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The happiest age might not exist
Plus: unforgettable jingles, strangers saving a retired nurse, and humanity’s first look at the far side of the Moon.
Greg Sullivan
October 08, 2026 • Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes
“May I have a small house and large garden;
And a few friends,
And many books, both true.”
― Abraham Cowley
So when do we peak? Thirty-six? Sixty? Seventy? Erik Barnes digs into the increasingly messy science of happiness and finds something far more useful than a birthday to circle on the calendar. Elsewhere today, old advertising slogans refuse to vacate our brains, strangers rally around a retired nurse facing jail over her yard, and a Soviet spacecraft photographs a side of the Moon no human had ever seen.
Research
The happiness curve is getting harder to predict.
I’m rapidly approaching a… certain age of great emotional weight, so I would appreciate science issuing a clear ruling on whether I’m heading toward the good part or whether I peaked sometime around the launch of the iPhone. Instead, happiness researchers have apparently chosen chaos. Depending on the study, our happiest years land in our 30s, 60s, 70s, or somewhere else entirely. One survey even made a surprisingly strong case for 36.
The disagreement isn’t just researchers measuring the same thing badly. The familiar U-shaped happiness curve appears to bend differently depending on where people live. Younger Americans report lower happiness than older adults, while young people in countries including Lithuania and Serbia show a very different pattern. Economics, opportunity, and expectations all seem to be messing with the calendar.
As Erik Barnes reports, the age question may not even be the most useful one. An 86-year Harvard study points to something we can actually do to boost happiness, regardless of the number on the birthday cake. And unlike most modern wellness advice, it does not require a supplement stack, a cold plunge, or waking up at 4:37 a.m.
GOOD reader Georgia Ehrreich caught these haunting shots of the harvest moon breaking through the clouds on one last boat ride. I saw almost the exact same thing here in Southern California last week, but my attempts to photograph it were... considerably less successful. These are gorgeous.
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Over time, about how much of the Moon’s surface can actually be seen from Earth?“We only ever see half” is not quite true. |
Yesterday's Results
In yesterday's issue, we went back to the gloriously ridiculous opening night of the Moulin Rouge in 1889.
And we asked: Which legendary venue would you most want to visit on opening night? 35.3% of you chose The Apollo Theater. Front-row seats and period-appropriate clothing await.
Moulin Rouge (28.6%)
Studio 54 (21.8%)
The Cavern Club (14.3%)
The Apollo Theater (35.3%) 🏆
The Moulin Rouge settled for second place on its own birthday, but one GOOD reader made a dazzling case for it: "I'd love to step into the space dressed 'to the nines' and get lost in the exuberance, talent and style."
Generations | Courtesy of Upworthy
 | ||
Slogans, phrases, and jingles that Boomers and Gen X will remember. | ||
22 forgotten slogans and phrases from commercials that Boomers and Gen Xers will instantly recognize | ||
“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” | ||
By Emily Shiffer | ||
Jingles and slogans from commercials are meant to be catchy. For Boomers (those born from 1946 to 1964) and Gen Xers (those born from 1965 to 1980), hearing certain songs and phrases from back in the day can bring them right back to their childhood. | ||
These jingles (also known as earworms) never seem to fade away from memory, and that’s on purpose. It’s part of the marketing science behind how they’re made. | ||
“The way that we store music in our brains is a lot different from text, numbers, things like that. It goes a lot longer into our past and we remember music a lot longer than just a string of words,” said Seth Ketron, assistant marketing professor at St. Thomas University, in an interview with CBS News. | ||
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Local
She thought no one would help. She was wrong.
Beverly Thomas spent her career as a nurse, caring for other people. At 79, with arthritis and tremors that make yard work nearly impossible, the retired Ohioan was summoned to court over the one thing her own body wouldn't let her keep up with: her overgrown lawn. A judge told her she could be put in jail over it. Living on a fixed income, with nothing left over for landscaping or a lawyer, she lay awake wondering what on earth she was supposed to do.
Then her predicament reached the local news. As Erik Barnes reports, the morning after the segment aired, Thomas opened her door to two complete strangers: a lawn care pro named Norburt Sanek and an attorney, who had arrived at the very same moment without ever having met. "We don't know each other, but we just showed up at the same time," the two of them told her. They were precisely the help she could never have afforded to hire.
Sanek didn't stop at the front yard. He rallied a crew of volunteers, some taking a day off work to clear years of overgrowth by hand, then launched a GoFundMe to cover her fines, her court costs, and the dangerous trees looming over her property. Donations began landing from strangers hundreds of miles away, and a local agency on aging caught wind and offered to match them. For a woman who'd been bracing for a jail cell, the numbers were starting to look very different.
On October 7, 1959, humanity saw the far side of the Moon for the first time. Because the Moon rotates at the same rate it orbits Earth, one hemisphere permanently faces away from us, meaning nobody had ever seen what was back there. Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 changed that when it spent about 40 minutes taking 29 grainy photographs covering roughly 70 percent of the far side.
The pictures revealed a surprisingly different landscape, with far fewer of the large dark plains familiar from the Moon we see at night. There’s also a wonderfully strange Cold War footnote: NASA says declassified records later revealed that Luna 3 used radiation-resistant photographic film originally made for American reconnaissance balloons, recovered after they drifted into Soviet territory. American spy technology inadvertently helped the Soviets show all of humanity a new world.
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Until tomorrow, is a poll about Moulin Rouge enough of an excuse to go dust off that DVD? Yes. Yes, I think it is.