I’ve spent the best part of a decade asking this question for a living. Every time travel novel I’ve written starts from the same itch: if someone handed you a return ticket to your own past, which stop would you choose? Ask it out loud at the barber’s and watch what happens. People go quiet. They stare into the middle distance like a dog hearing a crisp packet opened two rooms away. Then they name an age with alarming speed, which tells you they worked it out years ago and have simply been waiting for someone to ask.
So let’s ask it properly. What age would you return to? And, more to the point, should you trust your own answer?
The Official Answer Is 36 (Apparently)
YouGov put the question to the British public back in 2016, and the nation delivered its verdict: 36 is the ideal age. Not 18. Not 21. Thirty-six. Old enough to know better, young enough for your knees to cooperate. The same survey found the ideal age for physical health is 29, while the ideal age for wisdom is 51… which suggests wisdom travels by second-class post and spends twenty-two years stuck in a sorting office near Swindon.
Break the numbers down and a pattern emerges. The 18 to 24-year-olds picked 27 on average. The over-65s picked 42. Everybody, it seems, places the ideal age just beyond the last horizon they passed; near enough to remember, far enough to romanticise. The Germans, asked the same question, said 37. The Americans said 34. Even our daydreams have a national character.
One more finding deserves a moment of your time. Among the 18 to 24-year-olds, 74% said they’d return to childhood for a week if they could, and 29% would do it even if it cost them a year of their life. A year! Of actual, usable life! Traded for seven days of fish fingers and being sent to bed while it’s still light outside. Meanwhile, only 35% of the over-65s fancied the trip at all, and just 12% would surrender the year for it. The people with the longest view of the whole journey, in other words, mostly said no thanks.
Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.
Blame the Reminiscence Bump
There’s a reason your answer probably landed somewhere between your tenth and thirtieth birthday, and psychologists have given it a name: the reminiscence bump. Study after study shows adults over 40 recall a wildly disproportionate number of memories from roughly ages 10 to 30. Not just more memories; sharper ones, the kind that ambush you when a certain song comes on the radio. Ask a 70-year-old for the soundtrack of their life, and you’ll rarely hear anything from their fifties. You’ll hear whatever crackled out of a transistor radio when they were 17.
The explanations make sense. Those years contain nearly all your first times: first kiss, first wage packet, first heartbreak, first hangover. Novelty burns brightest in the memory, and life front-loads its novelty with no thought for fair distribution. Those years also build your identity, so the memories stay wired into who you are, like load-bearing walls. Knock them through and the whole house comes down.
My own bump sits squarely in the mid-1980s, which will shock nobody who has read my books. I can still hear the exact screech of an Oric Atmos loading a game from cassette, a process which took an eternity and failed precisely when the anticipation peaked. I couldn’t tell you what I did last Wednesday.
The Small Print Your Memory Won’t Show You
Before you hand over a deposit on 1986, though, a word about the travel brochure. Psychologists call it rosy retrospection: our reliable habit of remembering events more fondly than we rated them while they happened. Your memory is not an archive. It’s an editor, and a ruthless one. It trims the boredom, colour-grades the summers, lays a swelling soundtrack over scenes which, at the time, mostly involved waiting for something to happen, and bins the rest. You remember the BMX. The chilblains end up on the cutting-room floor.
I bump into this every time I research the decades my novels live in. When I dug into what life actually cost in 1985, the evidence kept interrupting the nostalgia. Yes, a pint cost buttons. So did the wages. And nobody, hand on heart, yearns for the queue outside the phone box in the drizzle, clutching a warm ten-pence piece, waiting for a lad called Gary to finish telling his nan about his verruca.
The U-Bend of Happiness
Now for the genuinely strange part. Researchers who track wellbeing across whole lifetimes keep finding the same shape: happiness follows a U-bend. It declines slowly from early adulthood, scrapes along the bottom somewhere around 47, then climbs steadily back up, leaving people in their late sixties and seventies among the most content of all. One major study pinned the low point at precisely 47.2 years old, a figure I admire for its confidence. Not a woolly “late forties”. 47.2. Somewhere out there, a researcher knows which Tuesday.
Which brings us back to those over-65s declining the trip to childhood. They aren’t being miserable. They’ve climbed out of the U-bend, looked back down the slope, and decided the view from up here suits them fine. Given an honest minute, the age they’d return to might well be the one they’re already living.
And here’s the kicker for the rest of us: if the research holds, the age you’d one day pay good money to revisit might still be ahead of you. Somewhere around 2046, somebody will wax lyrical about the golden, carefree days of 2026. And they’ll mean it.
And Yet
Here’s what ten years of marching characters into their own pasts has taught me. The age never matters. Press anyone on their answer and the year dissolves almost immediately into people. A kitchen with a particular smell. A mum, younger than you are now, shouting up the stairs about tea going cold. A best mate you last heard from via a Facebook message in 2019 and keep meaning to reply to. A dog long gone. Nobody actually wants to be 15 again; sitting through double maths with a head full of hormones ranks among history’s great endurance events. What we miss is everything 15 stood next to. The unknowing. The sense of every door still standing open.
And there’s the catch no brochure mentions: wherever you book, you travel with the one passenger you can never leave behind. Yourself. The same worries would unpack themselves in 1986 within a fortnight. They always do.
This question has fuelled more of my novels than I’d care to admit, mostly because the answer keeps wriggling away from me. In The ’86 Fix, Craig Pelling lands a weekend back in 1986 to repair the life he spent thirty years regretting, and discovers the past doesn’t take kindly to redecorating. In A Page in Your Diary, Sean Hardy returns to the late eighties not for his own sake, but for the girl whose life unravelled because of a choice he made as a young man. And in In Lieu of You, Gary Kirk travels back to 1996 to stop his younger self meeting his wife, on the theory you can’t divorce someone you never married. It goes about as well as you’d imagine. If today’s question left you staring into the middle distance, any one of them will keep you there a while longer… in the best possible way.
Frequently Asked Questions
What age do most people say they would return to?
When YouGov surveyed Britons in 2016, the average ideal age came out at 36 overall, with 29 considered the best age for physical health and 51 the best age for wisdom. Younger respondents chose younger ideals, with 18 to 24-year-olds averaging 27 and over-65s averaging 42.
What is the reminiscence bump?
The reminiscence bump is a well-documented memory phenomenon in which adults over 40 recall a disproportionately high number of vivid memories from roughly ages 10 to 30. Psychologists attribute it to the concentration of first-time experiences and identity-forming events in those years.
Why does the past feel better than it really felt?
Psychologists call it rosy retrospection: the tendency to remember past events more fondly than we rated them at the time. Memory edits out boredom and discomfort while preserving emotional highlights, so the past replays as a highlights reel rather than a documentary.
At what age are people least happy?
Wellbeing research repeatedly finds a U-shaped happiness curve across adult life, with contentment declining from early adulthood to a low point around age 47 before climbing again. People in their late sixties and seventies often report some of the highest life satisfaction of all.
Would going back to a younger age actually make you happier?
Almost certainly not for long. You would carry the same mind, worries and habits with you, and research on rosy retrospection suggests the past you miss never quite existed as you remember it. The longing usually points at people and possibilities rather than the age itself.