Last month, two economists presented a working paper that offers statistical proof for the existence of the midlife crisis. In a survey of 1.3 million people across 51 countries, the researchers found that people report a measurable decline in happiness, starting in their 30s and continuing until around age 50, when they started to feel satisfied with their lives again.
“We’re seeing this U-shape, this psychological dip, over and over again. There is definitely a midlife low,” said Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick and coauthor of the study.
There is just one problem: Psychologists say the midlife crisis does not exist.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
“I had a little tussle with Oswald about this a year or two ago,” said Susan Krauss Whitborne, a professor of psychology and brain science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and just one of several psychologists who hold this view.
“I’ve been doing research for pretty much my whole career on adult development, and I’ve never found age linked definitively to anything psychological about a person. You can call it a midlife crisis. A quarter-life crisis, but whatever’s going on with you personally, you can’t blame it on age,” she said.
“I don’t know why some psychologists say it doesn’t exist,” said Oswald’s coauthor, David Blanchflower, an economics professor at Dartmouth College. “It’s blindingly obvious. All we did was plot the data points.”
“I don’t understand why they’re so set on this,” Whitborne said. “They’re economists. What if I tried to use psychoanalytical measures to index the economy?”
This beef is not purely academic. Alongside traditional economic factors, social well-being is a growing consideration for government policy and often, businesses. Because people should be happy, yes — and because happiness tends to go along with health and productivity, both of which are good for the economy.
The UN studies happiness. So does Bhutan. In 2011, Britain started conducting national mood surveys in the hopes that the nation’s general feeling of well-being may one day guide policy decisions the way gross domestic product and inflation do.
The US government does not have a similar survey, but the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center has been conducting its General Social Survey, which asks about happiness, since 1972.
What governments and businesses should do with their findings is not for them to say, but it could be relevant to, say, public health policy on opiate addiction, or trying to decrease the suicide rate, Oswald and Blanchflower said.
(The two are currently interested in the use of antidepressants by middle-aged people.)
“We’re just concerned with the well-being of the country,” Blanchflower said. “Happiness is a part of that.”
The very idea of a midlife crisis originated in the early 1960s with a Canadian psychologist named Elliott Jaques. He was studying the creative habits of 310 famous artists, such as Mozart, Raphael and Gaugin, when he noticed a common trait: When the artists entered their mid-30s, their creative output waned. Some became depressed. A few committed suicide. Elliott then observed essentially the same pattern among his own clients.
As people approached middle-age, many of them became acutely aware that their lives were finite and, as a result, reported an increasing fear that they might not achieve their goals.
Jaques’ resulting paper, “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” published in the International Journal of Psychology in 1965, gave rise to a new pop-science term and provided men with an excuse to get hair plugs or buy a sports car. (The paper is also why most cultural midlife crisis cliches involve men; Jaques believed that women did not experience such crises because they went through menopause.)
For a while, Jaques’ theory was well accepted. It was popularized in Gail Sheehy’s 1976 best-selling book Passages, and in 1978 the New York Times ran a profile of a psychologist who claimed midlife crises always happened within three years of a milestone birthday such as 30 or 40.
However, in more recent research, several psychological studies have either failed to find middle-aged anxiety or have disproved it altogether.
The National Institute of Aging finds that only a third of Americans over age 50 claim to have experienced a midlife crisis. Half attribute their crises to “inner turmoil and angst associated with getting older,” while others point to a traumatic event outside their control, such as a divorce.
Whitbourne, for her part, has spent the bulk of her career tracking a few hundred people from their college graduations in 1965 to now, adding younger cohorts along the way.
“People do go through periods of self-evaluation, but it’s not tied to age. If someone close to you dies and you start to think about how life is limited, is that a midlife crisis? Or is it just a healthy reevaluation of your priorities?” she said.
Still, Oswald and Blanchflower said, there does seem to be a marked decrease in people’s happiness when they hit middle age.
