The ‘midlife crisis’ is too simple a story, scientists say

The notion of a midlife crisis is dead. Or maybe it was always bunk. Now some scientists want a postmortem for the theory.

The idea that happiness in the Western world plummets around midlife before rebounding has been around since the mid-1960s. In the late 1980s, after crunching data from well-being surveys around the globe, social scientists framed the phenomenon as quantifiable and global.

But a growing body of evidence now supports the theory’s demise. Most recently, researchers found several variants of how happiness unfolds among nonindustrialized communities in Asia, Latin America and Africa — places often neglected in the scientific literature (SN: 3/19/24).

In addition to the classic story, the team reports October 23 in Science Advances, they identified examples of midlife dips appearing years earlier than previously reported, happiness peaking in midlife (secret sauce unknown) and, mostly commonly, a steady decline in happiness starting around age 45.

The study is just the latest takedown of what social scientists call the U-curve. The idea is that on a graph of happiness levels on the y-axis and age on the x-axis, the shape of happiness forms a distinctive U. It’s been replicated hundreds of times since it first appeared in 2008.

But studies critical of the U-curve have circulated for years. They gained little traction until earlier this year when David Blanchflower, the theory’s cofounder and cheerleader, released working papers and a blog post killing it off himself. Mounting despair among teens and twentysomethings, particularly girls and women, has changed the happiness life course, says Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth College. “The U-shape curve has now all but disappeared.”

Blanchflower wants to move on. Researchers must turn their focus to teens and young adults immediately, he says. “We have a problem.… The question is: What do you do about it? We are behind the game.”

Others suggest taking a moment to reflect. The midlife crisis narrative rose out of people’s desire for simple answers to complex problems, says Nancy Galambos, a psychologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Researchers now seem to be latching onto an adolescence crisis narrative, she says, and asks, “Are we still on the wrong track of trying to find a single trajectory?”

Overly simplistic theories can cause real harm, says psychologist Margie Lachman of Brandeis University in Boston. “The U shape … really takes you away from thinking about what is going on at other age groups.”

Blanchflower and economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England confirmed the longstanding hunch that happiness plummets in midlife with their 2008 publication showing that populations across over 70 countries followed similar U-shaped happiness trends.

The idea gained more steam after a report in 2012 showed that even great apes get the midlife blues, which hinted at a biological explanation for the phenomenon.

Yet critics have long questioned the popular theory. Perhaps the U-curve is a statistical artifact caused by efforts to study a “‘pure’ effect of aging,” sociologist David Bartram wrote in February in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Researchers tend to control for, or hold constant, variables that interfere with happiness, such as divorce or health problems, says Bartram, of the University of Leicester in England. “If you want the results to describe everyone, you have to allow bad things to happen in old age.” 

Or perhaps the finding is unique to the cohort that hit midlife during the Great Recession. For instance, researchers involved with a study called Midlife in the United States have interviewed people about their health and well-being since the mid-1990s. Participants who were middle-aged during the 2011 wave of data collection, which coincided with the height of the recession, were worse off than middle-aged people in the original cohort, says Lachman, a project investigator. Timing matters.

A similar cohort effect now seems plausible for those whose adolescent years coincided with the arrival of smartphones and social media, Lachman says. The pandemic solidified that cohort’s shift to an online social world.

But Blanchflower counters that the roughly 600 papers showing the U-curve cannot all be wrong. “How are you going to argue there [wasn’t] one?” Instead, he contends that the typical arc of happiness across a lifespan has itself changed, putting the world in uncharted territory.

He acknowledges that a singular focus on the U-shaped happiness curve distracted him from the adolescent mental health crisis. “These changes that started around 2013,” he says. “We’ve missed them because we were looking elsewhere.”

Despair among adolescents is deeply troubling, Lachman says, but shifting from a midlife to an adolescent crisis narrative doesn’t make sense. People in midlife aren’t doing better than before, she says, adolescents are just doing worse. “Young people who are suffering right now … depend on people in middle age. It’s their parents and their teachers. Those young people need people in midlife to be in good mental health.”