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The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis 1.
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What a growing body of research reveals about the biology of
human happiness—and how to navigate the (temporary) slump in middle age.
All photos by Chris Buck
This summer, a friend called in
a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to
find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling
satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. His
reaction had taken him by surprise. It made no sense. Was there
something wrong with him? I gave him the best answer I know. I told him
about the U-curve.
Not everyone goes through the U-curve. But many people do, and I did.
In my 40s, I experienced a lot of success, objectively speaking. I was
in a stable and happy relationship; I was healthy; I was financially
secure, with a good career and marvelous colleagues; I published a book,
wrote for top outlets, won a big journalism prize. If you had described
my own career to me as someone else’s, or for that matter if you had
offered it to me when I was just out of college, I would have said,
“Wow, I want that!” Yet morning after morning (mornings were the worst),
I would wake up feeling disappointed, my head buzzing with obsessive
thoughts about my failures. I had accomplished too little
professionally, had let life pass me by, needed some nameless kind of
change or escape.
My dissatisfaction was whiny and irrational, as I well knew, so I
kept it to myself. When I thought about it—which I did, a lot—I rejected
the term midlife crisis, because I was holding a steady course
and never in fact experienced a crisis: more like a constant drizzle of
disappointment. What annoyed me most of all, much more than the
disappointment itself, was that I felt ungrateful, the last thing
in the world I was entitled to be. Hopeful that rationality might
prevail, I would count my blessings, quite literally—making lists
mentally, and sometimes also on paper of all that I had to be thankful
for. Reasoning with myself might help for a little while, but then the
disappointment would return. As the weeks turned into months, and then
into years, my image of myself began to change. I had always thought of
myself as a basically happy person, but now I seemed to be someone who
dwelt on discontents, real or imaginary. I supposed I would have to
reconcile myself to being a malcontent.
As I moved into my early 50s, I hit some real setbacks. Both of my
parents died, one of them after suffering a terrible illness while I
watched helplessly. My job disappeared when the magazine I worked for
was restructured. An entrepreneurial effort—to create a new online
marketplace that would match journalists who had story ideas with
editors looking for them—ran into problems. My shoulders, elbows, and
knees all started aching. And yet the fog of disappointment and
self-censure began to lift, at first almost imperceptibly, then more
distinctly. By now, at 54, I feel as if I have emerged from a passage
through something. But what?
Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the
greatest writer I have known, told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime
in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.”
In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no
one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense
of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about
the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has
returned.
I was about 50 when I discovered the U-curve and began poking through
the growing research on it. What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even
better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and
the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or
something else, is for many people a transition to something much
better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom. I wish someone
had told me what I was able to tell my worried friend: nothing was wrong
with him, and he wasn’t alone. In the 1970s, an economist named
Richard Easterlin, then at the University of Pennsylvania, learned of
surveys gauging people’s happiness in countries around the world.
Intrigued, he set about amassing and analyzing the data, in the process
discovering what came to be known as the Easterlin paradox: beyond a
certain point, countries don’t get happier as they get richer. Today he
is at the University of Southern California and is celebrated as the
founder of a new branch of economics, focused on human well-being. At
the time, though, looking at something as subjective as happiness seemed
eccentric to mainstream economists. His findings, Easterlin says, were
for many years regarded as a curiosity, more a subject for cocktail
conversation than for serious research.
A generation later, in the 1990s, happiness economics resurfaced.
This time a cluster of labor economists, among them David Blanchflower
of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, got
interested in the relationship between work and happiness. That led them
to international surveys of life satisfaction and the discovery, quite
unexpected, of a recurrent pattern in countries around the world.
“Whatever sets of data you looked at,” Blanchflower told me in a recent
interview, “you got the same things”: life satisfaction would decline
with age for the first couple of decades of adulthood, bottom out
somewhere in the 40s or early 50s, and then, until the very last years,
increase with age, often (though not always) reaching a higher level
than in young adulthood. The pattern came to be known as the happiness
U-curve.
Meanwhile, Carol Graham, a development economist (she is now at the
Brookings Institution, where I’m a senior fellow), was looking at
Peruvians who had emerged rapidly from poverty. “How do these people
think they’ve done?” she wanted to know. She told me she was startled to
find that objective life circumstances did not determine subjective
life satisfaction; in Peru, as in other countries, many people who had
moved out of poverty felt worse off than those who had stayed poor. “I
didn’t know how to explain it,” she said. Hunting around, she discovered
the sparse literature on the economics of happiness, plunged into
survey data, and found the same U-shaped pattern, first in Latin America
and then in the rest of the world. “It was a statistical regularity,”
she said. “Something about the human condition.”
