In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age

"This is a cultural history of the idea of middle age as a distinctive phase of life: the idea of there being particular challenges associated with being at midlife. Cohen traces this idea to the late 19th century, at which point – as she tells the story – it wasn’t associated with trauma or crisis. In fact, it was often associated with having reached full competence and full mastery of your life. It’s through the early 20th century that the idea of midlife as distinctively challenging or problematic slowly begins to emerge. I don’t know. When I was writing my book, I found that people will reach back pretty far for examples of the midlife crisis. People will point to Dante in the dark wood. There’s even a book by a psychoanalyst that uses Odysseus as an example of a midlife crisis: infidelity, drinking, and waywardness that eventually get resolved when he comes home. So, it’s very unclear how far back the phenomenon of struggling with midlife goes. The conceptualisation of middle age as a distinctive phase and problem is relatively recent, but that doesn’t tell us how far back the actual phenomenon went. She’s a journalist who is drawing on work by historians and social scientists. Part of what’s fascinating about the way she tells this story is that there’s a connection between the idea of midlife as particularly problematic and the increasing mechanisation of the workforce, along with the influence of efficiency experts like G Stanley Hall who went into factories and businesses and emphasised how to maximise productivity. “My attitude to the Socratic edict that the unexamined life is not worth living has always been sceptical. There are plenty of people I know who are not interested in philosophy or philosophical reflection who seem to be doing much better than many of my philosopher friends.” That connects with a focus on youthful energy and vitality and stamina and therefore generates the beginnings of the idea that by the time you’re forty you might be over the hill. You’re going to be competing with younger people who have the driving energy to push you out. And then we hit the Depression and middle-aged unemployment becomes a social problem in the US. Those factors together work to generate the problematisation of middle age. You’re absolutely right that the initial anxiety about being outmoded comes out of blue collar labour. It’s not associated with the busy executive who has an affair at midlife, but with the unemployment of people doing factory work who are being replaced with younger and more efficient workers. The further extension of the anxiety of being over the hill to white collar workers comes later in the history, as Cohen tells it. She doesn’t exactly have a treatment. Her book is not self-help but cultural history. Still, one of its strategies is to take an idea that’s come to seem natural and inevitable and use the fact that it has a relatively recent history to destabilise it and dislodge the sense of inevitability. We have the idea that midlife is a period of malaise, but that’s not how it’s always been perceived. Exactly. It is not so much debunking the idea of the midlife crisis as arguing that it is culturally specific and therefore not inevitable. It might be possible to recover earlier conceptualisations of middle age or midlife that are less debilitating. One of the things that Cohen does is to trace the work that’s been used to push against the stereotype of midlife as a time of great difficulty. The interesting fact about the timing of her book is that it came out in 2012, just when the research about the U-curve was being published but wasn’t really yet publicised. The social science that she’s picking up is an earlier cycle of studies by the MacArthur Network on Successful Midlife Development in the US. This was research that was happening in the 90s and was published around 2000 and it was very optimistic about midlife as a time of competence and life satisfaction. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One of the things that Cohen is pushing for is not so much a therapeutic angle but evidence that maybe middle age is not as bad as the stereotype of the crisis suggests. As I said, this comes before the U-curve research, so the history of the idea of the midlife crisis has been an up and down thing. It first catches on, then the social scientists debunk it, and then the economists come back and say, ‘Well, actually, we have all this data which suggests that there is some kind of pervasive challenge here.’ I think she is responding to the evidence she had. But it’s true that the research that has been done more recently, assuming the U-curve holds up, suggests that there is something to the idea of midlife as a period of particular difficulty for people. And so there is a challenge to confront. Even if it is culturally specific, it’s not just a cultural construction in the sense that it’s just a way of thinking that we could debunk and get rid of. It corresponds to something that is really happening to people."