In Our Prime (22 page)

We have become conditioned to use the midlife crisis as the default explanation for any discontent or unusual decision. Ninety years ago, G. Stanley Hall recognized how age, like the older sibling who should know better, always got the blame: “
Shortcomings that date from earlier years
are now ascribed to age.”
So David Foster Wallace, a deeply insightful
author, described a breakdown he had in college by saying, “I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty.” Media pundits in 2011 who described the actor Charlie Sheen's drug abuse, fights, and rants at age 46 as a midlife crisis ignored similar episodes that occurred in his youth, including shooting his fiancée in the arm when he was 25. And the Danish director
Lars von Trier
, already notorious for outrageous statements, suddenly blamed a midlife crisis for declaring himself a Nazi at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
As David Almeida, a psychologist at
the University of Pennsylvania and MacArthur researcher, argues: “Many of the stereotypical hallmarks of a midlife crisis, such as the sudden purchase of the expensive sports car, likely have more to do with middle-age financial status than with a search for youth.”

There is, however, another way to think about the midlife crisis. The bare-bones outline matches an archetypical plot: a hero encounters an obstacle or turning point and is shadowed by thoughts of death, yearns for an Edenic past, and then emerges from the crisis with new insight. Stripped of its ageist sentiments, this heroic journey fits adolescents, and 20- and 30-somethings—like David Foster Wallace—better than it does those in middle age. Trying to return home from Troy, Odysseus has the equivalent of a twenty-year midlife crisis (or crises) before reuniting with his wife, Penelope. This universal theme could explain why the midlife crisis narrative has resonated so deeply and has been so hard to dislodge. Everyone creates a story about their lives, fitting events together in a way that makes sense. These tales are modeled on plots that we have heard since childhood. We choose which events are significant and how they mesh with our overall experience. “
One spends a lifetime reconstructing
one's past,” the writer Brendan Gill observed, “in order to approach some tentative, usable truth about oneself by ransacking all the data that have hovered dimly somewhere ‘out there,' helping to form one's nature.”

The midlife crisis provides such a powerful narrative that people shoehorn their experience into that story line even when it is not true—labeling all significant crises as “midlife” no matter when they happened. People rewrite the past to fit their current understanding.

The MacArthur study constructed a portrait of the typical middle-aged American. That “average” creature, however, is only one character in midlife's story. America is vast and complex, and its inhabitants don't progress in lockstep. Thinking of the 1960s only in terms of radical youths without any reference to conservatives, for example, presents a distorted picture of that decade. Ultimately, “people,” “Americans,” “adults,” “men,” and “women” are always generalized stand-ins for a collection of quirky, distinct individuals whose experience of the middle decades varies widely.

In 2004, the
Annual Review of Psychology
asked Margie Lachman, a psychologist at Brandeis and a MacArthur veteran, to write a status report about the emerging field of midlife development, a kind of State of the Union address for the discipline. One of the biggest challenges facing researchers, she noted, is that adults in midlife have such diverse and varied experiences. Compared with previous generations, this group of middle-aged men and women is at the center of a much more intricate and sprawling web of social roles and responsibilities. The variety is compounded by differences in backgrounds, income, and geography. Divorce, aging parents, gay marriage, adoptions, and fertility drugs are contributing to the construction of novel family arrangements that are both stressful and enriching. “
For investigators trying to sort
their way through the growing stacks of new information, discerning patterns can be frustrating,” Lachman concluded.

MacArthur researchers found responses often varied with location.
When it came to describing
the ingredients that contribute to a sense of well-being in middle age, New Englanders emphasized control, having no constraints on their ability to do what they want. Inhabitants of the West South Central region (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana) reported feeling less nervous and restless, and more cheerful and happy. Residents of the West North Central region (Minnesota, North
Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri) weren't as cheery but felt calm, peaceful, and satisfied, a level of contentment that researchers thought might explain the region's marked unconcern with personal growth. And in the East South Central region (Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky), saddled with the lowest levels of personal income and education, participants were in worse physical and emotional health, and felt less in control of their lives. The one area that Southerners reported feeling good about was their contribution to other people's welfare.

The network also underscored the stark gaps in health and well-being that class, wealth, and schooling produced. The poor aged much faster than their middle-class contemporaries. Like a coastal town punished by salt water and rain, impoverished people in midlife were battered by the cumulative effect of mediocre or curtailed education, joblessness, single-parent families, ill health, and poor care.

Educational divisions revealed other unexpected
differences, as in definitions of “the good life.” Everyone between 40 and 59 agreed that relations with others was the most important element of well-being, followed by feeling healthy, being able to enjoy oneself, and experiencing a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. Financial security and having a positive outlook on life were also common responses. But college grads in their middle years emphasized being “able to make choices” and having a goal and purpose. High school graduates in the midsection of life tended to talk instead of doing the right thing and not giving up. It's about “endurance,” said one respondent. “If things get bad, I just feel God is testing me to see what I am capable of . . . just hang in there, hang tough.”

A similar class divide showed up
in the MacArthur data on the topic of responsibility. Meeting obligations and attending to the needs of others were elements that nearly everyone mentioned. But middle-aged high school graduates frequently added “being dependable to others” and “adjusting to circumstances” on their short list. By contrast, those who attended college emphasized balancing numerous responsibilities and taking the initiative. “I am good at juggling multiple tasks. I have a family life that demands that, I have a personal life that demands that, and I have a professional life that demands that,” said one mother. A man
put it this way: “Life should be a balance, you know, of work, of fun, of commitments.”

