Get up and go: is 54 really the age we lose our passion for life?

You need a combination of passion and grit to maintain a positive mindset. But a Norwegian study has found that by the time we reach our mid-50s we don't seem to possess both

Name: Get Up and Go.

Appearance: Lively, bold, adventurous.

Age: 54.

I could swear the concept is older than that. Apparently not.

Are you saying that until 54 years ago there was no such thing as get up and go? No, I'm saying that people over the age of 53 don't have any.

Well I am over 53 and I like to think I have still got plenty of get up and go. You like to think wrong. Your get up and go has got up and gone.

What do you mean by get up and go", exactly? Your passion, your grit, your drive to try new things and achieve fresh goals. All dried up, sadly.

No doubt it is a common enough problem, but surely the age at which it dries up varies widely from person to person? Nope. It's 54.

Who says? A Norwegian study published in New Ideas in Psychology, that has examined the relation between passion, grit" and a positive mindset across a lifespan.

And what did it find? That the correlation between grit and passion were strong between the ages of 17 and 53, but in the 54 to 69 group the correlation was trivial".

I have no idea what you are talking about. You may well have a high score for grit and a low one for passion, or vice versa. These intertwined qualities are needed for high achievement, but the over-53s don't seem to possess them as a package.

Nonsense. How are they even defining passion? As a strong desire or enthusiasm for something".

Yeah, I used to have that. And grit? As a quality of endurance characterised by exertion or diligence".