I asked 382 Americans to draw their happiness

In 2013, Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson published “The End of History Illusion.” Across six studies of more than 19,000 people, they found that people reported big changes in their personalities, values, and preferences over the past decade but expected little change in the next one.

The clever part was the comparison. The researchers matched people looking forward against people ten years older looking back. Thirty-year-olds expected less change between 30 and 40 than 40-year-olds remembered going through.

One explanation: remembering change is easier than imagining it. We mistake our struggle to picture change for evidence that change won’t happen.

The study explains a pattern in a survey I fielded last week. I asked an age-balanced sample of 382 Americans to draw the shape of their happiness across their lives. First they drew how happy they remembered being, from birth to today. Then they extended the line through age 80, showing how happy they expected to be.

I expected the drawings to resemble a U-shaped curve. Research comparing people of different ages has often found that happiness starts relatively high, declines toward a low point in midlife, then rises again later in life. When I analyzed the results, that is not what I found.

Try it yourself. Enter your age, draw the past you remember, then draw the future you expect.

The lines were all over the place, and some of the mess was my fault. I let people start at the very bottom of the chart, and many did, assuming, I think, that a newborn is basically nothing.

I was also comparing two different methods. The famous U-shaped happiness curve comes from people reporting how happy they are right now, then comparing the answers of 25-year-olds, 45-year-olds, and 70-year-olds. My survey asked each person to reconstruct their past and imagine their future.

But the mess hid a pattern. Although my survey measured happiness, not personality or values, the drawings showed the same asymmetry Quoidbach and his colleagues found: a past full of turns, then a smooth road ahead.

To measure the wiggle, I sampled each drawing at one-year intervals, added up all its up-and-down movement, then subtracted the minimum movement needed to get from where it began to where it ended. Finally, I converted that result to movement per decade, so longer stretches of life didn’t automatically have more room to bounce around. I found that past lines had nearly three times as much back-and-forth movement as future lines. Seventy-one percent of respondents drew a wobblier past than future.

Several years ago, while I worked at Publicis, one of our clients was AXA, the giant insurance company. I’ve forgotten most of the details, only that I ran research on how people thought about annuities, the life insurance industry, and their future.

I wish I’d had this line test back then. It captures the problem we kept circling: insurance protects you from bumps you can’t see coming, and people picture futures with no bumps at all.

The line test would also have bridged the gap every agency lives in. Creatives want something that feels alive. Researchers want something they can count. A drawn line satisfies both: it feels like a doodle and produces a number.

Building it would have been the hard part. Without LLMs, I’d have needed a developer, and inside an organization as huge as Publicis, getting one was impossible.

Someday I’ll get to use the line test on another insurance client. I expect everything between now and then to go smoothly.