Bringing midlife out of the closet
Self-help is valuable. Self-help is important. But none of what I just suggested is enough. Do everything right, and throw in exercise, diet, vitamins, and chicken soup. It still is not enough.
The more I researched this book, the more I came to see self-help, however necessary, as incomplete, and in some ways as missing the point. The larger, yet largely neglected, portion of the answer lies outside ourselves. My friend Karl and so many others like him are being asked to do too much on their own. They need social channels and a U-friendly environment. They need institutions and public norms that ease the way, instead of institutions that ignore the happiness curve and public norms that mock it. They need a story about what they are experiencing which assumes they are normal, not broken. Karl needs help from ashore.
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So does Gary. It was he who first drew my attention to the happiness-curve closet.
Gary, like Karl, is a professional acquaintance who became a personal friend. Back when I first started thinking about the happiness curve and how to write about it, he was one of the people I brainstormed with. In his early fifties, when I interviewed him, he rated his life satisfaction only six, up from a bottom-scraping five a few years before.
“Whom,” I asked, “do you discuss your discontent with?”
“I keep it contained within myself. I don’t share it with many of my friends.” He thinks of himself as a successful person, a strong person. “You like being in the success bubble and you don’t want to share vulnerability and what feels like weakness,” he said. Besides, he doesn’t want to whine. “Even with my issues, I’m aware of the fact that I’m more successful and more comfortable than many of my friends. Complaining feels like what my kids call first-world problems.”
I asked if he confides in his wife. “Yes, a little bit. Less so on the professional things. She’s less professionally satisfied than I am.”
Also, like so many others, he felt the standard templates—midlife crisis or depression—didn’t fit. His brother-in-law had a classic midlife crisis, divorcing his wife, taking up with a younger woman, buying a motorcycle. “I guess I associate midlife crisis with a kind of acting out. Maybe I would have had more fun if I’d acted out, but I didn’t.” Medical treatment and depression also have not felt right. “I didn’t feel I was clinically depressed or anything like that.”
Everything I heard that day from Gary would, it turned out, be echoed in other interviews: the malaise and bafflement and shame, the silence, the belief that standard labels don’t fit. Gary also said something that grew in significance as I learned more. “I wished I’d had in my life an older, wiser mentor type,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a safe space, and someone I could turn to and talk this through with?”
Safe space. A place for vulnerability. A place without secrecy and shame. And a guide. Those were what Gary needed, and what he could not give himself.
Gary was blocked by the two reigning social models for midlife discontent. One is medicalization. You need a doctor. Go get a prescription. Take an antidepressant. Of course, mental illness is stigmatized, and so even people who are acutely depressed may resist appropriate treatment. But, recall, the bottom of the happiness curve is long but shallow. Most people do not experience acute depression. They experience chronic dissatisfaction, which is very different. Their values and their lives are in tension, and their achievement and fulfillment are out of sync, neither of which is a medical problem. They are therefore right to balk at the medical model. Gary, when I spoke to him, was successful at work, successful as a father and husband. The problem was not that he was failing or flailing or functioning poorly. Rather, he couldn’t give himself emotional credit for not failing or flailing or functioning poorly. That’s the feedback trap. Some people may need a pill to deal with it, but most need to feel normal and supported and not like disappointments to themselves and others.
Mockery, the other social model for what Gary is going through, is much worse than medicalization. Through no fault of its own, midlife crisis is the butt of a million jokes, as you can confirm online in a few seconds by doing an image search on midlife crisis. What comes up? Photo after photo of middle-aged men and red sports cars. Always sports cars, almost always red, frequently convertibles. A typical image shows a balding man in a red convertible speeding along a highway; below, the caption reads, “Is It Time for Your Midlife Crisis Yet?” Another shows a similar photo over the caption: “Midlife Crisis: Because Hot Young Ladies Love Fast Cars and Liver Spots!” A sports car guide calls itself “Midlife Crisis Cars.” When I wrote about the happiness curve for The Atlantic magazine, the cover image showed, you guessed it, a sullen man in a red sports car. Though presumably not intended to be cruel, the sports-car meme has become the standard symbol of the materialism and self-indulgence and acting out that supposedly characterize middle-age discontent.
