Negotiating Happiness In an Era of Polycrisis: Ages, Life Stages and Generational Perspectives

While sociological literature has long examined well-being and happiness across the life-course, we are observing a profound shift in how this ‘work of happiness’ is performed, particularly when we take an age, life stage and generational approach to it: Younger cohorts, for example, report unprecedentedly low level of happiness in many post-pandemic societies. From childhood through the transition to adulthood, the structural constraints of our contemporary world are increasingly demanding new forms of agency and adaptation from them. People in midlife, older adults, on the contrary, report relatively high happiness, which research attributes to their ability of regulating and ‘brushing off’ negative emotions, and resilience as the ability to ‘bounce back’ into a happy state of mind. Hence, the global polycrisis is reshaping the age-happiness relationship worldwide. This session consequently aims to move beyond treating happiness as a static outcome and instead explores the perceptions, active negotiation and the practices of ‘doing’ happiness in the face of macro-level polycrisis. In so doing, we hope to complicate one-dimensional narratives of decline or despair. We are particularly interested in contributions that are inspired by age studies, life course research, and generational approaches, to bring experiences of children, youth, young, middle aged and older adults into comparison, contrast and dialogue. We welcome papers that interrogate how happiness is conceptualized, governed, measured, and pursued in people’s lives across their life courses and their diverse social, cultural,
economic, and political settings.