The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older

Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.

As one becomes older the world becomes colder.

As we grow older life becomes more challenging and complicated, but it can also become more satisfying.

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

Central thesis I had in mind

Happiness and satisfaction are a function of perspective, not of the true state of things.

Adage: bloom where you are planted and grow towards the sun.

Each and every person I have encountered over the span of my life has been in pursuit of nothing but happiness. The desire presents under different names and disguises. For some, it’s the satisfaction of achievement or acquisition; for others, it’s the joy and relief of meeting a person who sees them for who they really are, and loves them anyway. What we seek certainly changes as we age, but as we grow older it becomes clearer to us that true happiness comes when it is not sought – it is a function of contentment and peace with one’s circumstances and situation. Happiness is the absence of a spiritual deficit, even when not all worldly needs are satisfied.

I’ve observed that the ability for gratitude expands with age, as we lose loved people and objects around us and the impermanence of possessions and companionship leaves its impression on us. When we are young, we can’t understand that our pets only keep us company for a little while, why grandpa can’t lift us anymore even though we know it’s because his back hurts. Losing loved ones as an adult is an exquisitely painful ordeal because the wisdom of age imparts upon us that there are only two ways forward from a loss; either accepting that there is no way to return to us what is now gone forever, and moving forward with a permanent cavity within our hearts – or living in denial, bound to search forever for the person who cannot be found, who does not text back to the phone number you cannot bear to disconnect, the one who you chase around every street corner just to find you have made a circle around the block.

However, I believe that this loss is what makes happiness increase with age. We become more grateful for what we have in the moment as we have the looming awareness that it will one day go. There comes a point where we realise that today’s tribulations are tomorrow’s yearnings, that happiness arises out of a choice to appreciate even the prickly bits of life because at least it means you are feeling something. Some believe that we get sadder and older with the passage of time, that youth was the undercurrent and prerequisite for the happiness we embodied as children. No; youth simply was the time where others helped us meet our needs to the point where we did not know we had any, when we do not comprehend the finity of love and people are never lost, only misplaced. In short, we were content. But we could not have gratitude! Life and happiness were a given and constant to us.

It is a gift, that the happiness that comes from the appreciation of life’s transientiousness that we develop as adults is sweeter than the meeting of every need we have as a child. Gratitude swells with age as we realise deeper and deeper our fortune to still have what others have lost – and I do not envy those who are young and are yet to learn that we are not the the agent of sentences about the pursuit of happiness; but that we are the subject.