No such thing as a Midlife Crisis. Or is there?

“Let’s get something straight, I’m not having some ‘midlife crisis’, I’m not that person.”

So said a prospective client to me the other day on an introductory call. The intonation was much more pronounced than I can possibly convey in writing. Whoever ‘that person’ was, they were… Well what were they? I’m aware that my client didn’t actually use any descriptive words and so whilst I can convey what came to my mind, maybe that’s my perceptions not his. Well, anyway, the words that came to mind were: weak, lesser, self-occupied, introspective, somehow ridiculous. Either way he wanted no part of that classification, his problems were ‘real’ problems, not some stereotypical life stage thing.

Ever since the concept or label of the midlife crisis was first coined by Elliott Jaques in London in 1957, there has been a strongly opinionated reaction to it. I first came across Jaques as part of my Organisational and Group Psychology masters course, where he is rightly seen not as a specialist on the midlife experience but as part of the then revolutionary psychologist collective alongside such powerhouses as Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott. His paper was titled (in what we would doubtlessly now describe as ‘clickbait’ fashion) Death and the mid-life crisis. In it Jaques identified a decline in productivity in middle age that he linked to the realisation that their lives were half over and that death was their final destination. He referenced a ‘depressed client aged 36’ who told his therapist, “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly… death is observably present at the end.” It later emerged that this 36-year-old client was, in fact, himself. The symptoms of this midlife crisis, he identified as being ‘promiscuity, a sudden inability to enjoy life, “hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance,” and “compulsive attempts” to remain young’. Sound familiar?

Almost immediately, ‘midlife crisis’ was adopted by the mainstream and became part of the vernacular of the western popular culture with books such as The Middle-Aged Crisis by Barbara Fried, published in 1967, who claimed that this crisis was “a normal aspect of growth, as natural for those in their 40s as teething is for a younger age group.” During that part of the 20th century life expectancy was increasing at an impressive rate and turning 40 became synonymous with reaching life’s half-way point and suffering this normal moment of crisis.

But critically it also jumped from being something that Jaques had identified in some of his psychotherapeutic clients to being something that everyone had – and by everyone I mean affluent, middle class, white professional men. Because, of course, they were the only ones that mattered. You could have a midlife crisis because you’d achieved everything you’d wanted to and had no direction, or because you’d achieved nothing and felt redundant. Either way you needed the privilege to have the time and money to navel-gaze about your life, or accumulate new cars and mistresses.

The midlife crisis continued to evolve further away from any biological origins to instead being a societal or cultural construct in the 1980s, a decade when ‘real’ men didn’t have time for midlife crises what with all the making money, driving sports cars, taking drugs and shagging their secretaries. (Hmmm, wait a minute). Various books and papers emerged (such as MIDUS or Midlife in the United States),  stating that most middle-aged people didn’t have any such crises, they were too busy being successful, that happiness was a flat line throughout life. Which must mean that those who did were ‘pre-disposed to being neurotic’ or were simply ‘overly sensitive’.

So just as mass media had taken Jaques’ original concept and popularised it, they now began to debunk it. It was from this time on that the midlife crisis stopped being a badge of honour for the affluent middle classes and instead became associated with a demonstration of weak or destructive masculinity. Men saw it as something that only weaker men suffered from, and women saw it as a demonstration of self-justification for abusive male privilege.

And this is where it stuck in the popular mind until… well, now, I suppose.

Apart from a handful of researchers and academics who have been trying to use global data to understand the legitimacy of this ‘western cultural construct’ of midlife crisis. Academics such as Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, who I had the pleasure of speaking to a few days ago whilst he was on holiday in Wales. He, along with other economists such as David Blanchflower of Dartmouth in the US, decided to build on some work done back in the 1970s by another economist, Richard Easterlin, on the connection between affluence, work and happiness. Easterlin had surmised from his research that beyond a certain point, countries don’t get happier as they get richer. This became known as the Easterlin Paradox.