Also figuring prominently in midlife-crisis iconography are images of middle-aged men riding motorcycles. And images of middle-aged men surrounded by young women. And images of middle-aged men posing atop motorcycles while surrounded by young women. Those are the comparatively subtle images. Some turn the ridicule up to eleven, like the one showing a balding man holding a pistol to the head of stuffed bunny toy over the caption, “Midlife Crisis Begins with Baldness and Ends with Taking Your Common Sense.” Women are not exempt, though their representation in the iconography is much skimpier. One cartoon image centers on a woman making a version of the frightened face in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, amid sketches of the same woman being unable to cram herself into her clothes and looking with shock into a mirror. The horror! Sifting through midlife-crisis books, I came across one that helpfully includes a “bonus section” of midlife jokes. You’ll need them, if you plan to discuss the subject.
No one wants to be a punch line or a cliché. No one wants to set off alarm bells about being on the edge of a second adolescence or a mental breakdown. So talking is risky. Gary tried. “It’s a mixed bag,” he said, when I asked how he had fared. “I’ve opened up to some people, and that has been very good. I’ve opened up to other people and they gossiped about it, and that felt way worse than the good of the good. The downside is much worse than the upside.”
Few of us are deliberately cruel about malaise in midlife. It’s just that we lack a box to put the problem in other than medicalization and mockery. As it happens, gay people in America once faced a version of this problem. Being open about homosexuality was apt to get you ridiculed and stereotyped, categorized as antisocial or psychologically ill, or all of the above. No, I am not suggesting that people like Gary face anything as severe as the discrimination and bigotry which gay and lesbian people once faced (and sometimes still do). Only that, in a couple of notable ways, the cases share a family resemblance. Lacking a social narrative in which homosexuality could be normal, gay people often internalized the story that there was something wrong with how they felt. Self-denigration fed shame and stress, which led to isolation, compounding the shame and stress: a negative feedback loop that became known, in the gay argot, as the closet. The fault lay not with gay people. It lay with society’s misconceptions about what was going on.
What happens when society misunderstands entire age groups and shoehorns them into the wrong box? And how does that get fixed? American history provides an interesting example.
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Imagine a world without adolescence. Not, that is, without teenagers. A world, rather, without the concept of adolescence. In that world, when young people pass through puberty and reach physical adulthood, society would assume they’re ready for the workforce—and off to work they would go, instead of attending high school and sometimes college. Their competencies and social skills would be rudimentary, and they would bring the emotional resources of teenagers to the workplace, but usually their competence and maturity would be sufficient for the agricultural and artisanal duties they were expected to perform. They would marry young, too, and have children young.
As peculiar as that world seems, it was America about 150 years ago. The ancients, having had eyes in their heads, understood that the transition between the prepubescent years of childhood and full maturity was often turbulent. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus told of a Sumerian father who, around 1700 BC, deplored his son’s insolent and indifferent behavior. Aristotle distinguished young manhood (puberty to about age twenty-one) from two earlier stages, infancy (until about age seven) and boyhood (seven until puberty), a formulation which matches pretty well with our own. Until recently, however, society had little need for the concept of a distinct stage of development between childhood and adulthood. School was for children, and then postpubescent teenagers entered the adult world. In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, no one seems dumbfounded to encounter a boy of thirteen or fourteen making his own way in the world, whereas today any such boy would be immediately handed over to Child Protective Services.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a combination of urbanization, industrialization, and compulsory mass education transformed the template for youth. As specialization and technology increased the workplace’s need for skills and maturity, society responded by banning child labor, requiring school attendance, and keeping young people in school longer. High schools sprouted, and with them the expectation that teens belonged in the classroom, not the factory. Cities sprouted, too. In the pre–Industrial Age, teenagers had lived on farms and in small towns, with few other teens close by. Urbanization, however, created dense clusters of teens living cheek by jowl, attending schools together, and socializing together. As “teenager” became a group identity, a distinctive teen ethos and identity emerged; youth culture, as it became known, was born.
