Psychologists say that turning point has little to do with age, retirement dates or nostalgic memories, and everything to do with how we choose to think, day after day.
The unexpected “best age” of life
Ask people about the happiest time of their life and many will head straight for the past. Childhood, with its holidays and games. Youth, with late nights, first loves and big plans. Some even swear their golden years came with grey hair and grandchildren.
That story is comforting, but incomplete. Researchers have long pointed out that every one of those so-called golden ages carries its own shadows. Childhood usually means dependence and very little control over decisions. Youth is often flooded with anxiety, financial stress and identity questions. Old age can be a time of wisdom, but also of illness, loneliness or regret.
Across dozens of large-scale studies on happiness, one pattern stands out: there is no universal magic decade. The same age can be blissful for one person and miserable for another. What shifts the needle isn’t the number of candles on the cake; it’s the mental lens through which people look at their daily life.
The “best stage” of life tends to start not when circumstances change, but when our way of thinking does.
A Spanish psychologist’s provocative claim
Spanish psychologist Rafael Santandreu goes even further. For him, the ultimate stage of life has nothing to do with youth or retirement. It begins the day someone stops living as a permanent complainer and starts treating the present as their real home.
His argument is blunt: the habit of moaning, comparing and catastrophising quietly poisons years of potential joy. On the other hand, deliberately choosing to value simple, ordinary things – a quiet morning, a friendly message, a body that still works reasonably well – creates what he calls a “positive rupture” in a person’s story.
The ultimate stage of life, says this school of thought, begins when a person thinks: “I don’t need a different life to feel good. I need a different way of looking at the one I have.”
This shift can happen at 22 after a brutal breakup, at 45 during a career crisis, or at 70 following a health scare. The trigger varies wildly. The mental switch is the same: less obsession with what’s missing, more attention to what’s already there.
How a small mental shift rewires daily reality
This is not about forced optimism or pretending everything is fine. It’s closer to a form of mental training. Cognitive psychology has shown for years that the brain works with “attention filters”. What we repeatedly focus on starts to feel like the whole picture.
If those filters are tuned to failures, annoyances and threats, life feels like constant damage control. If they are trained to also register small comforts and signs of progress, the inner climate softens. Problems still exist, but they do not dominate the mental landscape in the same way.
Researchers who study wellbeing talk about three concrete mechanisms at play:
- Attentional training: directing the mind, again and again, towards specific types of information.
- Emotional regulation: learning not to let every thought or feeling dictate behaviour.
- Cognitive reframing: giving a different, more workable meaning to events.
This is where personal-development-style psychology, when grounded in real evidence, can help. It offers tools rather than promises: brief gratitude exercises, short meditations, structured journaling, and behavioural experiments that test new ways of reacting to stress.
From theory to practice: what the “ultimate stage” looks like
Typical signs you’ve entered this stage
Therapists often notice similar patterns in people who reach this mental turning point. They have not eliminated problems, but their relationship with those problems has changed.
| Before the shift | After the shift |
|---|---|
| Constant comparisons with others | Occasional comparisons, but more focus on personal trajectory |
| Blaming circumstances or past | Recognising limits, while asking “what can I do now?” |
| Waiting for “one day” to feel happy | Looking for small sources of satisfaction today |
| Seeing setbacks as proof of failure | Treating setbacks as unpleasant, but usable information |
| Rigid plans about how life “should” be | Flexible goals, more tolerance for detours |
People often describe a strange mix of relief and responsibility. Relief, because they no longer see themselves as victims of an unlucky timeline. Responsibility, because they realise no birthday, promotion or romantic drama will do the mental work for them.
The radical claim here is that adulthood’s real coming-of-age happens when we stop outsourcing our happiness to external milestones.
Concrete techniques that support this switch
Psychologists who share Santandreu’s view tend to suggest simple, repetitive practices rather than life makeovers. Examples include:
- Daily “three good things”: each evening, writing down three specific moments that were pleasant, useful or meaningful.
- Complaint audit: tracking how often you complain, to whom, and about what, for one week.
- “So what now?” question: after a setback, adding one practical next step to every worried thought.
- Short mindful pauses: 60 seconds, a few times a day, noticing bodily sensations and surroundings without judging them.
None of these instantly transform life. Their power lies in repetition. They slowly reshape which mental pathways feel natural to use.
Happiness as a decision, not a prize
This approach doesn’t deny the weight of social inequality, trauma or bad luck. A person born into poverty or facing chronic illness does not have the same room for manoeuvre as someone who is wealthy and healthy. Psychologists are increasingly cautious not to turn “positivity” into a moral obligation.
Yet within those constraints, there is still a degree of inner choice. Personal development, when it is honest, insists on a specific point: we rarely control life’s cards, but we can influence how we play them. That distinction between circumstances and response is at the heart of cognitive behavioural therapy.
The “ultimate stage” isn’t a reward life hands out; it’s a stance we practise, often clumsily, with the conditions we already have.
For some, this realisation is almost shocking. They notice how often they have postponed contentment: “once I lose weight”, “once I move”, “once I meet someone”, “once I retire”. The new question becomes: what if today’s imperfect conditions are not a waiting room, but the actual stage on which life is happening?
What this shift looks like in everyday scenarios
Midlife crisis re-framed
Imagine a 47-year-old who feels stuck in a job they never really chose and a marriage that has slipped into autopilot. The classic script is to fantasise about radical change: quitting, divorcing, moving abroad. Sometimes those changes are needed. Often, though, the first lever lies elsewhere.
A therapist working from this perspective might help them:
- Identify specific parts of their day where they still feel engaged or curious.
- Experiment with small shifts at work: new responsibilities, micro-learning, boundaries around overtime.
- Have different kinds of conversations at home, starting with appreciation rather than criticism.
This doesn’t magically fix systemic problems. Yet it can mark the start of the “ultimate stage”: less fantasising about an entirely different life, more active shaping of the existing one.
Ageing without surrendering joy
For older adults, the same mental switch can mean accepting real losses – health, friends, physical capacity – while refusing to let those losses define everything. That might look like actively scheduling small pleasures, joining groups even when energy feels low, or allowing themselves to learn new skills later in life.
Here, the risk is fatalism: the idea that past a certain age, nothing truly new can happen. The psychologists who speak of this “ultimate stage” argue the opposite. Mental flexibility, not youth, is the true renewable resource.
Key concepts behind this approach
Several psychological terms sit in the background of this debate and are worth clarifying:
- Locus of control: the degree to which people feel outcomes depend on their actions (internal) versus external forces (external). A more internal locus is linked to better resilience.
- Cognitive distortion: biased ways of thinking, such as all-or-nothing views or mind-reading others’ intentions, that fuel suffering.
- Gratitude practice: not just saying “thanks”, but deliberately registering benefits received, which research links to higher life satisfaction.
- Psychological flexibility: the ability to stay in contact with the present moment while adjusting behaviour in line with personal values.
Each of these ideas feeds into the same core message: the ultimate stage of life is less about perfect conditions and more about a mind that has learned, through trial and error, to work with reality rather than against it.
The shift is rarely neat. People slip back into old habits, fall into complaint spirals, forget to notice what is going well. Yet every time they return to this new way of thinking, even briefly, they reinforce a stage of life that has little to do with age – and a lot to do with deliberate attention.
