What makes life enjoyable at an older age? Experiential wellbeing, daily activities, and satisfaction with life in general

Abstract

Objectives

This study uses a broad range of activities to examine how the type of activity, its social context, associated stress, importance, and the level of effort required are linked with activity enjoyment. Using aggregated data from all activities, it analyses the association between the experiential wellbeing of individuals and their satisfaction with life in general.

Method

The data set included 1809 activities, reported by 200 non-institutionalised adults, aged 65 and above, living in Poland. Activity data were collected using the experience sampling method. Multilevel mixed effects models examined what makes an activity enjoyable for older adults. Linear regression models examined the relationship between aggregated subjective activity characteristics and satisfaction with life in general.

Results

The most enjoyable activities were religious practice, childcare, and socialising. Enjoyment was positively associated with perceived activity importance, inversely associated with stress, and formed a U-shaped association with effort. On the aggregated level, a higher mean enjoyment predicted a higher satisfaction with life in general, whereas the opposite was the case for the mean importance. However, having greater variance in importance was associated with higher satisfaction with life.

Conclusions

Enjoyable daily activities may boost the global wellbeing of older adults. Balancing high-effort and low-effort activities may provide additional benefits. This study points to new directions for research and shows that activities rarely studied in the existing literature have significant effects on the wellbeing of older adults.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to all Respondents, many of whom were frail and at an advanced age, without whose dedication and commitment this study would not have been possible. I also thank three anonymous Reviewers whose comments helped improve this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics

The study received ethics clearance from the University of Warsaw Rector’s Committee for the Ethics of Research Involving Human Participants. Ethics approval number: 44/2019. Written informed consent was obtained from all respondents.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement No 840113.

Notes

1 Studies using ESM are burdensome to respondents, which results in the low overall response rate. The recruitment process was also severely impacted by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national lockdown introduced in Poland in March 2020.

2 The most prevalent reason for refusal was a concern about sharing one’s mobile phone number with strangers (recruiters). Many individuals worried that their number would later be passed on to marketing companies. The main reason for dropping out of the study was due to annoyance with receiving daily calls and with the questions being repetitive (the same set of questions every day). Few individuals resigned due to health or personal reasons.

3 While the fieldwork overlapped with the introduction of the pandemic and the national lockdown in Poland, activity enjoyment did not significantly differ with the month of the study; thus, the month was not included in the models. It is noteworthy that respondents reported elevated stress levels, e.g. when watching news about COVID-19, and sometimes their fears were explicitly expressed in their verbatim responses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement No 840113.