When Does Middle Age Start? - The Atlantic

The only thing anyone can reliably tell you about middle age is that it’s in the middle of life. What’s the middle? Well, it’s after the beginning, and before the end.<br>Okay, we can do a little better than that: Middle age comes after young adulthood, and before what we used to call “old age” but now might more decorously refer to as “older age” or “late life.” But to get more specific, to figure out when precisely middle age begins and ends, is a daunting challenge.<br>The average life expectancy in the United States is 79. So if you cut that in half, 39.5 is the precise statistical midpoint of the average American life. But that doesn’t reveal much—middle age isn’t just a point in time but a phase of life. How long does that phase last? When does it start? When does it end? How can you tell when you’re in it? These, it turns out, are very fraught questions.<br>I am 35. Is a 35-year-old middle-aged? If you ask my friends, they’d be quick to say I’m “still young,” but the word still carries a note of reassurance that I find troubling. Is a 66-year-old retiree middle-aged? Maybe, maybe not—but they sure don’t want to be called “old.” Is a 29-year-old middle aged? Surely not, yet The Wall Street Journal ran a story a couple of years ago about 20-somethings who claimed they felt middle-aged.<br>Read: When are you really an adult?<br>When pollsters ask the populace about when middle age begins and ends, they get a variety of answers. In one survey, the median response put middle age as lasting from 40 to 60. In another, the average British person said that middle age begins at 35 (hello!) and ends at 58. Meanwhile, 55 percent of Americans think 65 is still middle-aged. And according to that Journal story, 20 percent of people ages 25 to 34 say they feel middle-aged.<br>If anyone could authoritatively answer the question “When is middle age?” I figured it would be Margie Lachman. She is a psychologist studying midlife at Brandeis University and the author of the recent book Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife; she’s also worked on the massive longitudinal Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study for all of the 30-plus years it’s been running. Yet even she cannot decide on a firm definition for when middle age begins and ends. Her official definition, in her book and her research, is 40 to 60, “plus or minus 10 years.” Even among scholars, the boundaries of middle age are fuzzy.<br>One reason for that fuzziness, Lachman told me, is that how you think about middle age depends on what age you currently are. The older people are, the later they tend to think middle age starts and ends. According to data Lachman shared from MIDUS, people in their 20s define middle age as starting around 39 or 40 and ending around 53, 54, or 55. Those numbers inch up with each successive decade of life. The oldest group in the study, people in their 70s, say middle age begins around 48 or 49 and ends from 62 to 65.<br>Read: When does someone become “old”?<br>Ageism is likely to blame for a lot of this. In a youth-obsessed culture, it makes sense that people want to consider themselves young for as long as possible. In Primetime, Lachman writes that she’s found that many people in their early 40s “actively resist the idea that they are middle-­aged,” and many in their late 60s or 70s “insist that they are still middle-aged.” Indeed, research shows that the older someone is, the later they think old age begins, too. And middle age has its own branding problem: “The No. 1 word attached to midlife is crisis,” Chip Conley—the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, an organization that offers workshops for making the most of midlife, and the author of Learning to Love Midlife—told me. (This association persists despite evidence showing the midlife crisis is mostly a myth.)<br>On top of that, the appearance of aging itself is changing. Celebrities get plastic surgery, Botox, and fillers to retain or restore youthful faces—and are more open about it than they once were—further confounding how we perceive the phases of life. (Saying the 70-year-old Kris Jenner is “old” feels odd when, after her much-publicized facelift, her facial skin is stretched so taut you can scarcely detect a single wrinkle.) Even the faces of ordinary people who don’t get work done are generally aging more slowly, The Cut reported, because overall, people smoke less than they used to and use more sunscreen. Wrinkle-reducing retinol is widely available in creams, gels, and serums at any old drug store. Anti-aging is now such a normal part of beauty routines that even some children are using products to prevent wrinkles they’re nowhere near having.<br>This isn’t the only factor shifting back our aging goalposts. Many milestones that people once used to define adulthood (marriage, home ownership, having kids) are happening later in life, if they happen at all. Given the association of middle age with responsibility, perhaps people don’t feel middle-aged unless...