Human longevity is rising rapidly all over the world, but are longer lives more satisfied lives? This study suggests that the answer might be no. Despite a substantial increase in months of satisfying life, people’s overall life satisfaction declined between 1985 and 2011 in West Germany due to substantial losses of life satisfaction in old age. When compared to 1985, in 2011, elderly West Germans were, on average, much less satisfied throughout their last five years of life. Moreover, they spent a larger proportion of their remaining lifetime in states of dissatisfaction, on average. Two important mechanisms that contributed to this satisfaction decline were health and social isolation. Using a broad variety of sensitivity tests, I show that these results are robust to a large set of alternative explanations.

人类的寿命在世界范围内迅速增长，但是更长的寿命会更令人满意吗？这项研究表明答案可能是否定的。尽管令人满意的生活月份大大增加，但由于老年生活满意度的大幅下降，1985年至2011年间，西德人们的总体生活满意度下降了。与1985年相比，2011年，年纪大的西德人在其生命的最后五年平均满意度低得多。而且，他们平均将大部分剩余时间用于不满状态。导致满意度下降的两个重要机制是健康和社会孤立。通过使用各种各样的敏感性测试，我证明了这些结果对于大量的其他解释都是可靠的。