Don't hold your breath waiting for a mid-life crisis
February 2nd 2010 10:40
Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
- Samuel Ullman
What is, for most of us, the happiest period of our lives? When we are young and carefree? When we are old and wise? Surely not somewhere in the middle, in the roiling waters infested by that terror of the psyche — the mid-life crisis.
Yes. Just that.
According to research by Tel Aviv University psychologist Carlo Strenger, not only are our middle years our happiest but their nemesis, the mid-life crisis, is actually a myth.
Strenger and his team got into the heads of about 1,500 people before coming to this conclusion. "Most of them actually say that they are better off and happier and more balanced than they were when they were 20 years younger," he found.
The psychologist Elliot Jacques coined the term “mid-life crisis” around 1970. He had started with the fact that the average human lifespan was 70 years, and he surmised that the average person’s quality of life started going down after age 35. If that was the case, thought Jacques, it was natural to expect some extreme reactions as one contemplated mortality.
"Shiver with anticipation," as Frank sibilated in the Rocky Horror Show.
The surprise responses to Strenger's survey attracted the attention of a another psychologist, Peter S. Kanaris, of Long Island in the US. And he decided they had a point.
The 40s and 50s, Kanaris said, can be viewed as times of contentment. “People in mid-life have reached a time where they are a little more settled and established. Prior to mid-life, people are building families, paying mortgages, developing in their careers at a time when there is much more uncertainty than usual. This creates a great deal of stress.”
By the time we are middle-aged, he concludes, we typically have substantially lessened the financial strains on our lives.
So must we let go of the potential of a mid-life crisis? I mean, let's face it, the word potential there could be replaced by allure. Promise. Attraction, even already. We are talking about, y'know, young women and sports cars and revisitations of youth.
B.J. Gallagher, author of a book entitled It’s Never too Late To Be What You Might Have Been, pours cold water on all that, and agrees with Strenger and Kanaris. "A so-called mid-life crisis these days is really more of a mid-life transition," she says.
It's nice that such revolutionary and revelatory scientific endeavour brings us ever deeper understanding of life.
But what about my Ferrari?
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