What does your happiness curve look like?
- Enter your age.
- Draw how happy you’ve been from birth to today and click “Continue.”
- Draw how happy you expect to be from today to age 80 and click “See results.”
Step 1 of 2: Your life so far
Enter your age to begin.
Your purple line: solid = past · dashed = expected future
Enter your age to begin.
Your line, alongside 382 lives
Each thin gray line is one survey respondent’s drawing. Your line appears in purple. Use the filters to compare with people of different ages.
Gray lines: survey respondents. Purple: your drawing. When enabled, the dark line shows the median happiness at each age—not a single person’s life. The people contributing to past-only and future-only views change across the age axis.
About these drawings
382 matched Prolific respondents drew their remembered happiness from birth to their current age, then their expected happiness through age 80. Recruitment used approximately equal age quotas; this is not a population-weighted sample. Filters use the age entered in the drawing exercise.
Lines are interpolated at half-year intervals. Each person contributes equally to the median at each age, regardless of how many drawing points they produced. The happiness scale is relative: these are memories and expectations, not measurements collected throughout people’s lives. Your drawing stays in this page and is not submitted or added to the survey data.