When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(29)
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood.
—MARGARET ATWOOD, ALIAS GRACE
Our lives rarely follow a clear, linear path. More often, they’re a series of episodes—with beginnings, middles, and ends. We often remember beginnings. (Can you picture your first date with your spouse or partner?) Endings also stand out. (Where were you when you heard that a parent, grandparent, or loved one had died?) But middles are muddy. They recede rather than reverberate. They get lost, well, in the middle.
Yet the science of timing is revealing that midpoints have powerful, though peculiar, effects on what we do and how we do it. Sometimes hitting the midpoint—of a project, a semester, a life—numbs our interest and stalls our progress. Other times, middles stir and stimulate; reaching the midpoint awakens our motivation and propels us onto a more promising path.
I call these two effects the “slump” and the “spark.”
Midpoints can bring us down. That’s the slump. But they can also fire us up. That’s the spark. How can we identify the difference? And how, if at all, can we turn a slump into a spark? Finding the answers requires lighting some holiday candles, making a radio commercial, and revisiting one of college basketball’s greatest games. But let’s launch our inquiry with what many consider the ultimate physical, emotional, and existential midpoint droop: middle age.
THAT’S WHAT I LIKE ABOUT U
In 1965, an obscure Canadian psychoanalyst named Elliott Jaques published a paper in an equally obscure publication called the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Jaques had been examining the biographies of prominent artists, including Mozart, Raphael, Dante, and Gauguin, and he noticed that an unusual number of them seemed to have died at age thirty-seven. Atop that flimsy factual foundation, he added a few floors of Freudian jargon, plopped a staircase of hazy clinical anecdotes in the center, and emerged with a fully constructed theory.
“In the course of the development of the individual,” Jaques wrote, “there are critical phases which have the character of change points, or periods of rapid transition.” And the least familiar but most crucial of these phases, he said, occurs around age thirty-five—“which I shall term the midlife crisis.”1
Kaboom!
The idea detonated. The phrase “midlife crisis” leaped onto magazine covers. It crept into TV dialogue. It launched dozens of Hollywood films and sustained the panel-discussion industry for at least two decades.2
“The central and crucial feature of the midlife phase,” Jaques said, was the “inevitability of one’s own eventual personal death.” When people reach the middle of their lives, they suddenly spy the Grim Reaper in the distance, which uncorks “a period of psychological disturbance and depressive breakdown.”3 Haunted by the specter of death, middle-aged people either succumb to its inevitability or radically redirect their course to avoid reckoning with it. The phrase infiltrated the global conversation with astonishing speed.
It remains part of the parlance today; the tableau of cultural clichés is as vivid as ever. We know what a midlife crisis looks like even when it’s updated for contemporary times. Mom impulsively buys a cherry Maserati—in midlife crises, the cars are always red and sporty—and zooms away with her twenty-five-year-old assistant. Dad disappears with the pool boy to open a vegan café in Palau. A full half century after Jaques lobbed his conceptual grenade, the midlife crisis is everywhere.
Everywhere, that is, except in the evidence.
When developmental psychologists have looked for it in the laboratory or the field, they’ve largely come up empty. When pollsters have listened for it in public-opinion surveys, this supposed cri de coeur barely registers. Instead, during the last ten years, researchers have detected a quieter midlife pattern, one that arrives with remarkable consistency across the world and that reflects a broader truth about midpoints of every kind.
For example, in 2010 four social scientists, including Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton, took what they called “a snapshot of the age distribution of wellbeing in the United States.” The team asked 340,000 interviewees to imagine themselves on a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. If the top step represented their best possible life, and the bottom the worst possible one, what step were they standing on now? (The question was a more artful way of asking, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how happy are you?”) The results, even controlling for income and demographics, were shaped like a shallow U, as you can see in the chart. People in their twenties and thirties were reasonably happy, people in their forties and early fifties less so, and people from about fifty-five onward happier once again.4
Wellbeing in midlife didn’t collapse in a cataclysmic, life-altering way. It just sagged.
This U-curve of happiness—a mild slump rather than a raging crisis—is a extremely robust finding. A slightly earlier study of more than 500,000 Americans and Europeans by economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald found that wellbeing consistently slid around the middle of life. “The regularity is intriguing,” they observe. “The U-shape is similar for males and females, and for each side of the Atlantic Ocean.” But it wasn’t merely an Anglo-American phenomenon. Blanchflower and Oswald also analyzed data from around the world and discovered something remarkable. “In total, we document a statistically significant U-shape in happiness or life satisfaction for 72 countries,” they write, from Albania and Argentina through the nation-state alphabet to Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.5