Gen Xers, step on up, it’s officially your turn to muddle through your midlife crisis.
You were born between 1965 and 1980, so you’re smack dab in the midst of what are regularly referred to as the most angst-filled years you’ll encounter.
Is that a bad thing? Nope. So says Chip Conley, author of the new book “Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age” and co-founder of MEA, the world’s first midlife wisdom school dedicated to helping midlifers reimagine and repurpose themselves.
“Midlife has a massive branding problem,” according to Conley. It is “the initiation into a time of massive transitions. A drizzle of disappointments. Parents passing away, kids leaving home, financial reckonings, changing jobs, changing spouses, hormonal wackiness, scary health diagnoses, addictive behaviors becoming unwieldy, and the stirring of a growing curiosity about the meaning of life,” he writes.
But hold your horses. Conley turns all that on its head, zeroing in on the “unexpected pleasures and joys of midlife.”
Here’s what Conley recently told Yahoo Finance about why embracing midlife can make us happier and freer, edited for length and clarity:
Chip, why is it so hard for people to love midlife?
Any life stage attached to a crisis has a problem. One of the challenges is a societal message. Part of that is that early midlife is a tough period. From ages 35 to 50, what I define as early midlife, is that time when the U-curve of happiness is actually sliding to its nadir, its bottom point. And so there is truth in that. What people don’t then recognize is that from 50 on, the U-curve of happiness starts going up. And that, quite frankly, people are happier in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and sometimes 80s than they were at half that age.
You write about shifting our perspective on aging from a negative one to a positive one. Why is that so important?
Becca Levy, a researcher at Yale, found in her studies that if you shift your mindset about aging from negative to positive, you get seven and a half years of additional life. And there’s no other thing I’ve heard of including stopping smoking or starting exercise that actually has a bigger impact on your longevity.
I love your description of age fluidity. Will you elaborate?
Age fluidity is different from being ageless. Ageless suggests there’s something wrong with age. I don’t love that language because it suggests that aging is a terrible thing. And so what age fluidity says is that just like gender fluidity, you can’t pinpoint a person’s gender. Well, maybe you can’t pinpoint a person’s age such that you’re all the ages you’ve ever been, as well as all of the ages you’ll ever be. And you don’t really define yourself based upon your age or your generation.
Can you share some of your thoughts on the anti-aging industry? I can’t open Facebook without getting an ad or a promotion for somebody selling me something on anti-aging.
That’s partly because you’re a woman because anti-aging is also anti-woman. We need some pro-aging products and services, messages, and public service announcements. The reason anti-aging exists is because the industry is feeding off the fact that people have fears of aging, and it’s all about the physical side. It’s a little bit on the mental side, too, in terms of cognitive decline, but most of the focus when it comes to anti-aging is the things that are going to make you look younger.
It shouldn’t be about looking younger. It’s about feeling younger and feeling younger is okay. Looking younger is a bit of a fool’s errand especially as we get older.
You write about the spiral staircase. Elaborate just for a little bit on that?
This is sort of based upon Jane Fonda’s perspective that we get to a stage in our life where age is a staircase we’re going up to wisdom and the idea of it being a spiral because it allows us to see 360 degrees of our whole life. One of the things that’s beautiful as we get older is we have enough life experience to see the pattern recognition and to be able to sort of look below and say, oh my gosh, look at all that I’ve learned. It’s hard to do that at 25, or even at 40, but once you’re past age 50, you’re sort of getting to a place where you can see your pattern. It’s a recognition of how you’ve lived your life. You can see the narrative of your story, which allows you to have a little bit more influence on where you want to take that.
To you, the ultimate middle age skill is knowing what you want in life. Wow. That can be tricky, right?
It’s really a simple statement, but I think it’s very true. One of the primary reasons why the U curve moves up after age 50 is because people get clear on what they want and what they don’t want, the things that aren’t serving them anymore, and they want to replace those. And so knowing what you want and not what other people want of you is something around midlife that you start to get clearer on.
You started a wisdom school. That’s pretty out there. What is wisdom at its core?
First of all, wisdom is the metabolization of your life experiences — how you make sense of them. Your painful life lessons are the raw material for your future wisdom. But that’s not all. I don’t think it’s exclusively just about making sense of your life experiences because wisdom is something you share. To me, wisdom is a metabolized experience, which leads to distilled compassion.
Compassion speaks to this idea that wisdom is something you offer to other people, and you do it in a fashion that feels very almost customized for them. If you’re particularly compassionate to a person, you’re distilling down your life experience and your wisdom in a way that’s actually supporting them.
As you know, Chip, my expertise is around work and retirement issues that people grapple with. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?
Today we have more and more knowledge workers who feel like, ‘My gosh, I’m in my early 60s, I’m at my best. I feel like I’m at the top of my game. Why would I want to step away from this?’
Retirement as a word is very triggering for some people. It’s not the thing that they’re aspiring to because in some ways they have seen other people, or maybe they’ve even tried it themselves to retire, and they got bored and they felt like they lost community. They lost purpose. They lost wellness. Those are the three things that Dr. Phil Pizzo at Stanford has talked about being foundational for living a longer, better life.
We’re going to see more companies creating gradual retirement and more people who are curious and wise and productive in the workplace.
So let’s close this out by talking about that sheer joy of being a beginner again. Why is that a magic elixir at midlife?
Growing is about constantly astonishing ourselves. I like the idea of how could I astonish myself? That means that you’re actually trying things that you didn’t think you could do. One of the challenges with older life is it gets very rote and very boring. Boring because it’s just the same old, same old. And so I think that every year, you should say, ‘I will become a beginner at…’ then you fill in the blank.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a workplace futurist, a career and retirement strategist, and the author of 14 books, including “In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in The New World of Work” and “Never Too Old To Get Rich.” Follow her on X @kerryhannon.
