Why have old Australians become less satisfied with life?

 

The accompanying graphic suggests that there has been a long-term decline in average life satisfaction of Australians since about 2010. The graph also shows that there has been a decline in Australians ratings of “Life in Australia”. The decline in ratings of life in Australia should be a particular concern to politicians. However, my focus in this post is on the decline in average life satisfaction. The graph has been copied from the Summary Report of the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index for 2024. The research was conducted by the Australian Centre on Quality of Life (ACQOL) at Deakin University.

I think the decline in average life satisfaction should be of some concern to Australians, even though I don’t believe that life satisfaction indicators tell us much about human flourishing or well-being. I view life satisfaction as, at best, a rough measure of psychological wellbeing, which is just one of the goods of a flourishing human. (Readers who require further explanation will find it in my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing.)

A similar decline in life satisfaction seems to have occurred in North America. (See Chapter2 of the World Happiness Report.) However, that is not of much comfort.

The analysis that ACQOL has presented in their full report focuses mainly on their Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) rather than on average life satisfaction. The PWI is an average measure of satisfaction across seven domains of personal life. Since the PWI does not show the same long-term decline as observed in average life satisfaction, the ACQOL analysis doesn’t fully answer my question of why Australians have become less satisfied with life.

Since the ACQOL analysis suggests that young people have become less satisfied in domains which seem to have greatest impact on life satisfaction, I thought it might be worth testing whether that explains why average life satisfaction has declined. The approach I adopted was to compare current life satisfaction by age with that in 2005. (I chose 2005 because I had data for that year on my computer.) The exercise has raised more questions than it answers, but I report the results in the hope that someone can solve the puzzle for me.

Comparison of satisfaction levels in 2005 and 2024

 

This graph suggests that the decline in average life satisfaction of old people has been just as great as the decline in average life satisfaction of young people.

Of the seven domains of personal life for which ACQOL collects data, regression analysis indicates the four that have greatest impact on life satisfaction are: Satisfaction with Standard of Living; Satisfaction with Health; Satisfaction with Achieving in Life; and Satisfaction with Personal Relationships. Comparative data for those four domains is depicted below.

 

The graphs suggest that the decline in average life satisfaction on young people is associated with increased dissatisfaction with standard of living and achievement in life. The dismal economic performance of the Australian economy over more than a decade provides young people with good reasons to be increasingly dissatisfied.

However, based on the graphs, taken together, one would expect that the average life satisfaction of young people to have declined to a greater extent than the average life satisfaction of old people. 

So, what explains the decline in average life satisfaction of the old people?

Addendum

I think I now have the answer to my question. While thinking about how to respond to a comment below I began thinking about cohort effects. That led to me to conduct a Google search for "Boomers" and "life satisfaction". I found an article which seems directly relevant:

Botha, F., Vera-Toscano, E. Generational Differences in Subjective Well-Being in Australia. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 2903–2932 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-022-10047-x

Boomers do indeed have relatively low life satisfaction and the age cohorts that preceded them had relatively high life satisfaction. The magnitudes of the differences look large enough to answer my question.

Of course, that leads to another question. Are the boomers really less satisfied with life, or do they just have a problem admitting how satisfied they are?