We have all heard it — 50 is the “new 30”, 60 is the “new 40”. Adolescence now seems to stretch on into the mid- to late-20s. And, what on Earth is “middle age” anyway? As these previously well defined life-stages become more fluid perhaps it’s time for yet another calibration.

[div class=attrib]From the Independent:[end-div]

One thing that can be said of “Middle Age” is that it’s moving further from the middle. The annual British Social Attitudes Survey suggests just a third of people in their 40s regard themselves as middle-aged, while almost a third of those in their 70s are still clinging to the label, arthritic fingers notwithstanding. In A Shed of One’s Own, his very funny new memoir of male midlife crisis and its avoidance, Marcus Berkmann reaches for a number of definitions for his time of life: “Middle age is comedy, and also tragedy,” he says. “Other people’s middle age is self-evidently ridiculous, while our own represents the collapse of all our hopes and dreams.”

He cites Denis Norden, who said: “Middle age is when, wherever you go on holiday, you pack a sweater.” And the fictional Frasier Crane, who maintains that the middle-aged “go ‘oof’ when [they] sit down on a sofa”. Shakespeare’s famous Seven Ages of Man speech, delivered by the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It, delineated the phases of human development by occupation: the schoolboy, the adolescent lover, the soldier, and the – presumably, middle-aged – legal professional. We have long defined ourselves compulsively by our stages in life; we yearn for maturity, then mourn the passing of youth. But to what extent are these stages socio-cultural (holidays/sweaters) and to what extent are they biological (sofas/”oof”)?

Patricia Cohen, New York Times reporter and author of another new study of ageing, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age, might not be overly sympathetic to Berkmann’s plight. The mid-life crisis, she suggests, is a marketing trick designed to sell cosmetics, cars and expensive foreign holidays; people in their 20s and 30s are far more vulnerable to such a crisis than their parents. Cohen finds little evidence for so-called “empty nest syndrome”, or for the widespread stereotype of the rich man with the young “trophy wife”.

She even claims that middle age itself is a “cultural fiction”, and that Americans only became neurotic about entering their 40s at the turn of the 20th century, when they started lying to census-takers about their age. Before then, “age was not an essential ingredient of one’s identity”. Rather, people were classified according to “marker events”: marriage, parenthood and so on. In 1800 the average American woman had seven children; by 1900 she had three. They were out of her hair by her early 40s and, thanks to modern medicine, she could look forward to a further 20 years or more of active life.

As Berkmann laments, “one of the most tangible symptoms of middle age is the sensation that you’re being cast adrift from mainstream culture.” Then again, the baby boomers, and the more mature members of “Generation X”, are the most powerful of economic blocs. The over-50s spend far more on consumer goods than their younger counterparts, making them particularly valuable to advertisers – and perpetuating the idea of the middle-aged as a discernible demographic.

David Bainbridge, a vet and evolutionary zoologist, also weighs in on the topic in his latest book, Middle Age: A Natural History. Middle age is an exclusively human phenomenon, Bainbridge explains, and doesn’t exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom, where infirmity often follows hot on the heels of parenthood. It is, he argues, “largely the product of millions of years of human evolution… not a 20th-century cultural invention.” He urges readers to embrace middle age as “flux, not crisis” – which is probably what he said to his wife, when he bought himself a blue vintage Lotus soon after turning 40.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Practical Financial.[end-div]