OPINION:
A midlife crisis isn’t inevitable. It can come down to whether you view your later years positively or negatively, writes Marc Wilson.
I have not gone to Tibet to find myself, and definitely not considered trading in my Nissan Tiida for a Harley, or my wife for a new model. I have just finished building a deck, but that’s more of an indoor-outdoor-flow kind of scenario than a midlife crisis.
That’s not to say that people don’t feel the pressure of the midlife crisis, something many of us take for a cultural and social reality.
Is it real, though? Well, if people experience it, then it’s real to them. This is a different question from “Is it inevitable?” or “Does everyone experience it?”
You might feel the urge to shave your head and meditate in a yurt, but midlife crises are more generally characterised by a smorgasbord of often uncomfortable emotions and thoughts. These could include worry about the state of things, as well as whether your life is meaningful, and, unsurprisingly, that thinking is accompanied by dissatisfaction with said life.
As the name suggests, this experience is most common between the ages of 45 and 55. A lot of transitions occur that invite reflection at this time. Kids might be leaving home and cutting ties, and our ageing parents not only hold up a mirror to where we’re going in the coming decades but also make salient the psychological and physical changes we’re going through ourselves.
Erik Erikson, a big-name German-American psychologist, might say we’ve hit that point in human development characterised by the challenge he calls “generativity vs self-absorption”. In other words, do we act positively on our concern for our families and society more generally, or do we look inward and focus on our own prosperity and well-being? That doesn’t sound as bad as what comes next: “integrity vs despair” – contentment with our lives or despair at the growing prospect of, ahem, death?
Maybe I haven’t yet hit my crisis point. That 45-55 years is a window with a big confidence interval. That’s when a crisis is most common, but it doesn’t mean younger (or older) folk don’t hit that point, too. However, research suggests not everyone ever does. Estimates are that 40-60 per cent of people – men and women – experience something they identify as a “crisis”. I put the word crisis in quote marks, because only about a quarter of midlife dissatisfaction is sufficiently critical or experienced so seriously as to cause severe distress. At the same time, there’s evidence that the nature of midlife crises may be different for different genders.
Part of the difficulty in getting a more precise fix on how common midlife crises are also reflects why not everyone experiences one: culture. Midlife crises may be more common in cultures that value such things as prosperity and career success (remember Erikson?). More relational cultures, or those that place more of a premium on wisdom, seem to show a lower prevalence.
So, what ya gonna do about it? Although you might be imagining old age as grim, or at least less rosy than the present feels, research also shows that older people generally report life as better than they thought it would be. Relationships tend to be better and more stable, though perhaps less energetic, and people are most likely to say they’re financially content and enjoy what they’re doing.
This last, as well as the statistical evidence that midlife dissatisfaction isn’t inevitable, hints at something else important: how we approach the thought of midlife and, indeed, the rest of our lives. As a general rule, coping through avoidance – whether that’s by avoiding people or situations – or avoidance behaviours such as drinking too much (or, in my case, playing computer games) produces more negative outcomes down the line. Instead, it really is about playing to the strengths in our expertise and our relationships, and reframing midlife not as the last of the summer wine, but a new chapter and opportunity.
- Marc Wilson is a professor of psychology at Victoria University
