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I just want you to know that the future is rosy.
I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Steven Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, what is the likelihood that you'll experience a midlife crisis?
I've got the stress of young children. I've got my career stresses. I've got aging parents. Oh,
my God, it's all going on at the same time. Angela, a question today from a listener whose
name is Rebecca Basie, who lives in Cleveland, Ohio. She writes, Hi, Angela, Steven, exclamation
point. Hello, Rebecca. Here's a question that I grapple with at random, especially since being
in my mid thirties. Do you remember your mid thirties, Angela? Oh, my gosh. I was like,
Rebecca, the email writer is so young. I vaguely remember my mid thirties.
So Rebecca writes about encountering certain situations in which I believe a midlife crisis
is to blame. And she wants to know, are they real midlife crises? Rebecca continues,
I am married with three kids. My husband and I both work full time. And as you can imagine,
we are very much busy keeping up with the everyday demands of child rearing, et cetera, et cetera.
The following, she writes, are some examples of times when I have thought midlife crisis.
One, when I decided to get a strange part of my ear pierced with my 19 year old niece.
Two, when I very strongly considered getting subwoofers in my car. And three, when I bought
a pack of cigarettes, I've never been a smoker, she writes, because I thought it'd be cool to
have one while driving. I guess my question is, could these things be related to the fact that
I have consciously and I think subconsciously felt substantially older in the past couple of
years? Am I trying? She writes in the small ways that my current lifestyle allows to feel young
again. I've had to start having my hair highlighted to cover the grays and I haven't been ID'd when
buying wine in years. Sad. She finishes her email with a sad face. So Angela, do you feel Rebecca is
old enough to have what might be called a midlife crisis? Let's start there. How about
we start with, I want to be best friends with Rebecca. This is the most adorable email. It's
like truly charming. I do want to tell Rebecca that it can't be midlife unless she's planning
to only live till she's 70. Life expectancy has increased dramatically over the last century. I
of course, midlife, I say this as a 52 year old, I don't plan to live until I'm 104,
but most scientists consider it age 40 to 60. Can I add one caveat though to the life expectancy
story, which is truly one of the greatest miracles of humankind? Right? It's huge. I believe in the
20th century, life expectancy in the US doubled, which is crazy. Nearly doubled I think is the
more accurate, but let's say doubled rounding up to the nearest double. And that's never going
to happen again unless something really wild occurs in science of longevity, which I might.
So I shouldn't say never, but one fact that I think it's hidden in that bigger statistic is that
it is true that life expectancy rose by a crazy amount, but the biggest driver of that was the
decline in maternal and child death, but not the only driver, just so you know, not the only one.
People still died of cholera and dysentery and heart failure, all that stuff. And the reason
I bring that up in this context is even, let's say 100 years ago or 200 years ago, once you
made it to, let's say 30, the odds that you were going to make it to 70 or 80 were pretty decent,
not that much worse than they are today. And so I just do wonder if really what we consider the
age of the midlife crisis is that different today than it was in previous generations.
I think things have changed for sure. Because I looked into this, I had to write a commencement
speech for the graduating classes of my university, University of Pennsylvania, the ones who had
missed their graduations because of the pandemic. And I wanted to make a point about how they had
a fairly long time to live relative to people who had graduated from the same university 100
or 200 years ago. And I looked up the research and I will just say that while infant mortality
accounts for the large share of those additional years statistically, it's also true that at every
decade of life, our expectation for how much longer we have to live is greater than for people
in the past. It's not just infant mortality. So I think in a very real sense, midlife has shifted.
And because of that shift, you're saying Rebecca probably is at a midlife crisis.
She's precocious for having a midlife crisis. Again, most scientists think about it as
the forties and fifties because that's more like midlife in the era where we're living longer.
But look, Rebecca charmingly is doing a lot of things that are at least in a cliche sense,
the kinds of things that people do in a midlife crisis.
Okay. So tell us what you can about the modern definition of the midlife crisis, where it came
from, how long we've been paying attention to it and so on before we get into what I really
want to know, and I think Rebecca probably wants to know too, is what is the prevalence
of the midlife crisis and what is the intensity? But before we even get to those, let's just
hear about how recently it's been focused on and who helped define it.
