Hello and welcome back to everything else, the culture podcast from The Financial Times.

I'm Griselda and with me in the studio is John.

Today we're going to be talking about at what time in our lives we're at our most happy.

Is it when we're in our 20s, 30s or maybe much later in our 70s, 80s or 90s even. And we're also going to discuss whether it's even possible to measure things like happiness. Some of us believe it is. Others don't. And then later we're going to hear from the writer will self. So he's going to be telling us why he doesn't use any commas at all in his new book? Yeah, this is a piece of advice for all you literary geeks out there. And for technology

geeks, he's talking about phone addiction and how to beat it. Guilty. So, as you all know from

previous episodes in this series, Griselda has just turned 30.

I'm 31.

Yes, I have.

Yeah, which kind of got us talking about what the next decade is going to hold for us.

Good, bad, ugly.

Yeah, whether we've peaked, whether our peak has decades to come.

And there's been lots in the news recently about life satisfaction, well-being, and when these things are greatest in life, so which decade is the best?

So it's been something that we've been kind of reading about and thinking about deciding whether our 20s were the greatest and it's all downhill from here, or if we have lots to look forward to.

Well, yeah, if you believe Jananne Ganesh, another FT columnist, he wrote a column a few weeks ago saying how the 30s were the best decade of his

life and had a huge response online. He said kind of physical decline is starting to set in,

but no one can notice it. It's kind of a private deterioration, he said. Men feel less

pressure these days to start family in their

30s. In your 30s, you're more energetic. You can have a strain your social life. You're smart

enough to avoid obvious follies. So for him being your 30s is the prime, although, you know,

a lot of these commenters, and many of them women, didn't necessarily agree with his thesis. So

it was slightly contentious

I mean do you think the 30s will be the best decade of your life I feel like that I feel good about 30s

...