The
U-curve emerges in answers to survey questions that measure
satisfaction with life as a whole, not mood from moment to moment. The
exact shape of the curve, and the age when it bottoms out, vary by
country, survey question, survey population, and method of statistical
analysis. The U-curve is not ubiquitous; indeed, one would be suspicious
if a single pattern turned up across an immensely variegated landscape
of surveys and countries and generations and analyses. Still, the
pattern turns up much too often to ignore. For example, in a 2008 study,
Blanchflower and Oswald found the U-curve—with the nadir, on average,
at age 46—in 55 of 80 countries where people were asked, “All things
considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”
Graham and Milena Nikolova recently looked at an international survey
that asked people in 149 countries to rate their lives on a zero-to-10
scale where 10 “represents the best possible life for you” and zero the
worst. They found a relationship between age and happiness in 80
countries, and in all but nine of those, satisfaction bottomed out
between the ages of 39 and 57 (the average nadir was at about age 50).
The apes’ well-being bottomed out at ages
comparable, in people, to between 45 and 50—implying that the happiness
curve is not uniquely human.
The curve tends to evince itself more in wealthier countries, where
people live longer and enjoy better health in old age. Sometimes it
turns up directly in raw survey data—that is, people just express less
overall satisfaction in middle age. But here’s a wrinkle: in many cases
(including the two analyses I just cited), the age-based U-curve emerges
only after researchers adjust for such variables as income, marital
status, employment, and so on, thus looking through to the effects of
age alone. Some scholars—including Easterlin, the grand old man of the
field—take a dim view of making such adjustments. Carol Ryff, a
psychologist who directs the University of Wisconsin’s Institute on
Aging, told me, “To my mind, that’s how you obscure the story; that’s
not how you clean it up.” But filtering out important life circumstances
suggests something intriguing: there may be an underlying pattern in
life satisfaction that is independent of your situation. In other words,
if all else is equal, it may be more difficult to feel satisfied with
your life in middle age than at other times. Blanchflower and Oswald
have found that, statistically speaking, going from age 20 to age 45
entails a loss of happiness equivalent to one-third the effect of
involuntary unemployment.
“I view this as a first-order discovery about human beings that will
outlive us by hundreds of years,” Oswald told me. Not everyone is
prepared to go so far. Many psychologists have their doubts, partly
because the U-curve is a statistical regularity that emerges from large
data sets, and psychologists prefer to study actual people, whether
individually or in experimental groups, and ideally across their whole
lives. “I think it’s a mistake to generalize about life-course
patterns,” Ryff told me. “In the final analysis, you’re not talking
about real people when you tell these big, generic stories.” Heretofore,
when psychologists have gone looking for evidence of midlife
crisis—that is, of a distinctive phenomenon of middle age, rather than
just stress or difficulty that might come at any point in life—they
haven’t found it, and they are cool to the possibility that the smoking
gun has turned up in economics, of all places.
In recent work, however, U-curve researchers have begun to find
evidence that is harder to dismiss as mere statistical correlation.
Oswald, Terence Cheng, and Nattavudh Powdthavee have found the U-curve
in four longitudinal data sets from three countries: an important kind
of evidence, because it traces the lived experiences of individuals over
time, rather than comparing people of various ages in a statistical
snapshot. Likewise, Blanchflower and Oswald, looking at samples from 27
European countries, have found a “strong hill-shaped pattern” in the use
of antidepressants, peaking in people’s late 40s. Being middle-aged
“nearly doubles” a person’s likelihood of using antidepressants. The
same pattern appears, they’ve found, in the two U.S. states that collect
the relevant data (New Hampshire and New Mexico).
And a lot of eyebrows went up when Oswald and four other scholars,
including two primatologists, found a U-shaped curve in chimpanzees’ and
orangutans’ state of mind over time. Zookeepers, researchers, and other
animal caretakers filled out a questionnaire rating the well-being of
their primate charges (more than 500 captive chimps and orangutans in
Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States). The apes’
well-being bottomed out at ages comparable, in people, to between 45 and
50. “Our results,” the authors concluded in a 2012 paper, “imply that
human wellbeing’s curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although
it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its
origins may lie partly in the biology we share with closely related
great apes.”
I think where the evidence points is this: being satisfied is perfectly possible in midlife, but for a great many of us it is harder. That is how the U-curve felt to me, and how it feels to some of the people I unscientifically surveyed for this article.