In 1904, the establishment of adolescence as a social category took a decisive turn. G. Stanley Hall, the first person in the United States to receive a professional degree in psychology, published an influential two-volume work titled, naturally, Adolescence. Hall posited that adolescence is a psychologically distinct time of conflicting and often extreme emotions. More important than the details of his theory is that he popularized a special term for what had until then been just an age. After Hall, the word “adolescence,” almost unknown before 1900, entered the popular lexicon, where it remains. The concept of adolescence, today, is so firmly rooted that we can barely imagine life without it.
In a world where adolescence is an accepted fact, teens, instead of being hurled into adulthood, are enfolded in all kinds of institutions and norms that guide them through the transition from childhood to full maturity. High schools, colleges, community colleges; internships, summer jobs, apprenticeships, the military; counseling, helplines, specialist psychologists; a separate juvenile justice system. Still more important, we have a developmental narrative for adolescence: a story in which the challenges and difficulties of the teenage years are part of a normal transition. Although some teenagers may need medical attention for emotional problems, the vast majority need mentoring, a supportive environment, and preformed social pathways, like schools and jobs and dating, which guide them through challenges. Generally, we encourage teens to reach out if they feel confusion or emotional turmoil, and, if they do reach out, most of us have the good sense not to mock them.
Like adolescence, midlife reboot is an ordinary and predictable developmental pathway. Like adolescence, it is perfectly normal, and not at all pathological. Like adolescence, it is a period which some people breeze through, but which gives some people a lot of trouble. Like adolescence, it is something which many people would benefit from getting help with, even if they could manage to fight through it on their own. Like adolescence, it can be aggravated by isolation, confusion, and self-defeating thought patterns. Like adolescence, it is a risky and stressful period and can lead to crisis (especially if handled inappropriately), but it is not, in and of itself, a crisis. Rather, like adolescence, it is a transition, and, for those who have problems with it, it generally leads to a happier, more stable stage of life.
In short, although adolescence and the trough of the happiness curve are not at all the same biologically, emotionally, or socially, they are alike in that they are challenging and distinctive transitions which are commonplace, predictable, and nonpathological. But one of them has a supportive social environment, whereas the other has … red sports cars.
In chapter 4, I discussed how time is an absolute concept, whereas aging is a relative concept. Where we are on the happiness curve is determined to some extent by both. The clock and biology have a lot to say about our physical and mental condition, but society and culture have a lot to say about our expectations and emotions at any given age. Sometimes, time and aging can get out of sync. The situation of teenagers in the nineteenth century was an example. The problem got fixed when society added a box called adolescence. As it happens, another time-age asynchrony is happening right now. Fortunately, some smart people—such as Marc Freedman—are inventing a new box.
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“I think what we’re seeing,” Freedman told me, when I interviewed him one summer day, “right in front of our nose, is the emergence of a new period of life.”
Freedman is in his late fifties and lives and works in San Francisco. He is the founder and CEO of a nonprofit called Encore.org, which he describes as being in the “applied Laura Carstensen” business. He sees his job as developing and demonstrating ways to bring society’s outdated model of aging into closer harmony with the modern reality. After growing up in Philadelphia, attending Swarthmore College, managing a modern-dance troupe, and receiving an MBA degree from Yale, he got interested in education and the power of mentoring. That led him to notice how much better kids do with older mentors in their lives, which got him interested in finding mentoring roles for older people, which led him to start Experience Corps, a nonprofit that organizes teams of people over age fifty-five to help inner-city schoolkids learn to read. That, finally, got him thinking about society’s conventional model of aging, and how, within his own lifetime, it had been dramatically reinvented.
