough to eat, and a purpose that keeps me eager to get out of bed each morning. That’s not to say my life is not without its irritations and aggravations. I’m not happy every minute. But I’m content.

If you’re not sure whether you’re satisfied, you can always ask a social scientist. But based on their evidence, the best thing you can do is keep aging. It gets better and better.