Oswald and Blanchflower conducted a huge piece of research that included 1.3 million people across 52 different countries. What they discovered was an almost universal (Professor Oswald specifically told me not to use the work ‘universal’ but this is a blog not a scientific paper so what the hell) pattern: happiness takes on a U-shaped curve from early adulthood to end of life which bottoms out in the 40s or early 50s. This pattern is known as the Happiness U-curve. I can’t help but think Jaques would have come up with a catchier name.

Why is this relevant? Because of the global nature of the study and the fact that it surveyed people over a significant period of time, they were able to account for certain variables such as children, income, job and marriage status that had influenced the research of Easterlin and others. What it showed was that from the USA and the UK to Peru and most places in between, the same U-curve emerges. As Carol Graham from the Brookings Institute states, “It was a statistical regularity. Something about the human condition”.

But Oswald took the research even further. He, and a global team from Edinburgh, Arizona and Kyoto, conducted the same study in 2012 but this time looking at our nearest cousins, the Great Apes. And, remarkably, the happiness U-curve was the same, once ape life expectancy of 50-55 years was taken into account. As Oswald explained to me, “It seems the curve of happiness should no longer be considered a social and economic phenomenon, the preserve of economists, sociologists, social psychologists, psychiatrists, or mysticists. Instead, intriguingly, the U-shape appears to be so deep within us that it may need a natural sciences explanation.”

Which raises the question – can it have both a biological and a cultural side to it. In Western cultures, there is still a view of the male midlife crisis as being for spoiled men looking for excuses for infantile behaviour. There is little compassion or sympathy which results in many who are suffering from genuine and significant mental health issues in mid-life, hiding their feelings and not seeking the support they need. I’ll be looking at the tragic costs of this in later blog posts. But how about other cultures – is the midlife crisis so stereotyped in other countries or belief systems?

In Japan, there is a ritual that starts on a man’s 39th birthday and occurs annually for three years, where his close friends give him a small wooden plaque with a money packet attached. At the end of the three years, the man burns the plaques demonstrating he is reconciled with this passing of time and moves on into the second half of his life. In parts of China, men don’t celebrate their 40th birthday, the number being associated with bad luck, remaining 39 until they turn 41. Perhaps these rituals speak to an acknowledgement of the difficulty of this time of life, to the bottoming out of the U-curve, compared to the West’s avoidance and denial. An acknowledgement that is at least the starting point for allowing men and women to speak up about their feelings and reach out for help, without fear of judgement.

So it looks like, since the advent of the midlife crisis back in the 1950s, we’re beginning to come full circle in our thinking and understanding around the midlife crisis, even if it still seems very hard for us to move away from seeing a connection between happiness and ‘stuff’. We see this in the new movements gaining traction that see an inverse correlation between the amount of stuff we have and our level of happiness – this is being called minimalism or the ‘art of subtraction’. Vishal Khandelwal, an investor coach, has produced a lovely chart which demonstrates this perfectly – and I have to admit that it's tempting to find solace in its simplicity as an antidote to the dip in the Happiness U-curve. However for me it is still, at its heart, an avoidance of the psychological or physiological perspective.

It would seem, whether we’re able to accept it and be compassionate to it, that middle age brings with it a universal (there I go again!) crisis that is felt and responded to differently by different people. Appreciating that it isn’t either made up or something that only weak or overly-sensitive men experience requires us to have more rounded consideration of what we know and what we don’t about the subject. And, as Professor Oswald said as he ended his call with me, “the don’t knows currently all sit on the natural science side”. Now that the ball is back in the ‘biology’ side of the midlife court, it requires someone to pick it up and do something with it and currently no one is. I still passionately believe that there has to be some biological influence on the Happiness U-curve and the resulting increase in depression and suicide and corresponding increase in anti-depression medication, but let’s explore that in a later blog!

Maybe it’s enough for now to be able to state that the midlife crisis exists.