“I think it must be something internal,” my 45-year-old friend S.
told me. He described his 20s as exciting and fun (“I was really dumb
but thought I knew a lot”) and his 30s as a time of hard work and steady
rewards (“I felt on track … Things looked like white picket fences and
the American dream”), but said he was bushwhacked in his 40s by an
unexpected divorce, unmarried fatherhood, and a heart attack. He said he
now experiences difficulty feeling contentment, leading to some of the
same self-doubt that I felt: a creeping suspicion that he is fated to be
whiny. He also wondered whether his dissatisfaction has been a cause
of some of his problems, not just an effect. “Professionally, things
looked pretty good,” S. told me. “But maybe something was going on.
Something sufficient for my wife to leave. If I did a deep psychological
dive, I might say that nothing will ever make me content. Maybe there’s
something deeply psychologically wrong with me. I see life as a
challenge to overcome rather than an adventure to be enjoyed. I’ve
thought of running away to Brazil—changing my name and becoming a hotel
clerk. Maybe that will change in my 50s.”
theatlantic.
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Not everyone goes through the U-curve. But many people do, and I did. In my 40s, I experienced a lot of success, objectively speaking. I was in a stable and happy relationship; I was healthy; I was financially secure, with a good career and marvelous colleagues; I published a book, wrote for top outlets, won a big journalism prize. If you had described my own career to me as someone else’s, or for that matter if you had offered it to me when I was just out of college, I would have said, “Wow, I want that!” Yet morning after morning (mornings were the worst), I would wake up feeling disappointed, my head buzzing with obsessive thoughts about my failures. I had accomplished too little professionally, had let life pass me by, needed some nameless kind of change or escape.
My dissatisfaction was whiny and irrational, as I well knew, so I kept it to myself. When I thought about it—which I did, a lot—I rejected the term midlife crisis, because I was holding a steady course and never in fact experienced a crisis: more like a constant drizzle of disappointment. What annoyed me most of all, much more than the disappointment itself, was that I felt ungrateful, the last thing in the world I was entitled to be. Hopeful that rationality might prevail, I would count my blessings, quite literally—making lists mentally, and sometimes also on paper of all that I had to be thankful for. Reasoning with myself might help for a little while, but then the disappointment would return. As the weeks turned into months, and then into years, my image of myself began to change. I had always thought of myself as a basically happy person, but now I seemed to be someone who dwelt on discontents, real or imaginary. I supposed I would have to reconcile myself to being a malcontent.
As I moved into my early 50s, I hit some real setbacks. Both of my parents died, one of them after suffering a terrible illness while I watched helplessly. My job disappeared when the magazine I worked for was restructured. An entrepreneurial effort—to create a new online marketplace that would match journalists who had story ideas with editors looking for them—ran into problems. My shoulders, elbows, and knees all started aching. And yet the fog of disappointment and self-censure began to lift, at first almost imperceptibly, then more distinctly. By now, at 54, I feel as if I have emerged from a passage through something. But what?
Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the greatest writer I have known, told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.” In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned.
I was about 50 when I discovered the U-curve and began poking through the growing research on it. What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom. I wish someone had told me what I was able to tell my worried friend: nothing was wrong with him, and he wasn’t alone.
In the 1970s, an economist named Richard Easterlin, then at the University of Pennsylvania, learned of surveys gauging people’s happiness in countries around the world. Intrigued, he set about amassing and analyzing the data, in the process discovering what came to be known as the Easterlin paradox: beyond a certain point, countries don’t get happier as they get richer. Today he is at the University of Southern California and is celebrated as the founder of a new branch of economics, focused on human well-being. At the time, though, looking at something as subjective as happiness seemed eccentric to mainstream economists. His findings, Easterlin says, were for many years regarded as a curiosity, more a subject for cocktail conversation than for serious research.
A generation later, in the 1990s, happiness economics resurfaced. This time a cluster of labor economists, among them David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, got interested in the relationship between work and happiness. That led them to international surveys of life satisfaction and the discovery, quite unexpected, of a recurrent pattern in countries around the world. “Whatever sets of data you looked at,” Blanchflower told me in a recent interview, “you got the same things”: life satisfaction would decline with age for the first couple of decades of adulthood, bottom out somewhere in the 40s or early 50s, and then, until the very last years, increase with age, often (though not always) reaching a higher level than in young adulthood. The pattern came to be known as the happiness U-curve.
