A Lifetime of Thoughts

The Four Seasons, second quarter 18th century — The Four Seasons, Antoine Watteau, second quarter 18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0).

At fifteen, a thought says: learn. At forty, another says: nothing to doubt. At seventy, a third says: follow the heart’s wish. Thoughts do not stay the same across a life, and an old text and a modern finding each say something about how they change. KTT counts the thoughts in both as thoughts, noticed or not, even when they arrive as a settled mood. The sources read for this article did not test whether a thought comes first.

A map from the Analects

In the Analects, a collection of sayings of Confucius, passage 2.4 lists stages of a life. In James Legge’s public-domain translation of 1893, Confucius says that at fifteen he set himself to learning, at thirty he stood firm, and at fifty he knew the decrees of Heaven. Of forty he says: “At forty, I had no doubts.” At sixty his ear was attuned, and at seventy he could follow what his heart desired without overstepping what was right. Translators render several phrases differently, so the wording varies.

KTT reads this as a map of thoughts. A thought of aim comes first, then one of firmness, then the thought of no doubt, and at the end a wish and a limit that no longer pull apart. It is one man’s account of his own life as the text records it. It is not a measurement, and it does not say that every life runs this way.

What research found

In 2014, Andrew Reed, Larry Chan and Joseph Mikels combined 100 studies with 7,129 participants. Compared with younger adults, older adults favored positive over negative information in attention and memory. This is called the positivity effect. It was larger the wider the age gap between the groups. Some individual studies failed to find it.

The most cited explanation is socioemotional selectivity theory, from Laura Carstensen. As a person’s sense of remaining time shortens, goals shift toward the present and toward feeling well, and attention and memory follow. This is an explanation, and it has support from experiments that ask younger and older people to think about a limited future.

What is not known

Whether the thoughts of later life actually change, or only what older people attend to and remember in lab tasks, is not known.

Whether the Analects map holds outside one text and one life is also open. Only one older cultural text was read here.

Whether the positivity effect looks the same across cultures is open. A paper on cultural differences in the effect exists. It was not read for this article.