The Midlife Crisis Is Real

For years, the midlife crisis has been dismissed as a myth, a punchline, something only cartoon dads experience when they buy a sports car. Well, turns out the cynics were wrong. The data is in, from a study by Giuntella et al. (2023), and it paints a disturbing picture of a very real, very painful longitudinal crisis hitting people squarely in the middle of their lives, particularly in the wealthiest nations on earth.

The conventional wisdom is that by midlife, typically defined as somewhere in the 40s or 50s, people in affluent societies should be crushing it. They’re usually near their peak earnings, often haven’t faced significant illness, and live in countries that are safer and more prosperous than ever before in human history. By all accounts, these folks should be enjoying cushioned, enviable lives. And yet, they are disproportionately taking their own lives, struggling with sleep, battling depression, and generally finding life less and less worth living. This is a genuine paradox of modern economic progress.

The Data Doesn’t Lie: It’s a Hill Shape of Hell

This isn’t just some fuzzy “subjective wellbeing” survey finding a slight dip in happiness that could be statistically manipulated. Giuntella et al. (2023) dug into the hard data – measures of extreme distress. And across a range of indicators, they found a consistent, unmistakable pattern: an approximate “hill shape” when charting distress levels against age. Imagine a mountain range where the peak of suffering is right in the middle of the lifespan, and then declines afterward.

What kind of misery are we talking about? The evidence spans multiple objective and subjective markers:

The Darkness Peaks in Midlife Suicide rates, the starkest measure of mental crisis, follow this hump shape. In English-speaking nations, after adjusting for cohort and time effects, the risk rises through midlife, peaking around ages 50-54 for females and 55-59 for males. This isn’t just a cross-sectional snapshot… it’s a pattern observed over seven decades of data.

Clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder in England show a repeated hump-shaped age pattern across multiple survey years (2000, 2007, 2014). Similarly, the proportion of people reporting that “life is not worth living” traces out a similar depressing arc. Less severe, but still significant, indicators like concentration problems and forgetfulness also show this trend.

Sleep? Not So Easy Anymore. Good sleep is fundamental to health and mental well-being. Worry keeps people awake, and sleeping problems are a marker of anxiety and depression. Official UK data on hospital admissions specifically for sleep disorders reveals a marked hill-shaped pattern by age. These aren’t just folks who had a restless night, these are problems severe enough to warrant hospitalization. Complementary data from the USA and other countries, both self-reported and objective, also shows a U-shape in sleep hours over the lifespan – meaning people sleep the least in midlife.

Tthe physical and occupational toll is evident. Disabling headaches, like migraines, which are linked to anxiety and depression, follow a similar hill shape in longitudinal data from Great Britain. Severe job stress, measured by employees’ agreement with statements like “I fear the amount of stress in my job will make me physically ill,” also peaks in midlife among working individuals in Australia. It seems the pressure cooker is really on during these years.

Even alcohol dependence shows the characteristic hill shape in England data.

This Isn’t About Kids or Recessions or Cohorts

One of the critical strengths of this study is its methodology. It doesn’t rely on simple cross-sectional data, which can confuse age effects with differences between generations (cohort effects). Instead, it uses large panel datasets, following the same individuals over time, and employs sophisticated methods to adjust for cohort and time effects. The findings hold up.

Nor is this pattern simply due to having young children, being overworked, being in a specific country, or being part of a particular generation. The researchers controlled for standard socioeconomic factors like gender, education, marriage, having children, housing, and employment, and the midlife distress pattern persists. This isn’t a temporary blip or an illusion.

So, What the Hell Is Going On?

The exact explanation for this midlife trough remains, frustratingly, an open question. The traditional psychological idea, coined by Elliott Jaques in the 1960s, was that the midlife crisis stemmed from confronting one’s own mortality. While most psychologists have dismissed this notion over the years, this study provides empirical support consistent with Jaques’ original hypothesis.

The authors speculate on a few possibilities. Maybe it’s about unmet aspirations – realizing you haven’t hit the goals you set for yourself, or that some doors are now permanently closed. Perhaps, more optimistically, the decline in distress later in life is due to increasing wisdom.

Intriguingly, there’s evidence of a similar midlife psychological low in great apes like chimpanzees and orangutans. If our primate cousins experience something similar, it suggests sheer aging biology might play a role, potentially taking the explanation out of the purely social sciences and into the realm of natural science. That’s a humbling thought.

The Takeaway

Regardless of the precise cause, the evidence is compelling: the human midlife crisis is not a myth. It’s a period of demonstrably elevated extreme distress across multiple indicators, impacting half a million individuals in affluent nations according to the Giuntella et al. (2023) data. It’s a troubling paradox that the people who are arguably at the peak of material and societal success are also experiencing peak misery.

The seriousness of this widespread societal problem, the authors argue, has been fundamentally under-recognized by policymakers in the affluent world. It’s time to stop laughing about red sports cars and start taking the midlife crisis for what it is: a significant, data-backed period of struggle that deserves serious attention and understanding.

Source:

Giuntella, O., McManus, S., Mujcic, R., Oswald, A. J., Powdthavee, N., & Tohamy, A. (2023). The midlife crisis. Economica, 90(357), 65-110.