Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.
Jean de La Fontaine
Harvard Study Questionnaire, 1975
Can you tell us the life issues that have faced you after age 50 that did not seem so important when you were younger? How have you tried to master these issues?
As Wes Travers was approaching his 60s, he found himself in a reflective mood. Looking back on his life, he was trying to square his past experiences with the man he was now. How did he get to this place? What events were pivotal? One event in particular kept coming back to him, though he had only the barest memory of it: when he was seven years old his father packed a small bag, walked out the front door of the family’s third-floor tenement apartment in the West End of Boston, and never came back. Wes, his mother, and his three siblings had no idea how they would make a living without him, but they also felt a certain relief. When each child was a toddler, their father was gentle and attentive. But as they grew, he changed. He became violent and short-tempered and often brutally beat the older children, sometimes until they bled. He came home drunk in the middle of the night. He was unfaithful to Wes’s mother. After he left, a new and welcome peace settled in the home. But so did a new set of struggles and financial responsibilities for the children, who were plunged into adult worries way too soon. His father’s absence affected everything about Wes’s formative years.
“I wonder what my life would have been like if he’d stuck around,” Wes told the Study later. “I don’t know if it would have been better or worse, but I think about it.”
When the Harvard Study met Wes at the age of 14, his life had already been a long sequence of challenges. His posture was a little stooped, and he suffered from strabismus, a condition that caused one of his eyes to wander. Because of his shyness and difficulty putting his thoughts into words, he struggled to tell the Harvard Study exactly what his life was like, but he managed to provide a basic picture. School was difficult for him. He couldn’t focus, he daydreamed, and he got bad grades in just about every subject. When asked, What’s your ambition in life? Wes said, “To be a cook.”
Like most of us at that age (or really any age), Wes had a hard time seeing beyond his present experience. Overwhelmed by his current troubles, he had no plans and little hope for his future. But the road he would take was not yet decided. If we could go back now and show his teen self what was to come, he would be very surprised how his life turned out. As we’ll see, it was not at all as he expected.
One of the advantages of a lifetime-spanning longitudinal study is that it can be used to map the entire road a person took over the course of their life. This allows events and challenges to be seen in the flow of everything that came before and after. We can trace the lefts and rights, the dead ends, the hills and valleys, and get a sense of the longer journey. Not just what happened, but how one thing may have led to another, and why. There is a storylike quality to these kinds of records. It’s hard to read them and not feel something for the participants. Which is as it should be; first and foremost these are records of personal adventures in being human. When these adventures are combined with hundreds of others and translated carefully into numbers, however, they become the raw material of science, revealing not just lives, but patterns of life.
If you were to place your life’s timeline alongside the timelines of everyone else reading this book, a set of patterns similar to those of the Harvard Study participants would emerge. Your life would be unique in some of its specifics, as would everyone’s, but striking similarities would emerge across gender, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic background. Wes had an abusive father, but for you it might have been tensions in your parents’ marriage that left you feeling deep anxiety, or a learning disability that led to bullying and fear at school. These shared human experiences and repeating patterns of life remind us that regardless of how solitary our own struggles and challenges feel in the moment, there are others who have gone through similar things in the past, and others going through them at this very moment. In this way, the outwardly emotionless material of science can have a very moving effect: it can remind us that we are not alone.
And of course, the other thing we all share is the ever-changing nature of our lives, and even of ourselves. Often these changes are so gradual that we can’t see them. Our perception is that we are like an unchanging rock in a stream as the world flows around us. But that perception is mistaken. We are forever changing from what we are into what we will be.
This chapter is about taking a bird’s-eye view of these patterns, and that winding path of change. Stepping back and considering the big picture illuminates aspects of our own experience—how we are changing and what we can expect—and also what others are going through. Life looks different at age 20 than it does at age 50 or age 80. That old aphorism, “Where you stand depends on where you sit,” is apt. How we see the world depends on our vantage point.
This is a first, basic step that we use as therapists and interviewers when we’re getting to know someone. If we sit down with a person, and they are 35, we have a few good guesses about which twists and turns have passed for them, and which might still be ahead. Nobody fits the model perfectly. Life is too interesting for that. But by considering a person’s stage in life, we can jump-start the process of understanding their experience. The same effort is useful for any person in your life, and even for yourself. Knowing that you’re not alone, that there are predictable challenges that many people face, makes living ever-so-slightly easier.
When we asked Study participants what they thought was most valuable about taking part in an eighty-year study, many of them said that it gave them an opportunity to take stock of their life at regular intervals. Wes was one of these participants. He mentioned more than once that devoting a few moments to reflect on how he felt and what his life was like helped him to appreciate what he already had, and to see what he wanted. The good news is that you don’t need to be part of a study to do this. It only takes a little effort and a little self-reflection. We hope this chapter will point the way.
If you’ve ever seen a picture of your mother or father as a young adult, you know how startling it can be. They seem like people we might have met along the road rather than the parents who created us. They often appear less burdened, more carefree, and somehow… different. Pictures of ourselves at a younger age can be even more startling. We might look at our younger selves and feel a sweet nostalgia, or maybe a sense of wistfulness, as we’re confronted with our physical changes, our abandoned dreams, our once treasured beliefs. For others, like Wes, looking back at a younger age reminds one of sorrows and challenges that are difficult to revisit.
These impressions point to areas of our lives that are important to us, and they can be turned into something helpful using a simple but powerful exercise we developed for our Lifespan Research Foundation (www.lifespanresearch.org). This involves a bit of personal research, but if you’re game, come play along.