Meanwhile, Carol Graham, a development economist (she is now at the Brookings Institution, where I’m a senior fellow), was looking at Peruvians who had emerged rapidly from poverty. “How do these people think they’ve done?” she wanted to know. She told me she was startled to find that objective life circumstances did not determine subjective life satisfaction; in Peru, as in other countries, many people who had moved out of poverty felt worse off than those who had stayed poor. “I didn’t know how to explain it,” she said. Hunting around, she discovered the sparse literature on the economics of happiness, plunged into survey data, and found the same U-shaped pattern, first in Latin America and then in the rest of the world. “It was a statistical regularity,” she said. “Something about the human condition.”
The U-curve emerges in answers to survey questions that measure satisfaction with life as a whole, not mood from moment to moment. The exact shape of the curve, and the age when it bottoms out, vary by country, survey question, survey population, and method of statistical analysis. The U-curve is not ubiquitous; indeed, one would be suspicious if a single pattern turned up across an immensely variegated landscape of surveys and countries and generations and analyses. Still, the pattern turns up much too often to ignore. For example, in a 2008 study, Blanchflower and Oswald found the U-curve—with the nadir, on average, at age 46—in 55 of 80 countries where people were asked, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” Graham and Milena Nikolova recently looked at an international survey that asked people in 149 countries to rate their lives on a zero-to-10 scale where 10 “represents the best possible life for you” and zero the worst. They found a relationship between age and happiness in 80 countries, and in all but nine of those, satisfaction bottomed out between the ages of 39 and 57 (the average nadir was at about age 50).
“I view this as a first-order discovery about human beings that will outlive us by hundreds of years,” Oswald told me. Not everyone is prepared to go so far. Many psychologists have their doubts, partly because the U-curve is a statistical regularity that emerges from large data sets, and psychologists prefer to study actual people, whether individually or in experimental groups, and ideally across their whole lives. “I think it’s a mistake to generalize about life-course patterns,” Ryff told me. “In the final analysis, you’re not talking about real people when you tell these big, generic stories.” Heretofore, when psychologists have gone looking for evidence of midlife crisis—that is, of a distinctive phenomenon of middle age, rather than just stress or difficulty that might come at any point in life—they haven’t found it, and they are cool to the possibility that the smoking gun has turned up in economics, of all places.
In recent work, however, U-curve researchers have begun to find evidence that is harder to dismiss as mere statistical correlation. Oswald, Terence Cheng, and Nattavudh Powdthavee have found the U-curve in four longitudinal data sets from three countries: an important kind of evidence, because it traces the lived experiences of individuals over time, rather than comparing people of various ages in a statistical snapshot. Likewise, Blanchflower and Oswald, looking at samples from 27 European countries, have found a “strong hill-shaped pattern” in the use of antidepressants, peaking in people’s late 40s. Being middle-aged “nearly doubles” a person’s likelihood of using antidepressants. The same pattern appears, they’ve found, in the two U.S. states that collect the relevant data (New Hampshire and New Mexico).
And a lot of eyebrows went up when Oswald and four other scholars, including two primatologists, found a U-shaped curve in chimpanzees’ and orangutans’ state of mind over time. Zookeepers, researchers, and other animal caretakers filled out a questionnaire rating the well-being of their primate charges (more than 500 captive chimps and orangutans in Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States). The apes’ well-being bottomed out at ages comparable, in people, to between 45 and 50. “Our results,” the authors concluded in a 2012 paper, “imply that human wellbeing’s curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its origins may lie partly in the biology we share with closely related great apes.”
I think where the evidence points is this: being satisfied is perfectly possible in midlife, but for a great many of us it is harder. That is how the U-curve felt to me, and how it feels to some of the people I unscientifically surveyed for this article.
“I think it must be something internal,” my 45-year-old friend S. told me. He described his 20s as exciting and fun (“I was really dumb but thought I knew a lot”) and his 30s as a time of hard work and steady rewards (“I felt on track … Things looked like white picket fences and the American dream”), but said he was bushwhacked in his 40s by an unexpected divorce, unmarried fatherhood, and a heart attack. He said he now experiences difficulty feeling contentment, leading to some of the same self-doubt that I felt: a creeping suspicion that he is fated to be whiny. He also wondered whether his dissatisfaction has been a cause of some of his problems, not just an effect. “Professionally, things looked pretty good,” S. told me. “But maybe something was going on. Something sufficient for my wife to leave. If I did a deep psychological dive, I might say that nothing will ever make me content. Maybe there’s something deeply psychologically wrong with me. I see life as a challenge to overcome rather than an adventure to be enjoyed. I’ve thought of running away to Brazil—changing my name and becoming a hotel clerk. Maybe that will change in my 50s.”
theatlantic.