A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MIDLIFE CRISIS

According to poet and librarian Philip Larkin, "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me)." We can date the origin of the midlife crisis with the same precision. In 1965, psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques published the essay that coined the phrase: "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis." In dissecting the crisis, Jaques quotes a patient in his mid-thirties:

"Up till now," he said, "life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight — far enough away it's true — but there is death observably present at the end."

If you are reading this book, the odds are good that you relate to this moment. You know how you are supposed to feel, whether you feel that way or not. You have lived long enough to ask "Is that all there is?" Enough to have made some serious mistakes, to look back on triumphs and failures with pride and regret, to look sideways at lost alternatives, lives you did not choose and cannot live, and to look ahead to the end of life, not imminent but not so far off, its distance measured in units you now comprehend: another forty years, with luck.

You are not the first. We have contemporary models, like Lester Burnham in American Beauty, who quits his job, buys a fast car, and lusts after his teenage daughter's seductive friend. But there are much earlier ones. A partial history would cite the protagonist of John Williams's luminous 1965 novel, Stoner, who at forty-two years old, with a failed marriage and stalled career, "could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember." No wonder he embarks on the prescribed affair. It would cite the absurd man of Albert Camus's 1942 Myth of Sisyphus, whose existential crisis is not timeless but comes "when a man notices or says that he is thirty."

He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

And it would cite The History of Mr. Polly by H. G. Wells, the darkly comic story of a bored shopkeeper whose abortive attempt at suicide makes him a local hero — he is credited with putting out the fire he started — and spurs him to begin life anew. The book was published in 1910.

If representations of the midlife crisis precede its naming in 1965, how far can we trace the thing itself? It comes as a surprise to learn that Jaques's examples are largely drawn not from his clinical practice but from the lives of creative artists. He was struck by the frequency with which the age of thirty-seven, or thereabouts, brings either creative silence or transformation. By thirty-seven, Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) had written his most successful operas, from The Barber of Seville to William Tell; though he lived another forty years, he barely composed again. At the same age, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) set off on a two-year journey through Italy. His greatest works were written afterwards, infused by the classics, as in the tragedy, Faust. Even Michelangelo (1475–1564) took a breather in midlife, painting virtually nothing from age forty to fifty-five, then the Medici monument and The Last Judgment.

It may strike you as reckless to speculate about the mental history of artists who died several centuries ago. We are not done yet. No stranger to reckless speculation, Philippe Ariès, the historian who posited the modern invention of childhood, traced the feeling of personal failure at midlife to the experience of "the rich, powerful, or learned man of the late Middle Ages" who had luxuries of aspiration denied to the inhabitants of traditional societies. Think of Dante at thirty-five: "Midway on our life's journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost."

Medievalist Mary Dove paints a very different picture in The Perfect Age of Man's Life, citing the Middle English narratives Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which draw on Aristotle's theory of middle age as the prime of life, the body being most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five, the mind at forty-nine. Others doubt that Ariès went far enough. In her 2002 book about the midlife crisis, Regeneration, psychotherapist Jane Polden takes as her paradigm the story of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey. Talk about a midlife crisis! Infidelity, drinking, the death of a beloved parent, and the need for some serious family counseling at the end. To be fair to Polden, she means it as a metaphor. The earliest text I have found cited as a genuine precedent for the midlife crisis is from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, around 2000 BCE: a dialogue between a world-weary man and his soul — though as far as I can tell what he is weary of is the injustice that surrounds him, not the inadequacies of his own life.

The moral of this prehistory is less the timelessness of the midlife crisis than the strength of its grip on our imaginations. It is all too easy to project our image of the crisis back into lives that are radically different from our own. The history I will tell in this chapter is not the imponderable history of midlife crises since the dawn of humankind, but the much more tractable history of the idea, from its inception in 1965 up to the present day. Even as its popularity soars, the midlife crisis has been haunted by the charge that it is a mere projection, that there is really no such thing.

RISE AND FALL

Despite some notable precedents — including psycho-analyst Edmund Bergler's 1954 study of extramarital affairs, The Revolt of the Middle-Aged Man — the midlife crisis was born in 1965. Its childhood was one of extra-ordinary promise and prodigious growth.

In 1966, Daniel Levinson, a psychology professor at Yale, embarked on a series of interviews with forty men aged from thirty-five to forty-five. He wanted to know if they shared his own midlife malaise. The result was a map of conjectured stages in adult male development, The Seasons of a Man's Life, published in 1978. In the same year, UCLA psychiatrist Roger Gould published Transformations: Growth and Change in Adult Life. He, too, was inspired by his own experience, a depression unexpectedly caused by the realization of a long-held dream: Gould and his wife had bought their own house in Los Angeles. Why was it making them so unhappy? Faced with personal trauma, Gould had the social scientist's response: he conducted a study, a self-assessment survey given to 524 people, male and female, aged sixteen to fifty. Like Levinson, Gould aimed to identify universal stages...