Find a photograph of yourself when you were about half as old as you are now. If you’re under 35, go back to the time you were starting adult life. Really, any photo from when you were a lot younger will do. Don’t just imagine that time, try to find an actual photo. The lively reality of a photograph, the details of the place and time, the expression on your face, all help evoke the feelings that make this exercise worthwhile.
Now take a close look at yourself in that photograph. After you stop wondering why you were so into brown clothes, or marveling at your weight or your once luxurious hair, try to place yourself back in the moment when the picture was taken. Really look: spend several minutes (a long time!) just taking it in and remembering that era of your life. What were you thinking about back then? What were you worried about? What were you hopeful about? What were your plans? Who were you spending time with? What was most important to you? And perhaps the most difficult question to face: When you think of yourself at that time, what do you regret?
It helps to put your answers to these questions into words. Jot down a few notes, be as detailed as you like. If you have somebody close to you who’s curious about this book you’re reading, consider asking them to find a photograph of themselves and to do this with you. (As longitudinal researchers, we suggest that if you have a printed photo, consider using it as a bookmark, and when you’re finished, leaving it here in this book, along with your notes. Someone you know might get something out of it in the future as they try the exercise themselves; these records of our loved ones’ past lives and thoughts are rare, and valuable.)
The Harvard Study is by no means the first effort to extract useful data from lifetimes of human experiences. For millennia people have been trying to unlock the secrets of human life by looking at its patterns, and they have analyzed these patterns in all kinds of ways, often by categorizing them into stages.
The Greeks had various versions of life’s stages. Aristotle described three. Hippocrates, seven. By the time Shakespeare wrote about the “seven ages of man” in his famous “all the world’s a stage” soliloquy in As You Like It, the idea of life happening in stages was likely familiar to his audience. Shakespeare himself probably learned them in grammar school.
Islamic teachings also mention seven stages of existence. Buddhist teachings illustrate the ten stages along the path to enlightenment using the metaphor of ox herding. Hinduism identifies four stages of life, or Ashramas, and these echo many modern psychological life stage theories: the student, who learns about the world, the householder, who develops a calling and takes care of his or her family, the retiree, who retreats from family life, and the ascetic, who commits to the pursuit of greater spirituality.
Science has its own perspectives on the biological and psychological development of the human being. But for a very long time, science focused almost entirely on early childhood development. Until recently, psychological textbooks had only short sections on the development of adults. Once someone reached adulthood, the thinking went, that person was fully formed; the only important change was that of decline, both physical and mental.
In the 1960s and 1970s, this perspective began to change. George Vaillant, the director of the Harvard Study from 1972 to 2004, was one of many scientists who began to see adulthood as a period of important flux and opportunity. It’s hard to look at the Harvard Study’s longitudinal data and come to any other conclusion. There were also new discoveries about the “plasticity” of the human brain showing that decreased brain volume and declining brain function are not the only changes adults experience with age; positive changes also unfold throughout the lifespan.
In short, the most recent science shows that no matter where you are in your life, you are changing, and not just for the worse; positive change is possible.
We find two perspectives particularly helpful in making sense of the life cycle. The first, introduced by Erik and Joan Erikson, framed adult development as a series of key challenges that we all face as we grow older. The second is a theory by Bernice Neugarten about the social and cultural expectations around the timing of the events in our lives.
The Eriksons identified life stages based on cognitive, biological, social, and psychological challenges, and they framed these as crises; we either do or we don’t meet a particular challenge successfully. And at every point in life we encounter at least one and often more than one of these challenges. For example, in young adulthood we are faced with the challenge of establishing intimacy or becoming isolated. During this period, we find ourselves asking, Will I find someone to love or will I remain alone? In midlife we are faced with the challenge of establishing a sense of generativity or feeling a sense of stagnation (Will I be creative and contribute to the development of the next generation, or will I be stuck in a self-centered rut?). These “Eriksonian” stages have been used by psychologists and therapists for decades to put life’s hurdles into a useful context.
Bernice Neugarten, another pioneer in the study of how adults change, has a different take. Rather than defining life completely by a “development clock,” Neugarten has argued that society and culture shape development in important ways. Our upbringing and influences (friends, news, social media, movies) create an informal “social clock” or schedule of events that are supposed to occur at specific times in our lives. Social clocks differ from culture to culture, and from generation to generation. Key events like leaving one’s childhood home, entering into a committed, long-term relationship, and having children each have their own cultural value and places in the timeline, and we experience these important events as either “on-time” or “off-time,” based on whether we think we’re meeting society’s expectations. Many who identify as LGBTQ+ experience themselves as “off-time,” because some of the events used as markers reflect traditional heterosexual lifestyles. Neugarten said that she was herself “off-time” in important ways. She married early and began her professional career late. In her theory, “on-time” events help us feel that our lives are on track, and “off-time” events create worry that we’re not on track. We worry not because off-time events are inherently stressful, but because they don’t fit others’ (and our own) expectations.
These two ideas—life as a sequence of challenges, and variation in the cultural importance of events and their timing—go a long way toward explaining how we feel about ourselves, and how we engage with the world at different points in our lives.
But there is another way to look at the winding road of life: through the lens of our relationships. Because human life is essentially social, when major changes deeply affect us, our relationships are usually a central element of what’s in flux. When a teenager moves away from home, what is it that produces most of the powerful feelings involved: living in a new place, or making new friendships and being away from parents? When two people marry, is it the ceremony, the event, or the bond that changes their lives? As we develop and change over time, it is our relationships that most often reflect back to us who we really are, and how far we’ve come on our life path.