For many years, the model had basically two stages: education in childhood, then work in adulthood (which began young). If people became too old or disabled to work, there wasn’t much for them to do, and they were likely to be poor, and they were unlikely to live long. When Social Security got started in the 1930s, few people were expected to survive to collect any benefits. But the longevity revolution unfolded much faster than anyone expected, and by the 1950s millions of people found themselves fitting into a new social box, called retirement. Retirement was mainly about not working, which seemed a lot like doing nothing. “There was a purpose gap that had opened up,” Freedman said.
To create a story for the healthy elderly that seemed more appealing than, say, being put out to pasture, society came up with a new box, which Freedman has called the Golden Years. Digging a bit, he found that the Golden Years box dates to as recently as 1960, when an Arizona developer named Del Webb debuted Sun City, a so-called retirement community on the outskirts of Phoenix. The idea which Webb and, soon, many other marketers promoted was that retirement should be a long holiday, a time whose purpose is play and leisure. Underscoring the point, one of Webb’s competitors was a chain of retirement communities called Leisure World. According to Freedman, “Older people were so rejected socially that the idea arose of building a community where everyone was old and so no one was old, and you could play shuffleboard and not be bothered by the presence of actual young people.” So popular was the Golden Years idea that, when Sun City displayed its first six model homes, traffic backed up for miles to see them.
Lives continued to lengthen, however. Health and vitality in late adulthood continued to improve. Today, as we’ve seen, the sixth and seventh decades of life are no longer a short or infirm prelude to death; they are a time when most people are cognitively sharp and experientially skilled. They often are a time when people look for ways to give back to family and community and society.
Meanwhile, thirty-year careers and midlife stability are growing harder to come by. Between 2008 and 2013, one out of four Americans in their fifties lost a job (so did one in five people aged sixty to sixty-four). Many people are forced by economic need to relaunch or rebuild careers in midlife. Many others choose to relaunch, seeking renewed purpose or a more rewarding way of life. “Everything that used to seem rote, like moving in lockstep from high school or college into a job or industry that you would stay in for the rest of your life—that’s all upended now,” Phyllis Moen, a prominent sociologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Retirement is upended. Old age has been pushed back. You may have chronic problems, but you don’t feel old. It opens everything up. It’s like a second chance.”
This new second-chance period does not yet have a name. It has been variously dubbed (in alphabetical order) act IV, adulthood II, midcourse, middlescence, second adulthood, third age, third chapter, and young old. If anyone deserves naming rights, it is probably Moen, who calls the new phase encore adulthood, in an important 2016 book of that name.
“Whatever the label ends up being,” said Freedman, “they’re all describing basically the same thing, which is a period of life that doesn’t fit existing categories, a new stage of life between midlife and old age—and a population explosion of people flooding into it, yet an inability to exploit its possibilities.”
Freedman cites Encore.org’s survey research suggesting that something like 9 percent of Americans between fifty and seventy have already begun what he calls an encore career: a relaunch combining, as Freedman likes to put it, passion, a purpose, and often (though not always) a paycheck. As people in middle age and beyond seek more meaningful, socially positive missions, some, to be sure, turn to volunteer work, but many take commercial risks and enter new phases of their professional careers. Contrary to stereotype, people in late adulthood are avid entrepreneurs: figures compiled by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation show that, in more than half of the years from 1996 to 2015, the rate of new entrepreneurship of people aged fifty-five to sixty-four matched or exceeded the rate of younger age brackets. (People aged forty-five to fifty-four were not far behind.) If Encore.org’s survey is anything to judge by, something like 20 million Americans between fifty to seventy want to start an encore career. “That’s two hundred and fifty million years of human and social capital that could be applied to areas like education, health, the elderly,” Freedman remarked.
Baby boomers represent a human bow wave of social change. More than a third of Americans are fifty or older. Fewer and fewer of them stop working irreversibly; more and more dip in and out of the workforce, replacing the cliché of retirement on the golf course with customized hybrids of jobs, volunteering, caregiving, school, and leisure. “Retired but currently working”—not long ago an oxymoron—has already become the self-description of more than half of Americans age sixty-five to seventy-four who are in the workforce, and of a sixth of workers aged fifty-seven to sixty-four.
