Traditionally, a midlife crisis has been associated with a person’s mature reflection on what he has managed to achieve in life. Now, however, researchers are beginning to suspect that it appears to be biologically programmed by our life cycle.
This phenomenon began to be studied in the United States and Europe, and for decades sociologists believed that the midlife crisis is a phenomenon of Western culture. It was associated with a lack of psychological support from society, which a person feels after 40 years, or with the pressure that society puts on him, promoting the cult of success. Comparing himself to an ideal model who has built a career and a family, and is cheerful and cheerful, the average person cannot help but feel like a loser.
And already in the 80s, economists at the University of Warwick, who studied the relationship between a person’s satisfaction with their work and life in general, found that the midlife crisis is a phenomenon that is weakly dependent on the country. After interviewing citizens of 55 countries of the world, they found that the inhabitants of 46 of them are undergoing a change in attitude to life strictly along the same U-shaped curve. The lowest point of this “pit” falls on average at XNUMX years.
The societies of the countries where the study was conducted were very different from each other – far from everywhere there was a cult of success, in many countries there was an extensive system of family and social ties in which a person could not feel lonely and abandoned. Cultural differences, of course, leave their mark on the “course of the disease” – citizens of advanced post-industrial countries experience a midlife crisis more acutely than residents of developing countries. And yet this difference does not obscure the universality of the phenomenon.
It is on middle-aged people that the main burden of social responsibility falls.
Psychologists have tried to explain the ubiquity of the midlife crisis through the few commonalities that exist between most of the world’s societies, despite all the differences between them. These common features are associated with the human life cycle itself.
It is on middle-aged people that the main burden of social responsibility falls – as a rule, they have school-age children who constantly make them solve dozens of problems related to their education, socialization, material support, as well as aging parents who also need to be taken care of.
Over time, this pressure weakens – children become independent, parents, alas, die. And while the feeling of loneliness may grow because of this, people feel less burdened by difficulties than before. And the feeling of oppression goes away.
There is another explanation – the U-shaped curve creates a gap between our expectations and reality. In youth, most people are maximalists: they expect a lot from life, and they have the strength and ability to achieve this. And most importantly – the hope that if not today, then in ten years they will be able to fulfill their desires.
In middle age, this hope is no longer there – a person realizes that there is no time left to realize his dreams, and this fills his existence with sadness. However, at the age of 55-60, he no longer expects much from life – and, perhaps for the first time in his life, he begins to be content with what he really has. As a result, his satisfaction with life begins to grow again.
The difference in the severity of the phenomenon between developed and developing countries can be completely explained statistically – people in developed countries usually live longer, which means they can experience a midlife crisis for the prescribed one and a half to two decades.
In impoverished countries, residents (especially men) may not live past sixty, and their U-shaped curve simply breaks off at the lowest point or on a slight rise from the bottom. In addition, the health of centenarians in developed countries is much better on average, which means that growth from the bottom point will be more pronounced – after all, health determines an important part of self-perception.
However, even these “social” explanations for the universality of the midlife crisis may not be enough. The fact is that the midlife crisis occurs not only in humans, but also in … higher monkeys.
Midlife crisis may be programmed by the biology of aging in social mammals
As ethologists have found, in chimpanzees and orangutans, it falls between about 28 and 35 years old – if we take into account the shorter life expectancy of these monkeys compared to ours, then this age approximately corresponds to our period between forty and fifty years. During this period, primates become more withdrawn, show less interest in the things they possess – in a partner, position in society, food.
This suggests that the midlife crisis may be programmed by the biology of aging in social mammals – this boundary marks their transition to an age when waning forces do not allow them to occupy the place in the community to which they are accustomed. Feeling this subconsciously, the individual begins to change his attitude towards the surrounding and former values, proceeds to the development of a new behavioral strategy.
Whether this activity will be crowned with success, in each case is determined by his character, abilities, and so on. Alas, not everyone manages to adapt – however, those who are going through a crisis and entering the time of aging begin to feel much more confident in the new status of a long-liver.