A good life requires growth and change. This change is not an automatic process that occurs as we age. What we experience, what we endure, and what we do all affect the trajectory of growth. Relationships are a central player in this growth process. Other people challenge and enrich us. With new relationships come new expectations, new troubles, new hills to climb, and often we’re not “ready.” Very few people, for example, are ever perfectly ready to become a parent. But becoming a parent, and being responsible for a tiny human being, has a way of making most of us ready. It pushes us. Somehow we live up to what we have to do, relationship by relationship, stage by stage, and in the process, we change. We grow.
What follows is a short roadmap of these life stages, as seen through the relationships that make them what they are. Compared to the vast literature available on the human life cycle, this is like a map drawn on a napkin. If you find it helpful, you can explore the references we’ve put in the notes at the back of the book, and take an even deeper dive. You might recognize yourself and some of your own challenges in what follows, and some of it might not apply at all; that’s the case for everyone. But even if you don’t recognize yourself at every stage, you might recognize people you know and love.
ADOLESCENCE (12–19): Walking the Tightrope
Let’s start with that infamous life stage, the teenage years. This is a time of rapid growth but also of contradiction and confusion. An adolescent’s life burns with intensity as they ascend into adulthood. If we have teenagers in our lives, their path from childhood to adult life can seem precarious—for them and for us. Richard Bromfield captured the feeling of loving a teenager well when he described the “tightropes” that they string for their parents and the people around them. A teenager needs us to:
Hold but don’t baby;
admire but don’t embarrass;
guide but don’t control;
release but don’t abandon.
However unstable this stage might feel to the people around them, it feels even more precarious for teens themselves. They need to accomplish some big tasks as they move toward adulthood, chief among them figuring out their own identity. This involves experimenting with new kinds of relationships and changing existing relationships, sometimes dramatically. Through their encounters with others, teenagers develop new views of themselves, the world, and other people.
From the inside, adolescence feels both exciting and scary. Possibilities abound, but so do anxieties as teenagers find themselves confronted with profound questions like:
At some point in the teen years, parental figures usually fall off their pedestals and become ordinary (sometimes boring) adults. This creates a temporary vacuum in the role model department. Parental figures remain necessary for support (food, rides, money), but the real action is with friendships, which are exciting, if sometimes volatile, and can involve new levels of connection and intimacy. The question, “Who am I?” is central, and teenagers often find themselves discovering who they are together, trying on new ways of being that include everything from styles of clothing to political beliefs to gender identity. For many people, close friends are never as central as they are when we’re teenagers.
From the outside, adolescence can look like a bundle of contradictions. To a middle-aged parent, it may look like Invasion of the Body Snatchers—that once adorable and adoring child is now a moody teen who is at one moment childlike and clingy and in the next moment a disdainful know-it-all. The clever title of Anthony Wolf’s popular parenting book sums up a parental perspective on this period: Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? Grandparents who watched this transition in their own children might have a different perspective. To them, this same teenager may represent the joyous future of the world, and the grandchild’s shifting sense of self may seem like necessary experimentation.
All of these perspectives make sense. Just as the scenery changes on a long road trip, when you look out at the world, what you see depends on where you are in the life cycle. Taking another person’s life perspective into account, taking it to heart, is a skill that we can learn. It requires some imagination and some effort, especially in the face of frustration. But it can help us to spend less time complaining and criticizing and wishing that someone else were different, and more time connecting and nurturing.
If you are the parents, grandparents, mentor, teacher, coach, or role model of an adolescent, you might be asking: How can I best support them, even as they seem to want to be independent? What kinds of things can we do to help them emerge from this period stronger and ready for adult life? And how can I survive their adolescence myself?
First, don’t be fooled by signals of teenage bravado and claims about self-sufficiency. Teens need you. Some teens will show this by being clingy, but others may insist that they don’t need anyone. Of course, they do. In fact, a teen’s relationships with adults may be more crucial than at any other time in life. Research tells us that there are advantages for adolescents who become more autonomous while still remaining connected to their parents.
One participant in the Student Council Study (the longitudinal research linked to the Harvard Study conducted with graduates of three colleges in the Northeast) was able to look back as an adult and see the emotional puzzle of her teen years more clearly. After she’d become a mother of four herself, she reflected on the way her perspective of her mother had changed, and told researchers:
There is that standard joke of Mark Twain’s about how much his father learned between the time the boy was fifteen and twenty. It’s that way with me and my mother. But of course the change was in me, not in her. For a long time, I sort of clung. I was very anxious when my mother was around, mainly, I guess, because I was afraid she was going to be living my life for me instead of letting me be myself. Now I sort of realize how perfectly marvelous she is.
Presence matters. The adults an adolescent interacts with as well as the cultural figures in today’s saturated media environment provide models for what life is, and what it can be. So the availability of in-person, real-time role models is extremely important. Life may be taking place increasingly online (more on that in Chapter Five), but physical presence still really matters. The template for how an adolescent imagines life is heavily influenced by peers, teachers, coaches, parents, the parents of friends (an underappreciated group of role models), and—as in Wes Travers’s case—older siblings.
