No, there is a well-studied and objective answer to this general question. Even though people will vary, there’s a crystal-clear trend that’s been studied over and over again as a perennial question in psychology, sociology, and economics. We don’t have to base any of this on vibes, and arguably a question with a definitive answer like this doesn’t belong here.

A large empirical literature has debated the existence of a U-shaped happiness-age curve. This paper re-examines the relationship between various measures of well-being and age in 145 countries, including 109 developing countries, controlling for education and marital and labor force status, among others, on samples of individuals under the age of 70. The U-shape of the curve is forcefully confirmed, with an age minimum, or nadir, in midlife around age 50 in separate analyses for developing and advanced countries as well as for the continent of Africa. The happiness curve seems to be everywhere. While panel data are largely unavailable for this issue, and the findings using such data largely confirm the cross-section results, the paper discusses insights on why cohort effects do not drive the findings. I find the age of the minima has risen over time in Europe and the USA.

Here you go, OP (full-access preprint here). There’s no need to get anecdotal about this; it’s a very well-studied question in psychology, sociology, and economics. The U-shape has extensive evidence supporting it. If “have you gotten progressively less happy as you age?” were the prompt here, I wouldn’t be doing this, but you asked a general question that can be and has been answered empirically over and over.

I only get about 4 hours

If you feel rested after that much sleep (but I suppose probably not if you’re having this consistently for months), that could be a symptom of mania.

Take that with a massive grain of salt, especially because I know nothing about you besides this one thing and because mania is more than just that.

Man, am I the only one who sees emojis used in place of bullet points (especially “✨”, whatever the shit that’s supposed to convey; polish?) and thinks “An LLM definitely wrote this”?