The Hard Years Count Too

There are two ways most of us were taught to tell whether a life was a good one.

Was it happy? And did it count for something?

Nobody remembers agreeing to those two. They were simply in the air. And between them, they're supposed to cover the whole thing.

For a good deal of a life, they manage it.

But there's a stretch in every life they can't get near. The year everything changed and none of it was your idea. The decade that went somewhere you'd never have chosen. The long patch you would never call happy and couldn't honestly say counted for much either.

Two questions, and that stretch answers neither one. Which leaves it outside anything you might call your life's good — however many years of that life it took.

A group of researchers walked into the same wall from the other side.

They were trying to work out what makes a life good, and they had the same two questions everybody else has. And they kept meeting people those two couldn't account for — people whose lives hadn't been especially happy and hadn't obviously added up to anything, who said without hesitating that their lives had been good ones.

There were far too many of them to wave away.

So they went looking for a third question. Several thousand people, across nine countries, from Norway to Japan to Angola. And one came back that nobody had thought to put on the list.

Not was it happy. Not did it count for something. But: What do you understand now that you couldn't have grasped before?

Not facts — facts can be handed to anybody. This is the other kind of knowing: the depth of a thing you had only ever seen the surface of.

It shows up in the most unremarkable ways. Knowing when somebody is pretending to be all right, because you did it yourself once and you know exactly how it looks from the inside. No longer being frightened of a thing that used to frighten you, having found out what you can actually survive. Knowing which troubles are real troubles and which ones aren't — and knowing it in your body rather than as an opinion. Spotting somebody across a room who is in the middle of the worst of it, and knowing better than to say anything clever.

None of that arrived with age. Every piece of it came from somewhere in particular.

Being the one who can tell means being the one somebody finally tells. Knowing what you can survive means walking into rooms you'd have backed out of at thirty. Being able to sit with somebody in the worst week of their life without flinching and without trying to fix it is rarer than it sounds, and worth a great deal more than advice.

People want this one, too, and not only as a bonus on top of the other two. Made to pick just one type of life from the three and give up the rest, between seven and seventeen percent chose the third — a minority, but a steady one, in countries with nothing else in common.

Then somebody thought to test the question against whole lives, from the outside, with nobody's own account of themselves involved. They read obituaries. Thousands of them. They marked down the hard events — the bereavements, the divorces, the work that went away — and then had the lives rated on all three questions.

The lives with the most hard years in them came back rated as the richest. Not happier — the least happy of the lot. And on meaning, no different at all.

Three dials, and the hard years sent two of them in opposite directions. Which is precisely why those stretches have been so difficult to place. Held up against was it happy, they come back as the worst of it. Held up against did it count, they don't register. It took a third question to show that anything had been going on in there at all.

None of which is a recommendation, and the people who found it said so first. Nobody would choose one of those years, and whatever you came to understand in them is no payment for what they cost.

But those tough stretches were never outside a good life. They mattered — profoundly. They were registering the whole time, on a dial nobody had thought to show you.