Seven years after his father left, Wes Travers became a participant in the Harvard Study, at the age of 14. When asked in what way the kids’ father influenced their lives now that he no longer lived with them, Wes’s mother said that the children’s father had no interest in any of them, and the feeling was mutual. While his absence strained the household in material ways, it also brought the family closer together. In lieu of a father, the children now looked after each other, each contributing to the household income—an average of $13.68 per person, per week—and sometimes chipping in extra to buy one sibling a needed pair of shoes or a coat or a book bag. As the youngest child, and being somewhat meek, Wes had been cared for by the others and protected from having to get a job. They wanted him to go to school instead. In this way, they were remembering themselves at that stage of life—remembering how they felt having to go to work too early in life. They were trying to give Wes the opportunity to have a longer childhood. His older sister, Violet, worked as a nanny and gave Wes spending money to use however he wanted. Each year he looked forward to summer camp, which his older siblings all saved up to pay for. That’s what kept him out of trouble, he told the Study, since among the boys he knew, living in Boston in the summertime meant getting into trouble, plain and simple. He looked up to his older brother, a hard worker who, Wes said, “didn’t curse in the house” and set a good example for him. An interviewer’s handwritten note from the Study’s first conversation with the family, in 1945, captures the special place that Wes had in the Travers household:
“Sister Violet said that when Wesley returned home unexpectedly from camp one day, her eyes filled with tears, she was so happy.”
But Wes’s siblings couldn’t protect him forever. When he was 15, only one year after the Harvard Study first visited him, he had to drop out of high school to help support the family. For the next four years he worked as a dishwasher and busboy in various restaurants, had no consistent friends his age, and spent most of his free time at home. His search to be someone, to be something, had been diverted before it really began. Later he would tell the Study, “Those were hard years. I felt like nothing.”
Wes went from being a somewhat sheltered child to being plunged headlong into adult responsibility, working long hours with very little recreation. This meant that he was deprived of many key developmental adolescent experiences. He had to forge his way through days taken up by a menial job, and as happens for many children in challenging circumstances, he had to kick some developmental tasks down the road—tasks like making close friends, figuring out his identity, and learning how to connect with others in more intimate ways. He had a low sense of self-worth and life offered him few opportunities to explore who he was.
Then, when he was 19, the United States entered the Korean War. Unsure of what his life would become, and seeing no future for himself in Boston, Wes did something many of the men in the Harvard Study did: he joined the military. This was both a way out of his adolescence and a way in to friendships with other young men his age from other walks of life—a new experience for Wes. This gave him more of an opportunity to explore new roles and to ponder what he wanted out of life. After what had seemed like an endless period of toil, Wes had entered into a new era of development—his young adulthood.
YOUNG ADULTHOOD (20–40): Weaving Your Own Safety Net
Peggy Keane, Second Generation Study participant, age 53:
I was 26 years old and engaged to one of the nicest men on the planet. I felt completely adored and loved. As the wedding date grew closer, I felt panicked and knew, in my gut and heart, that I should not be getting married. The truth was, I knew I was gay. The plans and my own fear of that reality prevented me from speaking up. Immediately following the wedding, I quickly began to shut down. I looked for reasons to blame it on my husband, reasons why this marriage would not work. In a matter of months, divorce papers were filed. This whole event is a low point. Not because I came to terms with being gay, but because I caused this incredible man a great deal of pain. I caused my family such grief. I felt completely embarrassed. Again, not about being gay, but for not figuring out who I was sooner and for all the grief I caused two families and so many friends who supported our relationship and traveled from so far to celebrate this wedding.
This was a lonely experience for Peggy in the early years of her young adulthood. Her parents, Henry and Rosa, whom we met in Chapter One, were devout Catholics, and this event strained her relationship with them to its limit. She felt lost and isolated.
If adolescence is the first time we begin asking Who am I?, then young adulthood is the time potential answers to that question are really put to the test. We typically become more independent from our family of origin, and this means creating new bonds to fill that vacuum. Work and financial independence become central, and the habits we acquire around balancing work and life can stay with us the rest of our lives. Knitting all of this together is the desire and need for intimate attachments that aren’t just about romance, but about sharing life and responsibilities with someone we know we can lean on.
From the outside, young adults can appear to members of their family of origin as detached from family relationships as they focus on work and seek to build emotional intimacy with romantic partners as well as families of their own. Parents might look at their children in this stage and mistake this new focus for a lack of caring, or selfishness. Someone in late life might look at a young adult with envy, and maybe even a little pity that young people are overstressed and can’t see the beauty and possibilities of the time and choices they have. Youth is wasted on the young, as the saying goes.
From the inside, young adulthood can provoke anxiety as we become responsible for ourselves, while at the same time our path in life is uncertain. Young adults can also experience intense feelings of loneliness. For a young adult struggling to find meaningful work, to find friends and a connection to a larger community, or to find love, seeing others succeed in these efforts can be painful.
Young adults often ask themselves questions like:
Two of the great sources of excitement in young adulthood—becoming more self-sufficient and getting ahead in the world—can also be traps. To be sure, accomplishing personal goals or career milestones is enlivening and builds confidence, but it’s easy to get so wrapped up in the pursuit of achievement that equally enlivening personal relationships fall by the wayside.
The drive for self-sufficiency can turn into social isolation. Close friendships really matter in young adulthood. Even one good friend who understands what we’re going through, someone we can confide in and who can help us blow off steam, can make a big difference in our lives. Family still matters, though there’s great variation around the world in how young adults relate to their families of origin. In many countries in Asia and Latin America, young adults often continue living with parents until and even after marriage. By contrast, young adults in the United States often find themselves living hundreds or thousands of miles away from their childhood homes. Physical separation isn’t necessarily a negative, but keeping parents and siblings in our emotional loop can ease the trials of young adulthood, and give us confidence to take risks.