So the term midlife crisis, it's widely believed to be attributed to a particular
psychoanalyst named Eliot Jax. And we're talking mid 20th century, 1960s. And Eliot Jax was treating
particularly artists and he was finding that many of his artist clients went through kind of a
depression in their 30s, a period where they were not as creative, not as productive, and were
having sadness and inability to enjoy life. Now, again, that's quite some time ago when life
expectancy was shorter. His thought being a psychoanalyst was that really there was something
going on with this midlife change that was important to think about. But I think it led to
a lot of more empirical research than one psychoanalyst thinking about his clients. And
the modern research on the midlife crisis suggests that it is not very common.
From what I recall, there was a book by Gail Sheehy, which was just at the time,
massively everywhere. It was particularly looking at the passage of time and aging from a female
perspective, but it was called Passages Predictable Crises of Adult Life. That was 1976.
Who was the author?
Gail Sheehy, because my first job in journalism in New York was at New York Magazine. She had been a
writer for New York Magazine, maybe even still writing when I got there. But it felt like the
idea of a midlife crisis became, for a time, at least in my memory, in the 80s and 90s, a given.
This is part of life.
Almost like adolescence. You will go through it.
Can you talk about how right or wrong that impression is? Because Rebecca certainly
seems to think that it is a rite of passage or at least a developmental stage.
Well, we definitely, if we live long enough, go through midlife. So there is midlife. The
midlife crisis that most of us can brace for. And because there has been research, survey
research in particular, where you have the same group of people that you follow as they march on
through the decades, you can in a pretty defensible way say whether there is or is not this prevailing
midlife crisis where people are trying to regain their youth, et cetera. And I think estimates of
have you had a midlife crisis, yes or no, or some version of that. Estimates range from one in 10
people saying, yes, I have, to at most like one in four. That leaves most of us three out of four
or nine out of 10 people not having had a midlife crisis.
So you're saying the prevalence doesn't seem to be that high, between 10 and 25 percent.
But if the intensity is legit, to say that up to 25 percent of the population suffers from or
experiences X condition, if the condition is serious enough, it's certainly worth paying
attention to. How would you describe or characterize the condition? What's really at
stake here? I think a lot of people are saying they have a lot of midlife stress. And so let's
describe that. You know, Stephen, you and I talked very early, I think it was one of the first no
stupid question conversations we had about the happiness. You. Oh, sure. David Blancheflower
and Andrew Oswald. Yes, that's right. I'll never forget Blancheflower's name.
I find that most flowers are more edible when you blanch them.
Anyway, I love Blancheflower's name and the research is very interesting. What Blancheflower
claims based on data sets collected around the world is that when you ask what is the low point
of life satisfaction in the human lifespan, he wants to say it's midlife. And I can't remember
the exact number. Was it 48 or 50? Let's say it's 50 just for kicks. It was certainly midlife.
And I think that is probably the best empirical evidence. There's something like a midlife crisis
that's common. But the point I want to make about this Blancheflower research is that people aren't
that low. If you compare how satisfied they are with their life at this, you know, 50 year mark,
it's like slightly lower than when they're 60 or when they're 40. So it is a U when the U is
at its bottom at mid adulthood, but nothing like a real crisis. At the same time, I want to point
out that there are other questions that you could ask people about their emotional experience.
How happy were you yesterday? How sad were you yesterday? How anxious? How worried? How angry?
And on these emotional measures of happiness, not how satisfied do you think you are with your life,
but how do you feel there? You don't get a U. You don't get a low point at midlife. You get this
ever increasing emotional stability that starts from adolescence and young adulthood and just
marches upward fairly linearly. I say this to my undergraduates and my MBA students because they
are at the bottom of the emotional stability trend. And I'm like, look, I just want you to know that
the future is rosy and that has to be taken into account as well. So what does that mean? How can
you explain the two different shapes of those curves? Does it mean that we sort of underrate
emotional stability perhaps? Well, there is a dimension of happiness, which is feeling,
and there is a different dimension, which is thinking. So these life satisfaction questions,
right? And I think we've done this before because you told me you were like a 9.2.
I think it was when you were talking about Philadelphia, you were a 9 point something,
even though you live in your least favorite city in the world.
Yes. By the way, my husband was not thrilled that I trashed our home city.
Can I just say Jason made the mistake of listening to no stupid questions. You should tell him his
life would probably be much better if he just ignores it. But that question, overall, how
satisfied are you with your life is a cognitive statement. It's like, what do you think about your
life overall? And that is different from how you're feeling. For example, income correlates much
more strongly with how you think about your life than how you feel in your daily life.
