The stats say I’ve just hit the happiest age

This week I turned 36, and a few days later someone sent me two surveys I’ve not quite shaken off since. One reckons 36 is the “ideal age”. The other found it’s the age people say they’re happiest. 

That’s a lovely thing to read on your birthday, right up until you notice what it’s actually implying… that it’s all downhill from here. 

36 does tend to be the age when the bets you placed in your twenties finally start to pay off. Perhaps you’ve built the company you once described hopefully in a pitch deck, or finally got to the point where you’re affecting change at your company. Maybe you have a family like myself, or you’re in the noisy, sleep-deprived business of building one.

On paper, it’s genuinely hard to argue this hasn’t been the best year of my life. My second child arrived, and I found out that your love and affection doesn’t get divided between two children. Rather, it just doubles (the sleep, I’m afraid, goes firmly the other way).

It’s been a year to remember for the MAGIC AI team too, which is now 26 people strong. We grew our online community to 10,000, took the company stateside and, to my ongoing disbelief, sold out. A King’s Award – perhaps the highlight of my professional career so far – followed shortly after. If you handed 26-year-old me a list of what happened this year, he’d probably think it was time for a well-earned rest.

To be honest, that’s the part that unsettles me. If 36 really is the top of the proverbial hill, every year after it is just a slow, ambling stroll back down the other side. I don’t really fancy that as a plan for the next few decades.

So I’ve decided to read the statistics differently. I don’t think 36 is the happiest or most ideal age because life peaks and then coasts. I think it’s the happiest age because it’s the year you tend to have the most going on at once.

You’ve got people relying on you, the most half-finished things you’re desperate to see through, the most reasons to haul yourself out of bed at five in the morning whether you feel like it or not. Happiness, it turns out, isn’t the absence of pressure. For me, at least, it’s the by-product of caring about a lot of things at the same time.

Which makes my plan for beating the stats simple: keep moving. Set the next goal before you’ve finished celebrating the last one, and always keep enough on the go that I never mistake a good year for a finish line. I’d much rather my daughter saw success as something you keep chasing, gratefully and greedily, for as long as you possibly can.

So, has 36 really been the fulfilling year of my life? When it comes to both my family and my work, I’m struggling to think of one that beats it. But I’m still going to do everything I can to prove the polls wrong, and show that your mid-thirties are only the “peak” if you let them be.

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