Good morning,

Here’s what’s in today’s issue:

• One big thing. How did the midlife crisis go from obscure theory to cultural cliché? A look at its origins, rise, and the research that debunks it. ⛰️

• You have to check this out. Two opposing myths about midlife and taking risks as you age. 🔁

• Tools and tech. Looking at cacti. 🔎🌵

Let’s jump in. 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

A history of the midlife crisis.

Until now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now, suddenly, I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope…with death observably present at the end.

Elliott Jaques listened nervously as his depressed patient described his feelings of dread. He jotted down a few notes. For the Canadian psychologist, it wasn’t the first time a middle-aged patient described feelings like this.

Jaques (pronounced “Jacks”) started piecing together the common facets of these stories: realization life was half over, disappointment in failing to achieve cultural hallmarks of success (marriage, children, professional success), and awareness of imminent physical decline.

In these stories, his patients reported disillusionment, dissatisfaction, detachment, and desperation. They had a compulsion to remain young.

Jaques summarized the symptoms: "The hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern are familiar patterns. They are attempts at a race against time.”

Jaques read those lines in a 1957 speech to the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Six years later, in October 1965, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis published his paper on this topic.

The title: Death and the Mid-life Crisis.

Jaques didn't know it then, but he had invented the term midlife crisis. Despite an entire career that shifted to cover workplace relations and organization efficiency, the headline of his 2003 obituary in the New York Times read, “Elliott Jaques, 86, Scientist Who Coined ‘Midlife Crisis.’”

But there was a problem: The whole idea was wrong.

The midlife crisis was not a thing.

To find out how we got here, let’s go back to 1900.

The midlife century.

For most of human history, people lived about 30 years.

The twentieth century is known for many things, but a radical increase in life expectancy should be near the top.

Today, life expectancy globally is 72 years.

The sharp upturn in life expectancy in the early 1900s was almost entirely due to the control of infectious diseases through improved sanitation and the creation and use of vaccines and antibiotics.

As you can see from the blue line below, our mortality rate from noninfectious causes (dying from all other causes) has barely changed over the past 100 years.

If you were born in the U.S. in 1900, your life expectancy was 47 years. Midlife occurred in your twenties, so there wasn’t much time for existential dread.

What Jaques observed in his patients was partly a function of people living long enough beyond their child-rearing years to ask, "What now?" for the first time in history.

The midlife crisis goes viral.

Jaques' paper hit at the perfect time. The hallmarks of the midlife crisis meshed perfectly with the cultural shifts of the 1960s. The civil rights and women's liberation movements opened new doors for many, and changes in divorce law and the birth control pill opened others.

“It wasn’t just individuals who had midlife crises. The whole society seemed to be having one, too,” says Pamela Druckerman.

Suddenly, the midlife crisis was everywhere.

In 1967, Barbara Fried wrote the book The Middle-Age Crisis.

But the 1976 book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life "turned the midlife crisis into a cultural phenomenon, symbolized by the red sports car, quitting your job or leaving your marriage,” says Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

Most of us in Generation X grew up at the height of this midlife crisis frenzy. It was part of TV shows and movies (even if American Beauty didn’t come out until 1999). There was even a board game.

Though many factors influenced this, we also lived through an epic spike in divorce rates, which doubled from 1960 to 1980. “Approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part,” research shows.

Here is where things get interesting.

Was any of this midlife hysteria real?

Or was this a mass cultural fever dream?

Coming of midlife age in America.

In the 1980s, the anthropologist Stanley Brandes began to doubt that the midlife crisis was an inevitable part of life in your forties.

As a good anthropologist, he reflected on the findings of Margaret Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, the most widely read book in anthropology for forty years.

In the book, “Mead argues that Americans expect teenage girls to have an adolescent crisis, and many of them do. But Samoans don’t expect the teenage years to be filled with emotional upheaval, and in Samoa they aren’t,” says Druckerman. 

Brandes believed the midlife crisis was a cultural construct. “The midlife crisis, like that of adolescence, is a cultural invention. It becomes more evident and real as people increasingly believe in its existence,” he wrote in Forty: The Age and the Symbol.

People had a midlife crisis in this era because they expected to have one.

More cliché than crisis.

In time, widespread research measured many of these ideas. The National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) gathered data from 7,000 people aged 25-74 in 1995-1996 and 5,000 people aged 35-86 in 2004-2006. The study tracked changes through midlife.

The MIDAS study found that most people don't experience the signs of a midlife crisis, as Jaques outlined. While some do, MIDAS found that this often occurs in people who are "crisis prone."

“They have crises throughout their lives, not just in midlife. And about half of those who have midlife crises say it’s related to a life event like a health problem, a job loss, or a divorce, not to aging per se,” according to Druckerman’s conversations with the MIDAS team.

From mountains to valleys.

Let's return to the original quote from Jaques' struggling patient:

Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope… Now, suddenly, I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope…with death observably present at the end.

The core visual of the midlife crisis is a mountain.

Life ascends through your twenties and thirties, peaks somewhere along the line, and slowly descends to the grave.

Here’s the thing:

The research suggests that life (life satisfaction, more specifically) actually proceeds in the shape of a valley.

I’ll dive into this research and the valley metaphor next week.

I’ll see you back here next Sunday.

ENDNOTE:

This week’s newsletter draws heavily on Pamela Druckerman’s excellent “How the Midlife Crisis Came to Be",” published in The Atlantic in May 2018. If you want to read it, but cannot access this subscription-only article, just reply to this email and I’ll send it to you.

Thank you for reading.

See you next Sunday.

Kevin

P.S. - In case you missed it, you might enjoy these prior newsletters:

• Your cultural life script. Why are your strongest memories from when you were 10-30?

• Contrasting gratitude. How the contrast effect can turn negativity into gratitude.

• Miswanting the future. Why we often want the wrong things and why it matters.