This For males, the happiest decade is 60-69, and the least happy is 20-29.
I found it surprising that many posters have agreed with the statement highlighted above. I, for one, do not.
Rather, I find myself in concordance with another survey I read some time back and do not have handy to provide a reference to. Basically, it said that married people with children are most unhappy during their children's teenage years, and they regain their happiness when the children are grown. For us, the children's growing pain years coincided with the most stressful time of our careers.
In our case - I think I can speak for my wife here too - the years of 20-30 were not at all bad. We were in love, got married, bought a house, and I was making good money (for a wet-behind-the-ears engineer) for the first time.
The years of 35-45 were the most horrible years of our lives (we are of the same age). It was gradually becoming clear that my involvement with a couple of startups - first as moonlighting part-time works, then as full-time jobs - was simply a bad investment, though a life enriching experience. My wife's work with her megacorp (also one of the companies in the Dow 30) was also getting worse with the turmoil in her division. Higher managers one or two ranks above her were getting fired one after another, and no replacements could last more than a few months. When a business model no longer works, there is simply no way a change of workers or managers can turn it around. She agreed with me that perhaps it would be better for the corp just to shut down the entire division. But it dragged on with her being the manager having to lay off workers. In the end, she walked off her job. And to add to our misery with work, my eldest child was going through the teenage rebellious years. It was HELL.
Now that my children (20 & 23) seem to be past their growing pain and we have realized that despite our career failure we are not broke, it has been a lot more peaceful. Due to the LBYM approach, we still have enough to have food on the table, plus some extra money for occasional recreation activities. What else do people need?
I don't know why people have to be past 60 to start mellowing down. Too much hormone? We started when we were 45. Going downhill has been really easy; there is no pedalling involved and I am through with pedalling. Sit back, roll along and enjoy the scenery. Life is good again (knock on wood).