And finally, romantic relationships and committed intimacy give us a new feeling of home and provide an important haven of confiding and trust.
When a Harvard Study interviewer tried to contact Wes in his mid-20s, he was nowhere to be found. When the Study caught up to his mother, who was still living in the same Boston tenement, she told the Study interviewer that after serving in the Korean War, Wes was recruited to work in some kind of government organization and was living overseas. The interviewer was, at first, suspicious.
“Mother claims Wes is doing work for the government overseas,” the interviewer wrote in his field notes. “Difficult to know if this is something Wes made up to cover his absence, or if he really is working for the government. I would guess the former.”
Wes was, in fact, hired by the U.S. government to help train foreign armies after his service in the war, and worked all over the world, from Western Europe to Latin America. He returned from his duties when he was 29 years old with an entirely different perspective on life, culture, and the world in general. According to his sister, Wes “saved every penny” while he was working internationally and was fortunate to have some military benefits and few financial pressures when he came back to the States. He was able to buy a house for his mother, and moved her out of the tenement their family had lived in his entire life.
Wes was handy and capable with house repairs, so he started helping friends and neighbors with various projects for a little extra money.
He was single at that time, dating no one in particular, and told the Study interviewers that he was not inclined to get married. This is an inflection point for many young adults: Do I want to commit myself to another person? Am I ready? We know from later records that Wes was feeling nervous about close commitments. He had his parents’ difficult marriage in mind, and he’d also watched his older siblings’ marriages encounter serious challenges, so he made a conscious decision to avoid romantic attachments. He spent most of his time fixing up the house he’d bought for his mother.
Wes had had a challenging adolescence, but he was now well on his way in the world. He was propelled into adult responsibilities at a young age, joined the military to escape, had lived his 20s entirely in other countries. Now that he was back, he was, in a way, navigating adolescent and early adult challenges he had never fully faced. He pursued things to see if they would be of interest to him; some were, some weren’t. He joined a softball team, a woodworking club, and met new friends. To observers he was certainly “off-time” and seemed uncertain of his path in life. But in his own way, he was taking on important developmental tasks and challenges. He was living life at his own pace.
As Wes’s case shows, the challenges of adolescence don’t necessarily end at a certain age. Just because you turn 18 or 25 or even 30 doesn’t mean that you are finished with the developmental tasks associated with the teenage years, and that your transition to adulthood is now complete. The effort to make one’s own way in the world continues, and some important emotional or career developments can get postponed as other things take priority. This timing is a little different for everyone, and as society changes, the paths through young adulthood have become more and more varied—there are all kinds of possibilities, and all kinds of dangers.
In modern times, particularly in societies that are relatively well-off, there is a kind of extended adolescence that often continues through the 20s. Jeffrey Arnett has labeled this period “emerging adulthood,” in which young adults may remain largely dependent on their parents, casting around for their place in the world. The development of some young adults seems to stall during this time, as they never venture very far out from under the wings of their parents.
The path to responsible adulthood has become very complicated, and navigating it is not easy.
In Spain there is a group of young adults called the NiNi generation (ni estudia, ni trabaja: “they don’t study; they don’t work”), who live at home. In the U.K. and other countries, there is an actual public policy designation for this subset of the population: NEETs (not in education, employment, or training).
In Japan, there is the even more concerning phenomenon of hikikomori, which translates roughly to “pulling inward” or “being confined.” This is a slightly different issue, more common in young men than young women, that combines the inactivity of NiNis and NEETs with arrested psychological and social development, an intense social aversion, and sometimes internet addiction through gaming and social media platforms.
In the United States the phenomenon is not so ubiquitous that there is a popular name for it, but young adults do continue to live with parents in considerable numbers and many are struggling to identify a path forward in their lives. In 2015, one third of U.S. adults aged 18–34 lived with their parents, and about one quarter of those, or 2.2 million young adults, were neither attending school nor working.
These young men and women are not living independently, and this can hamper their ability to see themselves as competent adults. A dramatic and compounding effect on intimate relationships often follows as an increasing dependency on parents further stifles the development of self-confidence. But it’s not always their fault. The modern economy is unforgiving. Even young adults who go to college and train for a particular profession might emerge with large debts and no assets into an economy that doesn’t need them. Parents often provide the safety net.
This is mainly a phenomenon in developed nations and within wealthy groups. By contrast, in developing nations and in less advantaged groups in developed countries, children may begin working and supporting their family at 15 or even younger, just as Wes Travers had done.
While Wes had delayed some of the tasks of adolescent development into his later years, he was quite far ahead of his peers in establishing competency. He joined the military at 19 and pursued difficult training, earned promotions, and parachuted into enemy territory. This once shy child developed skills as a young adult that bolstered his self-confidence. Normally humble and self-deprecating, he uncharacteristically boasted to the Study at age 34: “You could drop me in any environment anywhere in the world and I believe I could survive, and thrive.” When he returned to the States he was unafraid of attempting any hands-on task. He taught himself carpentry and built his own house. The house he bought for his mother and sister with his earnings gave him a feeling of purpose and pride; he was returning some of the care they gave him in the way he knew how.
In general, as young adults we are trying to figure out how to establish ourselves in the two big domains of life—work and family. Some people manage to develop competence in both work and family spheres simultaneously, others flourish more in one sphere.