Their findings are pretty simple: Even when accounting for employment status, marriage, wealth, race, gender, education and whether people had children, respondents tended to report decreasing satisfaction over the decades.
In other words, life looks great to 20-year-olds, less rosy for 30-year-olds, and borderline bleak for people from ages 40 to 50. And yes, both men and women experience the dip.
“Mostly, we just want people to understand that this is happening,” Oswald said. “How does it affect people’s jobs? Marriages? Economic activity? We don’t fully know.”
The existence of such a dip does not mean that middle-aged people hate their lives.
When Americans were asked in a 2010 survey conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “in general, how satisfied are you with your life ” on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being very satisfied, the change in their answers dropped from 3.75 around age 21 to just below 3.5 in the late 40s. That is still pretty satisfied.
Oswald and Blanchflower have been studying happiness as it relates to age for more than a decade; their first paper published on the topic in 2004 put the nadir at age 37 for men and 41 for women.
“No explanation is available even in the psychology literature,” they said at the time.
A 2008 paper repeated the findings in both developed and developing countries, and again said that “what causes this apparently U-shaped curve ... is unknown.”
“OK, but a decade ago the group with the highest rates of suicide used to be white men ages 75 to 84,” Whitmore said. “I’d hardly call that midlife.”
Ultimately, they might both be right. Oswald and Blanchflower’s dip might not indicate the existential angst Jaques theorized in the 1960s. It may instead be a general side effect of contemporary adulthood. The dip occurs during people’s prime working years. It is also the time period when most of them marry, form families, get mortgages and possibly experience unplanned shocks, such as divorce or unemployment.
The “midlife low” hovers over a number of other studies, including one put out recently by a British human resources firm that found employees from age 35 to 55 were more likely to hate their jobs.
A 2005 Families and Work Institute study found that people from 40 to 55 were more likely to feel overworked, but it noted that their feelings stemmed from demanding jobs and family obligations, not their age.
If anything, the dip recorded by Oswald and Blanchflower may simply be the statistical proof of what millennials are only starting to learn: “Adulting” is hard.
A recent report concerning a student who is suing his teacher posed the question in its headline: Does failing a student in two subjects constitute bullying? The college student in Chiayi County apparently sought NT$2 million (US$63,603) in state compensation, but a court dismissed the case. The first reaction of many might have been to ask: What has happened to students nowadays? Some say that teachers have lost their authority, while others say students are overindulged. Some even start reminiscing over the days when “whatever the teacher says goes.” However, the real issue might be overlooked if emotional reactions like that are the
When I visited Taiwan last summer, I called on the nation to use its status as a technology superpower to build superweapons. It is obvious to me as I return a year later that Taiwan is now answering that call. By 2030, Taiwan envisions a domestic drone hub, capable of producing large quantities of drones per year. The nation continues to tighten cooperation across the private sector, scientific researchers and the elected government, on creating new and innovative production avenues for defense, while efforts to become central to the “democratic supply chain” are only increasing. Anduril is seeing all of these positive
Singaporean former Prime Minister and current senior minister Lee Hsien- Loong(李顯龍) last month stood on Chinese soil and told Beijing that Singapore cooperates because of “shared interests”, not because of common “ethnic descent,” a significant statement that has upended China’s cognitive warfare tactics of “ethnic nationalism.” Along with using its military buildup and economic growth to expand its international dominance, China has long deployed ethnic politics to promote the idea that all ethnic Chinese around the world, regardless of citizenship, share a tight bond with the Chinese motherland, by which it means the regime of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
Taiwan’s economic momentum, driven by demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products, remains strong, with booming demand for advanced semiconductors, servers and key components. In the first quarter, GDP expanded 14.55 percent year-on-year, the second consecutive quarter of double-digit percentage growth and accelerating from the 12.95 percent expansion in the previous quarter, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) reported on Friday. Net exports remained the dominant driver of growth, contributing 10.33 percentage points to Taiwan’s GDP growth in the first quarter. That came as exports rose 35.76 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, outpacing 26.34 percent growth in imports, the
RSS