I turned 37 in February. Eric turns 39 in two months. But we already feel like we're smack in the middle of a midlife crisis. Well, maybe that's not the right word for it. Not a crisis—just a, how do you put it—vortex of time. We don't have any time for anything.
And not even to the halfway point yet, our bodies are breaking: Eric with wrist strains for which he wears a pad/cast to the office and knee problems—me with hip pains, a pituitary tumor, an abnormal aortic valve, plus the whole mood disorder thing.
Furthermore, we're getting more and more stupid with each passing day, with stress zapping our short-term memory. Example: a guy two doors down has a car detailing business. Up until yesterday, I just thought he really liked washing his car.
"You didn't see that the car was different each time?" Eric asked me, shaking his head.
"Nope."
I see it with my friends, too. Prudish friends who had valued their virginity and innocence in college are now saying things like, "I should have slept around more before I got married." Girlfriends who have sweated their way to a corner office in respectable consulting firms have decided to drop it all to nurture their inner artist and see if they can make a living on their colorful creations.
So it was with interest that I read Stefanie Weiss's piece in the Washington Post about the midlife crisis (which you can get to by clicking here). Is it for real? To test her theory she interviewed five experts: two psychologists, an economist, a journalist, and a cultural anthropologist.
Here's what they had to say.
Expert #1: It's not about the nines, and it's not about a midlife crisis, either.Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, flat-out rejected my theory of a series of midlife crises. In fact, she said, for most people, even one crisis in midlife would be a lot.
"There is no empirical evidence for a midlife crisis," Carstensen said. "It's just not typical that people in midlife are unhappy. Now," she was quick to add, "that doesn't mean that people in the middle of their lives don't sometimes have a hard time. They do. But they aren't more at risk for a crisis in midlife than at other times in their lives."
The real crisis, Carstensen suggested, may be at a much earlier nine: 19. "Negative emotion declines from early adulthood to pretty advanced old age. That's been shown in dozens of studies. Twenty-year-olds show the highest levels of negative emotions, and it's a steady linear decline to 60, when it levels off. You begin to see a slight upturn in the 70s, but it never returns to the levels you see in early adulthood."
Why? "People get better at regulating their emotions. People get better at managing life."
And those men in their 50s who are buying tiny sports cars?
"It finally occurred to me," Carstensen said. "It's the first time in their lives they can afford the dream car."
Expert #2: It is about a worldwide pattern of midlife unhappiness, but it doesn't necessarily happen on the nines.
David Blanchflower, an economics professor at Dartmouth, analyzed data from millions of people in dozens of countries, all the way from Albania to Zimbabwe. In this month's issue of Social Science & Medicine, he and a co-author conclude that "a typical individual's happiness reaches its minimum -- on both sides of the Atlantic and for both males and females -- in middle age."
"I'm not saying there is a midlife crisis," Blanchflower told me, "but this awfully looks like it." So much for consensus in academe.
Who's right? Blanchflower is no shrinking violet when it comes to defending himself. Look at the "sheer power" of the study, he said. "It's 72 countries. Two million people. Beat that!"
Not content to leave it there, he actually said, "My stick is bigger than your stick," proving that a cigar is never just a cigar.
Expert #3: It's not about anticipating birthdays. It's about anticipating death.
Wall Street Journal columnist Sue Shellenbarger writes that her own midlife crisis "erupted at age 49." Surely, she would see the value of a theory based on the nines.
"My age didn't have anything to do with my crisis," she said. "The death of my father triggered it for me."In her book "The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today's Women," Shellenbarger suggests that many women wake up one day with the realization that they've been sitting on deep, unfulfilled desires for adventure, love, artistic expression, spirituality and success in the world. Eventually, they can't sit still any longer.
Shellenbarger herself started skiing down dangerous slopes and driving all-terrain vehicles way too fast. The pull to the wild side landed her in a hospital -- and on a seven-year journey to "integrate" the parts of herself that had been suppressed too long.
It's not about the nines, Shellenbarger said. "It's all about anticipation that you're going to die without having given expression to parts of yourself that you cherish."
Enter the Grim Reaper, coming too soon to a theater near you.Expert #4: It's not about death. It's about the birth of a second life cycle.
Carlo Strenger, an associate professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University and co-author of a recent Harvard Business Review article on the "existential necessity of midlife change," said the midlife crisis today is evidence of what he calls cultural lag.
Although life expectancy at birth in the United States nears 80, he said, "we still live in a culture which seems to acknowledge only two adult ages: extended youth and old age." Those in midlife crisis are in "a protracted panic reaction at the loss of youth."
Witness the growing coffers of plastic surgeons and makers of anti-aging creams.Instead of joining the desperate effort to deny aging, Strenger suggests that we knock down the myth of midlife as the onset of decline and build up the notion of a "second life cycle" full of new possibilities founded on self-knowledge and experience.
"Imagine -- as we often have people do in psychology experiments -- that you're 20," he said, "and you're told you have an incurable illness. You'll be fine for the next 30 years, then you'll die at 50. What would you do? You'd live a full life. That's exactly the situation 50-year-olds are in now. Statistically you have another 30 years. What are you going to do with your next decades?"
It's time, Strenger said, to move "from midlife crisis to midlife transition."
But where does that leave the nines?Expert #5: It's not about numbers. It's about radically reshaping longer lives.
No one was buying my theory. I made one last, desperate call to Mary Catherine Bateson, a cultural anthropologist and author of "Composing a Life." She's a visiting scholar at the Center on Aging and Work/Workplace Flexibility at Boston College.
The erudite Bateson waxed sarcastic. "Suppose I were to say that the years of greatest development for me are going to be where the two numbers are the same: 22, 33, 44, 55, 99. Wow! You could say that just as well."