Finding this balance is a developmental challenge, and the possible solutions have varied across gender. Wes’s family is a good example. When he came out of the military, he moved into adulthood with the affection and support of his sister and mother; with this foundation and the right circumstances, his sense of competence blossomed. But in the 1950s and 1960s, the same type of support and encouragement was not available to his sister. Even in the twenty-first century, gender-based norms continue to shape young adult development, both in work and family life. Despite advances, women in many cultures still carry much of the burden of duties around children and the home. This unbalanced division of labor may slow or even hinder young women’s development and realization of goals, while allowing men greater freedom to pursue career development.
Although Wes had the support of his sister and mother, he had no significant intimate relationships through his young adulthood. He had come a long way in his sense of competency and control, and he had developed a lot of casual friendships and an active social life. However, the records show some reluctance, uncertainty, and loneliness in Wes’s romantic life. He had no one to confide in, no one to share his days with. Although others might not feel the need for romance in their lives, Wes felt the absence of romance as a major void, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He could build a house, but he couldn’t figure out how to build a home.
MIDLIFE (41–65): Stepping Beyond the Self
1964 Harvard Study Questionnaire for John Marsden, age 43:
Q: Please use the last page(s) to answer all the questions we should have asked, if we’d asked about the things that matter most to you.
A:
At some point in life we realize that we’re no longer young. The generation before us is growing old and we can see (and feel) the beginnings of that same process in our own bodies. If we have children, our roles in their lives are changing as they become their own people, and we worry about what their future will bring. Friendships—so important in adolescence and young adulthood—may take a backseat to responsibilities. We may be proud of our accomplishments and happy with where we are in some ways, and in other ways wish we’d done things differently. Our lives seem to be shedding some of the possibilities they once had. At the same time, we’ve learned a great deal, and many of us would not choose to go back.
From the outside, the middle years often look stable and predictable. To younger generations, even boring. To older adults looking back, midlife might look like the prime of life—the best mix of wisdom and vitality. These are flip sides of the same perception; when we look at a person in middle age who has steady work, a routine, a partner and a family, we often think, This person really has it together, they’re in control. Middle-aged adults often look at their peers this way. But the struggles of midlife aren’t always visible for others to see.
From the inside, midlife can feel different than it looks. We may have a stable work and home life, and have pride in those things, but also feel more stressed than ever, overwhelmed with responsibilities and worry. Raising children, taking care of aging parents, and juggling the tasks of home and work, middle-aged adults often find neither the opportunity nor the energy to reach out and share their worries with others. The stability and routine that some of us find in midlife will feel like safety and security to one person—I’ve established myself and built a life—but to another like stagnation. We may look at how we got here and wonder if we’ve chosen the right path (What would have happened if only…?). And then of course, as John Marsden’s response to the questionnaire above makes clear, at some point we begin to understand on a visceral level that our life is short. In fact, it’s probably more than half over. This is a bracing realization, to say the least.
Around the middle of our lives, it’s common to ask questions like:
Finally, realizing that a lot of life is behind us, we might look around at our lives, see the limits of our abilities and the likely conclusion of the path we are on, and think, Is this all there is?
The simple answer is no. There is more. Midlife is an inflection point, not only between young and old, but also between the self-focused, inward-looking way of living that many of us developed in young adulthood and a more generous, outward-looking way of living. This is the most important and enlivening task of midlife: to expand one’s focus to the world beyond the self.
In psychology, expanding our concerns and efforts beyond our own lives is called “generativity” and it’s a key to unlocking the vibrancy and excitement of midlife. Among Harvard Study participants, the happiest and most satisfied adults were those who managed to turn the question “What can I do for myself?” into “What can I do for the world beyond me?”
John F. Kennedy—himself a Harvard Study participant—came to understand this well in his own midlife. He offered not just political, but emotional and developmental guidance when, as president, he said, famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
When asked at the end of their lives, “What do you wish you’d done less of? What do you wish you’d done more of?” our Study participants, male and female, often referenced their middle years, and regretted having spent so much time worrying and so little time acting in a way that made them feel alive:
“I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time.”
“I wish I hadn’t procrastinated so much.”
“I wish I hadn’t worried so much.”
“I wish I’d spent more time with my family.”
One participant quipped: “Well I didn’t do much of anything so less would be nothing!” Many of these answers were given when participants were in their 70s and 80s, looking back on their lives. But we don’t need to wait till then to ask ourselves how we can best spend our time.
Relationships are the vehicle that will allow us both to improve our lives and to build things that will outlive us. If we manage to do this in meaningful ways, the question Is this all there is? will be reserved for those times we pull out the last quart of ice cream and it feels far too light.
At 40 Wes Travers had not yet married. In the late 1960s in Boston, this was unusual, or what Bernice Neugarten would have called “off-time.” When he was 36 he’d started dating a woman named Amy who was divorced and had a three-year-old son. He helped raise the child, but he and Amy never tied the knot. They now lived together in an apartment in the South End.
Wes had applied to the Boston Police Department, and after several years of waiting for a position, was finally accepted.
This proved to be an extremely positive experience for him. He got along well with his colleagues and was particularly suited to the environment. He now knew people all over Boston, and said he had one of the slower heartbeats on the force, so in any tense situation he thought of his role as the peacekeeper—keeping everyone calm.
When Wes was 44 years old he asked Amy to marry him.
Several years later, when a Study interviewer visited Wes for an interview, she asked him about Amy, and recorded his response in her notes. The passage is worth quoting at length:
Amy, Mr. Travers’ wife, is 37 years old and they were married in 1971. She is a Baptist and a college graduate. Mr. Travers described his wife as “great—a terrific person,” and indicated that he really meant this; it was not something he was just putting on.
