If the search for happiness sometimes seems to be the quest of a lifetime, misfortune is within everyone’s reach! As proof of this, a scientific study has established in a completely Cartesian way which would be the four least happy years of our lives…
Luman being is hardly satisfied with his condition: as a child or teenager, he dreams of the freedom enjoyed by adults, but once an adult, he dreams with melancholy of the idleness of his young years. Always driven by the desire for a better situation, never happy with his current state. Difficult, therefore, to be able to decide objectively on what one could define as “the best period of our life”.
But that was without counting on science, which has the answer to everything! And more specifically, on Spanish researcher Begoña Álvarezwho wanted to get to the bottom of it and conducted a study whose conclusions were published in the scientific journal Social Indicators Researchreports Cosmopolitan. To do this, the researcher surveyed 28,000 people aged 50 and overand asked them about the look they had retrospectively on their life course.
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Puberty, a thankless period par excellence
The researcher’s investigation actually focused on the opposite requestto know what are the happiest years. But the results collected thanks to his study make it possible to draw, in hollow, the period when one would be, conversely, the least happy. Begoña Álvarez thus addressed 3 questions to respondents : Was there a specific time when you were happier than the rest of your life? If yes, when did this period begin? And when did it stop? From his investigation, a double reality emerges: the first four years of our thirties would be the most fulfilling, when those where we are the least happy would be between our 10 and 14 years.
A result that is just as sad as it is eloquent: this period corresponds to that of puberty, a thankless age when we pass from the status of a child to that of an adolescent, and where we struggle to tame our bodily changes as much as our emotional evolutions. These years also coincide with when we spend most of our time in collegea place of refuge for some, a real hell for those who are victims of school harassment. However, as we know today, they are not in the minority: nearly 8 out of 10 students are victims of violence within their establishment, alerts the recent survey of the Apprentis d’Auteuil.
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