“Doing what I don't want to do” and “taking care of myself” showed up much more frequently on the list of social responsibilities cited by college graduates. “I take on the responsibility and I complete it, which is the reason, for instance, why I have stuck with being treasurer at church,” said one college-educated respondent.

These definitions of social responsibility reveal a sense of self-entitlement among the college-educated group, who groused about interferences with their own happiness and their ability to control what happens in their lives. Underneath many of the answers lay the assumption that taking care of others depended on taking care of oneself first. “Typically what gets lost for me is . . . a sense of responsibility to myself, which would be, you know, just take a weekend off and go sit under a tree,” said one overworked woman. Responsibility includes being “good to myself, responsible to myself,” said one man. Without the gym and down time, “[I] build up a lot of passive-aggressive resentment.” Compared with high school graduates, the college graduates were much more likely to draw a link between responsibility and self-improvement—twenty-nine to two percent.

Differences between men and women were evident in many corners of midlife, including the experience and effects of marriage.
From their early 30s through
their mid-80s, three out of four men had a ring on their finger; between the ages of 55 and 64, that figure rose to eighty percent, peaking among 65- to 74-year-olds, when eighty-two percent of men were married.

The marriage curve for women had a radically different shape, in part because men typically marry younger women. Roughly seven out of ten women between 32 and 44 were married. That proportion dipped slightly for women between 45 and 54 before sliding down a steeper incline. Sixty-four percent of women between the ages of 55 and 64 were married; for women between 65 and 74, the figure dropped to fifty-eight percent. By the time women reached the 75- to 84-year-old interval, only forty percent were married compared with seventy-four percent of men that age.

The glaring marriage gap between elderly men and women was primarily due to health. Men die earlier than women, leaving many more widows than widowers, although the gap is closing. Perhaps reinforcing this differential was women's ability to weather the death of a spouse better than men: about half of women over 55 who lost a husband reported being in good health compared with thirty percent of men whose wives had died. And while women over 55 who never walked down the aisle were somewhat more likely to be in good health than their married counterparts, the opposite was true for men.

Women and men with college degrees had a better chance not only of getting married but of having a happy relationship. Researchers also found a link between marriage and health, but they have not yet sorted out whether marriage causes people to be healthier or whether healthier people are more likely to get married. Either way, miserable couples lost out on any possible health benefits; they were no healthier than adults who never married.

The MacArthur project attempted to probe more deeply
into what life was like for racial and ethnic minorities, so in addition to the general pool of survey respondents, the investigators collected information from nearly fourteen hundred Mexican-Americans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans who lived in either Chicago or New York City. Data about minority groups was still sketchy, but the information illustrated the unpredictable variety of midlife experiences.

Minorities tended to be in worse physical health than their white counterparts. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure visited middle-aged African Americans much more often than whites, for instance. They smoked more, slept less, ate badly. Death also knocked more frequently and earlier for blacks than for whites over 45. When it came to the psychological side of the equation, however, racial and ethnic minorities tended to be in better shape than whites. Confounding expectations, minorities enjoyed a greater sense of well-being, personal growth, and contentment with the way life turned out after the negative effects of discrimination or lower education and income were taken into
account. Latinos who embraced their ethnic identity were similarly in better physical and mental health than those who did not. Trying to explain this apparent paradox, some researchers have suggested that the challenges minorities face sharpen their confidence and abilities—as the saying goes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Racial and ethnic pride, embedded in tales of overcoming persecution, apparently offered a protective veil against life's knocks. Interpreting suffering as building resilience and offering redemption infused it with meaning.

Blacks over 40 who were surveyed also greeted the prospect of their middle decades with a sense of accomplishment. For poor black men, the pressure to prove oneself on the street eased and there was satisfaction in having made it this far without getting killed. “
When you get to be 40,” said Geoffrey Powers
, a black man from Harlem, “life changes for the better. No more hotdogging. No more running around. I think it's time to settle down and just look after family.”
Katherine Newman, a sociologist at Princeton University, oversaw
a pilot study in the mid-1990s funded by the MacArthur network that included extended interviews with working-poor African Americans in their 40s and 50s in Harlem. She found that residents of troubled and dangerous neighborhoods “look upon success as the absence of major failure. A middle-aged parent is to be congratulated if she or he has managed to raise a family where the children are not in trouble.”

In Harlem, stable middle-aged men were in great demand but in short supply. A black woman in her middle decades who managed to maintain a job and save for retirement might discover that her relative security was accompanied by unexpected stresses. She was besieged by her children and an extended network of friends and family for help in paying for a doctor, a broken carburetor, or a new winter coat. A refusal to assist was often met with anger and disappointment. Being poor and single in late middle age frequently brought loneliness, guilt, and worry. In addition to their personal travails, African Americans in midlife felt as if they had to account for the social problems of their community in a way their white counterparts never did.

Many of the Harlem women found their strongest bonds at midlife not with a partner but with a daughter (rather than a son) and grandchildren.
Some had their first child as teenagers, an event that rippled through the family—an example of Glen Elder's injunction that one generation's decisions can have a fateful impact on others. That mother often found herself a grandmother in her 30s or early 40s; a great-grandmother before she hit 60. If their children were swallowed by addiction and joblessness, women in middle age had to raise their grandchildren. Many of the people Newman interviewed had migrated from the Jim Crow South and had opportunities their parents never dreamed of, yet they also saw fragile economic and social gains crumble when inner-city black communities were slammed in the 1980s by the crack epidemic and a recession. In this respect, these women were thrust back into the circumstances of early nineteenth-century farmers' wives whose burdens of childcare did not cease until they died.