He described the characteristics that most pleased him about his wife as “she is a gentle and compassionate person.” He said he likes everything about her; that there is something about her personality that he liked right away that has never gone away. He said she is the kind of person who will be very sympathetic toward those who have less than she does, and mentioned that one of the reasons she had gotten this particular kitten for his birthday last year was that the cat had a scar on its head and one half-missing ear from when it was attacked by a dog. He said that even though she could have chosen a healthy-looking cat, it was just like her to take the one in the litter that had scars like this. He said he is somewhat like that too and he probably would have done the same thing.
He said he could not think of anything that really bothers him about his wife. He said that every once in a while they might have a spat—he does not really know about what—but it is something they just get over in an hour or two, and there have never been any kind of serious disagreements between them. They have never been close to getting a separation or a divorce. In terms of his marriage, he said “it gets better all the time.”
In the end, I asked the subject why they had waited so long to get married. He said, “I was afraid I might be a person who was set in my ways—afraid of what I might do to her.” He indicated that he did have a certain amount of fear of the intimacy of marriage. However, he now seems to have grown with the marriage and has no such feelings or fears about that anymore.
Wes had avoided a long-term partner his entire adult life, perhaps in no small part because of his early childhood experience of his parents’ marriage. This is not unusual. We can develop ideas about ourselves and the world that turn out not to be true. It took him much of his life, but with the help of a loving partner, he overcame this fear, surprising himself, and never looked back.
LATE LIFE (66+): Minding What (and Who) Matters
In a study done in 2003, two groups of participants—one older and one younger—were shown two advertisements for a new camera. Both ads included the same lovely picture of a bird, but the slogans were different.
One said: Capture those special moments.
The other: Capture the unexplored world.
The participants were asked to choose which advertisement they liked best.
The older group chose the slogan about special moments, the younger group chose the slogan about the unexplored world.
But when researchers primed another group of older people by saying, “Imagine that you’ll live twenty years longer than you expect to, and you’ll be in good health,” that older group chose the ad about “the unexplored world.”
This study shows a very basic truth about aging: the amount of time we think we have left on earth shapes our priorities. If we think we have a lot of time, we think more about the future. If we think we have less time, we try to appreciate the present.
In late life, time is suddenly very precious. Faced with the reality of our own mortality, we start asking ourselves questions like:
From the outside, late life is often viewed primarily as a period of physical and mental decline. To the young, old age might look like a distant abstraction; a state so divorced from their experience that they can’t even imagine growing old themselves. To someone in midlife, an older person’s decline hits a little closer to home and might remind them of their own aging process. In contrast to these notions of decline, the wisdom of older people is often viewed with deep respect and honor, particularly in certain cultures.
From the inside, old age is not so simple. We may be more concerned about time as death approaches, but older folks are also more capable of appreciating that time. The fewer moments we have to look forward to in life, the more valuable they become. Past grievances and preoccupations often dissipate, and what’s left is what we have before us. The beauty of a snowy day; the pride we have in our children or in the work we’ve done; the relationships we cherish. Despite the perception that old people are grumpy and cantankerous, research has shown that human beings are never so happy as in the late years of their lives. We get better at maximizing highs and minimizing lows. We feel less hassled by the little things that go wrong, and we are better at knowing when something is important and when it’s not. The value of positive experiences far outweighs the cost of negative experiences, and we prioritize things that bring us joy. In short, we’re emotionally wiser, and that wisdom helps us thrive.
But there are still things to learn, still some development ahead, and our relationships are the key to maximizing the joys of late life.
One of the harder things for some people to learn is how to give help, and—even harder for others as they grow older—how to receive help. But this exchange is one of the central developmental tasks in late life. As we age, we become concerned both that we’re too needy and that people won’t be there for us when we really need them. It’s a valid worry. Social isolation is a danger. As work and child care and other time investments wane, relationships that were normally attached to those activities tend to fall away. Good friends and important family connections become more important and should be savored. The sense of limited time makes all of our relationships more important: we have to learn how to balance an awareness of death with staying engaged with life.
When Wes Travers was 79, one of our Study interviewers paid Wes and Amy a visit. She landed in Phoenix in the middle of the afternoon and called Wes. He gave her very specific directions on how to get from the airport to the retirement community, and then from the entrance gate up to their duplex. The directions were clear as day, even a bit overly detailed. As she approached in her car, she realized they must have known the exact travel time from the airport because they were ready for her: she could see the two of them standing in the doorway, waving.
Wes had just come in from his morning walk. Amy offered our interviewer coffee, water, and freshly baked blueberry bread.
Before they settled in to the research tasks at hand—a blood draw for DNA collection and an interview—the interviewer asked the couple about their son, Ryan.
Amy paused, then explained that the family had recently experienced a terrible tragedy: Ryan’s wife had been diagnosed with brain cancer the previous year, and died in December. She was only 43. Amy and Wes were just doing whatever they could to help, but Ryan and the kids were all struggling.
“I can’t help but think of my family growing up,” Wes said. “My dad ran away when I was seven. It changed us. Obviously, he was nothing like Leah, our son’s wife—my father was a terrible person. But he left and it changed everything. I worry about that for the kids, how they’ll cope. It’s hard to be a single parent. For me it was probably good that my father left, I don’t know. But for these kids… it’s going to be hard for them.”