You know, that might explain I came across the fact that there's a huge variation among countries
and cultures, and it's the richer countries like the U.S. is kind of example number one of a place
that experiences a lot of midlife crisis that would seem to run counter to logic on some
dimensions. But as you're saying now, the more freedom and opportunity you have to think about
options and regrets and future, et cetera, you can think yourself into thinking you're less happy
than you are. Is that kind of the idea? What does it mean to say I'm satisfied with my life? I mean,
almost directly that question is asking about how your life is measuring up to your expectations.
And there's this really nice paper that an economist named Hans Schwandt, who's, I think,
at Northwestern University wrote on this explanation for the U-shaped curve of happiness,
of life satisfaction in particular. And what this analysis takes advantage of is this longitudinal
study in Germany, very well known and well used. It's called the German socioeconomic panel. Social
psychologists call it GSUP for short. And it's got this massive population of Germans that are
followed over time. And in this study, not only are you periodically asked on a scale from zero to
ten, where zero is completely dissatisfied and ten is completely satisfied, how satisfied are you
with your life, all things considered? We know Stephen's a 9.2. We know Angela's often around
the same. Even with the Philadelphia discount. Despite Philadelphia. There's another question.
Stephen, how do you think you will feel in five years? Same scale, zero to ten. So this is assuming
I'm a nine right now. We work off that baseline. Yeah, let's call it a nine. Let's make it easy.
So Stephen Dumner in 2027. I'll be honest with you. I've read about this type of research. I
took great comfort in that research when I read it, because it's basically good news. It basically
says that for most people, not all certainly, but for most people, life kind of gets better.
You're like, I know about Blancheflower. I'll be a 9.5. But I totally empathize with the impulse
to say, wait a minute, five years from now? Oh, no, no, I'll be older. The world will be more
chaotic. Eyesight's going to go. Right. So you're right on lots of counts. When you ask people,
how do you think you'll feel in five years? What happens is that at midlife, basically people think
that getting older, especially getting into older adulthood is going to be terrible and that they're
going to be very unhappy. And as you correctly predict, that actually doesn't happen. Now,
this question about expectations is central, because it seems that when we get older, 60s,
70s, we're not talking about the very, very end of life, which is a very different question,
because there you're often suffering and in pain. But as you're just getting older,
you lower your expectations, it seems, for what you would expect out of your life.
And so the idea here is that perhaps the unhappiness you this nadir at midlife,
it's that you are expecting the future to be worse than it really is. But also you are
disappointed in that you have not achieved the expectations that you had when you were a younger
self. So it's a kind of double whammy. A lot of people do express like I thought my career would
have turned out better than this. I thought I'd be closer to my children. This is all there is.
Yeah. The German data that Schwant looked at, did it include people young enough to know whether
people overestimate how satisfied they'll be in their 20s or in their 30s? In other words,
is it coming from both sides that in middle age, you're underestimating and in younger age,
you're overestimating? The GSUB data goes, I think, down to at least 21 and maybe even younger.
Let me just read you from the abstract. I find people to err systematically in predicting their
life satisfaction over the life cycle. They expect incorrectly increases in young adulthood
and decreases during old age. These errors are large, ranging from 9.8% at age 21
to minus 4.5% at age 68. Amazing. So youth, they think things are going to be better than it is.
But when we're in middle age, we're still really crappy at predicting our future feelings. It's
just that it's going in a different direction. Also, I think being wrong about the future may
not be so bad. In fact, it might be the right thing to do. What is it about optimistic youth
that says, you know what, things are getting better. I'm going to be happier. I'm going to
do more. I'm going to achieve more with my life. I'm going to have better relationships.
I don't know that we want youth to not have those optimistic and perhaps too sunny predictions
because that's what drives us. And in fact, this puzzle about why people have mistaken expectations
for the future has preoccupied philosophers, certainly psychologists going back to William
James and Kurt Lewin. I think that when you have aspirations, expectations, yes, maybe you'll
disappoint yourself when you arrive and you didn't quite reach them. But isn't that what got you off
the couch in the first place? So I think there's a story here about how for much of adulthood,
we are striving, we are expecting better. It seems like when we are in midlife,
we're starting to change our strategy to manage our expectations downward to accommodate reality.
Maybe that makes us feel better, but I'm not sure it gets us to do more.
It also makes me think about some of the, I guess you could call them confounding factors
about middle age. And what I'm talking about really now is Rebecca, she's got three kids,
she and her husband both work full time. They're deep, deep, deep in the middle of it.
And it strikes me that when we think about what Rebecca's call