She gathered steam. "How about organizing our lives in periods of 12 years -- duodecades -- rather than periods of 10. At the end of your fifth duodecade, you'd be 60. Get it?"
Um, yeah.
"It's just fashion and cliche to insist on a zero as drawing the line," she said. I was sinking lower by the minute. Bateson switched to the high road.
Today there are many ways to adapt to longer lives, she said. You can tack years onto the end of life -- "you would be sick for longer, decrepit for a longer period." You can "stretch each stage of life just a little longer: more years in school, more years married before kids, and so on." Or you can insert years into the middle of life, starting more new chapters, new relationships, new careers.
"If you add a room to a house," Bateson said, "it turns out to change the function of every room in the house. You don't leave your tennis racket in the same place, you don't drink your coffee in the same place. The flow of the whole house changes. 'Add' is the wrong word. The effect of increasing the size of the total house [adding years to life, for those who are metaphorically challenged] is to reconfigure it. It's almost as if you were multiplying rather than adding."
In that scenario, Bateson said, "if people feel free to learn and grow and explore, maybe they don't end up feeling trapped, and they don't have to have a crisis at all."
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At age 27, I married the first guy to treat me decently after several years of counseling to learn how to find one of those. I'm 49 now, but at age 38, my "midlife" crisis began. Or was it really a crisis? Just a change in the way I felt about life maybe. My mother had passed away. Without my mother, I lost my buffer against having to face my own mortality. Found myself asking, "Is that all there is?" We had 2 children but I just wanted more of everything, more fun, more money, more variety in sex, a different house, a better job, just more of everything! Even a different and better husband. I bought a red sporty car. Some told me I was having a mid-life crisis. Nowadays, we have seperate rooms and no sex, have our own interests and friends. We make extremely good parents to our girls, ages 11 and 15. There's been periods of content and happiness, moments of joy of course, lots of sadness, and finally I have realized my own happiness is up to me. I'm still asking, "Is that all there is?" but now I'm ready to do something about it. Not sure what that is, but I just do not want to keep living this way for the rest of my life!
...after reading about these gals in their '30s,'40s.'50s & '60s to my grandmama who will be 100 yes ONE HUNDRED come sept. she laughed so hard & fell off the chair!!! what midlife crisis are they talking about she asked me,,more laughs--oh maybe they mean midwife crisis if the doctor is out. She allways told me,,when you wake up-thank the Lord for another day,never worry on anything, get up start moving no matter how you feel and keep your teeth clean. She has all her own teeth,can still place her hands flat on the floor bending over. When I was turning 29 thought oh gosh I'll be 30 next year and freaked out,,Grandmama got out 2 bottles of vino sat me down and we both drank a whole bottle each,,I'm whimpering about never finding a husband and all kinds of other "oh no's" Grandmama said better you don't ever get married as he'd just be another kid to take care of and he'll get in your way doing some real stupid things,, I never forgot that night,,survived never getting married,,never thought about midlife,did as Grandmama said and have lived grandly for 55 years now,,which I view as just a number. So all you youngers playing oldies, get off it and start dancing instead of writing about your bla-bla ways for all the innernet to read and stop wasting the time you've been given,,what a bunch of complainers!!!!!!!
Therese, and any of you reading this who have aches and pains. My husband had a lot of pain in his elbows and knees and I had pain in my hip from a fall and a previously injured finger that was stiff every morning when I woke up. A year and a half ago my husband and I started taking "Tumeric" in a gel capsule form. It is amazing. Neither of us have pain any longer. My finger is no longer stiff. Tumeric is actually a spice that is contained in curry. It is an antiinflamatory and is incredible. It is suppose to prevent arthritis, cancer, altimers, and to prevent the progression of MS. I am a very health conscience person and only take things that I am convinced are healthy for you. I hope that any of you who are suffering from pain research it for yourselves.
I endorse these 5 points of view. Just because there is a cultural conversation (paradigm) about something doesn't mean that it actually exists. In 1491, the conversation was that if you sailed beyond the horizon, you would fall off the earth. Midlife crisis is one of those conversations.
My philosophy is that each of us is an "experiment of one." It doesn't matter what experts tell us. We have the power to create our own life - to be happy, to be fulfilled, to be peaceful, to be love and to be well.
Arguments over whether or not midlife crisis exists would be avoided if the terminology was thrown out. Too much labeling creates too many inaccurate statistics. They say x% of those in 40s blah blah blah. No one came to my town and asked anyone.
But I will say that such a crisis doe exist and it is purely constructed by an individualistic culture such as in America. Other cultures dont seem to have these problems.
It can happen to anyone at anytime in their life depending on their perceptions at the time. After all, the seriousness of anything is Fight or Flight dependent on what a person believes.
For me personally, a 37 year old male, I spent my entire childhood dreaming about doing big things for personal satisfaction. I know what its like to be on a big stage doing something grand and getting an applause for it. Its hard to throw that away. But I did. I got married in my early 20s and later had three kids. Now I am facing a crisis.
Should I return to my dreams and fullfill them while I still can? Should I NOT wait until wrinkles set in on my face and ruin any chance of getting the proper attention I need from such a materialistic and narrowminded society?
There are many goals that I did not fullfill that I knew I would someday. After you spend more than a decade trying to make ends meet, and then realize that all you are doing is surviving, you start to question the point. I dont believe that life was meant to be enjoyed at retirement age. I think that age is meant for sitting on a back patio, doing lazy things with the person you grow old with. Boring things are big things for old people.
But yet, I do those things at 37. It makes you feel 65 minus the experiences of life. We should throw out the conformity ideas and become free flowing spirits that do as we choose. As much as I adore my wife, I dont adore marriage. Its a hindrance on individual discovery.
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