Let’s pause here for a moment to appreciate the unexpected. Lifespan developmental theories often emphasize the predictability and logic of life stages. Yet Wes’s life illustrates a truth that we encounter over and over again in the lives of participants in many studies, including the Harvard Study: that the unexpected is perfectly ordinary. Chance encounters and unforeseen events are a big reason why an individual’s life can never be completely understood by any “system” of life stages. An individual life is an improvisation in which circumstances and chance help determine the trajectory. While there are common patterns in life, it would be impossible for any person to make it from the beginning to the end of life without an unplanned event sending them in a new direction. There is even some research that suggests that it’s these unexpected turns, and not any plan, that most define a person’s life and can lead to periods of growth. One wrench thrown into the machine can be more significant than all the gears of planned action combined.
Many of these shocks emerge directly from our relationships. We carry the people we love around with us; they are part of us, and when we lose them or those relationships go awry, the feeling is so visceral that it’s almost as if there is a physical hole where that person used to be. But intense change, even of the traumatic kind, presents opportunities for positive growth. Evelyn, one of our Second Generation participants, had an experience in her midlife that is not unusual for either men or women:
Evelyn, age 49:
My husband and I had started to grow apart, after being together from our college days to the end of our 30s. One evening he said he had something to tell me: he was in love with a woman he met on a business trip.… I literally felt the floor had fallen away.… The emotional pain I felt for the next year was visceral. It took a huge amount of energy to get up every day, go to work, etc.… Eventually we divorced, he married her, I remarried six years after he first told me. I wouldn’t have thought the outcome of this experience would be positive, but it was. My career blossomed, and I met a man who I share a much more full and satisfying life with. I know now I can do well on my own and I have much more compassion and empathy for people who experience loss and rejection. I wouldn’t have chosen to go through this experience, but I am glad that I did.
Cultural or even global changes can be similar in their sudden shocks to the system. The Covid-19 pandemic that began in 2020 turned many lives inside out. Economic collapses and wars can do the same. All of the college men in the Harvard Study had plans as the 1940s began, while they were contemplating the end of their college careers. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and every plan, for every student, went out the window—89 percent of the college men fought in the war, and their lives were deeply affected by it. Yet nearly all of the college men reported feeling proud to have served, and many remember it as one of the best and most meaningful times in their lives despite its challenges.
This echoes findings from the longitudinal research project known as the Dunedin Study, which began with 1,037 babies born in New Zealand in 1972–73, and continues today. For a number of the Dunedin participants who struggled in adolescence, military service was seen as an important, positive turning point in their life.
For some generations it was war, for another generation it was the upheaval of the 1960s, or the economic collapse of 2008, or the Covid-19 pandemic. For individuals it might be a tragic accident, a mental health problem, a sudden disease, the death of a loved one. For Wes, it was being abandoned by his father, being forced to drop out of school to go to work, and many other things. The only thing we can expect is that the unexpected—and how we respond to it—will change the course of our lives. In the words of a Yiddish proverb, Der mentsh trakht, un Got lakht. Man plans, and God laughs.
And yet, unexpected events are not always challenging. Some are positive twists of fate, and these almost always involve relationships. The people we meet in life are responsible for a huge amount of how our life moves. Life is chaotic, and cultivating good relationships increases the positivity of that chaos and makes the chances of beneficial encounters more likely (more on this in Chapter Ten). Maybe that earlier photo of yourself shows some evidence of positive chance encounters. Nearly every moment of our life does: If I hadn’t taken that class then I would have never met… If I hadn’t missed the bus that day I wouldn’t have run into…
It’s true that we can never be in total control of our fate. Just because we’re having some good luck doesn’t mean we earned it, and just because we’re having some bad luck doesn’t mean we deserve it. We can’t outrun the chaos of life. But the more we nurture positive relationships, the better our chances of surviving and even thriving on this bumpy ride.
In 2012, just two years after our researcher’s visit, at the age of 81, Wes sat down at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee to answer our biennial questionnaire (there are some faint coffee stains still visible on the pages). Here are a few of his responses:
Q#8: Who can you really count on to be dependable when you need help? Please list all the people you know whom you can count on in the manner described.
A: Too many to list.
Q#9: What is your relationship like with each of your children, on a scale from 1 (Negative—hostile and/or distant) to 7 (Positive—Loving and/or close)
A: 7
Q#10: Circle the one dot on the scale that best describes how often you feel lonely:
Never Some of the time A lot of the time All of the time
Q#11:
a. How often do you feel that you lack companionship?
Hardly Ever Some of the time Often
b. How often do you feel left out?
Hardly Ever Some of the time Often
c. How often do you feel isolated from others?
Hardly Ever Some of the time Often
In this questionnaire, he was asked, What is the most enjoyable activity that you and your wife engage in together? Wes Travers—who served his country bravely in war, who traveled all over the world, who built his own homes with no formal training, who raised a happy and healthy stepson, and volunteered every day in his community—wrote that the thing he and his wife enjoyed most was: “Just being together.”
So why bother to think about ourselves in this big-picture way? Can thinking about the process of an entire life really help us from one day to the next?
It can. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand and connect with the people in our lives when all we’re thinking about is what’s right in front of us. Stepping back now and then to take a wider view, to place ourselves and the people we care about into the context of a longer life, is a great way to inject empathy and understanding into our relationships. Some of the frustrations we have with each other can be avoided, and deeper connections made, by remembering that our views of life depend on where we stand in the life cycle.
In the end it’s about gaining some perspective on the roads we’ve taken, and the roads still to come, so that we can help each other anticipate and prepare for the hard curves ahead. And as the old Turkish proverb says, No road is long with good company.