On the printed page, the idea of second acts and fresh starts in midlife sounds pretty glorious—but not so fast. In real life, nothing is harder than jumping out of the deep grooves we have carved for ourselves by our forties. What do I really want? Who wants me? How can I reinvent my life while meeting responsibilities and making ends meet? What are the options, and how can I sort through them all? What is achievable, and what is a daydream? What is the fallback if I fail? Those questions and many more clobber anyone who contemplates a relaunch. Relaunchers need guardrails to change course safely. They need institutions and programs and examples that provide support and structure. They need employers who will accommodate and hire mature workers who may want to work part-time, undertake not-so-big jobs, and apply old skills to new ventures. They need universities and financial aid geared to retooling in midlife; pensions and 401(k) plans flexible enough to cope with the “retired but working”; career counseling and job fairs and internships and gap years for graybeards in search of new missions and opportunities. They need society’s permission to experiment and grow and err: permission which teens and twentysomethings take for granted, but which adults in maturity often need just as much. And, of course, if they take a gap year or internship at age fifty-five, they need to be understood as doing something appropriate and natural, not as disrupting their lives or chasing their lost youth.
“So,” I asked Marc Freedman, “how much social and cultural infrastructure exists right now for midlife repurposing?”
“None,” came the blunt reply. “It’s a do-it-yourself project.” In his 2011 book The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife, Freedman suggests that we talk about a midlife chasm instead of a midlife crisis: a gap between the substantial support people need in middle age and the meager support society gives them. “The intervening space is not just wide,” Freedman writes, “it’s confusing and chaotic, a mismatched mess of mixed signals, outdated norms, anachronistic institutions, and multiple misperceptions. A series of troubling features characterize this growing chasm—a void in individual identity, an absence of coherent institutions (and policies), and a lack of understanding about what’s happening more broadly to the society.” In our parents’ time, Freedman continues, “individuals moving beyond midlife might have proceeded directly into the social institution called retirement—or, if that was delayed, tread water for a couple of years before ducking into that safe harbor of identity and security. Today, they are, for the most part, on their own, in uncharted waters, facing fundamental questions about what’s next and what matters along with a society unprepared for them.”
Freedman and others who are mapping encore adulthood imagine innovations like Individual Purpose Accounts, which would help people save up for gap years and adult education, or reforms allowing people to use a year’s worth of Social Security benefits early, so they could go back to school or do an internship. There is no shortage of possibilities. But few have been realized as yet. The education system and the pension and retirement systems remain fixed on the three-stage model. Schooling is delivered in a lump on the front end; pensions and Medicare are delivered in a lump on the back end. As for people of “working age,” they pay the bills for both lumps. Family responsibilities and fiscal burdens peak just as the happiness curve sags, so it is hardly a wonder if people at midlife feel squeezed.
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Still, social change is coming. Indeed, it is happening already. “There’s an adaptation that’s going on in a lot of sectors,” Freedman said. The adaptation is fragmented and improvisational and bottom-up rather than top-down, as organic social change very often is. Little by little, employers are adjusting to the priorities of baby boomers who seek to realign their work responsibilities instead of putting all their skills and experience on the shelf. In a recent study published in 2016 in The Gerontologist, Phyllis Moen, with coauthors Erik Kojola and Kate Schaefers, conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-three innovative organizations in the greater Minneapolis region, including private-sector companies, government agencies, and nonprofits. The organizations, they write, are “upending existing age-graded workplace norms and experimenting with new policies”: providing flexible working hours; developing phased exits for employees who want to scale back gradually rather than retire all at once; hiring and rehiring older workers and retirees; providing training and development to older as well as younger workers.
Communities and civic groups and social entrepreneurs are also inventing new templates. Freedman likes to tell the story of a group of rabbis who are creating a bar mitzvah ceremony for people in their sixties. Encore.org is itself an example of civic improvisation. Another sprang up spontaneously in 2000. Charlotte Frank and Christine Millen, friends and New Yorkers and veterans of the women’s movement, found themselves leaving jobs but unready to retire. “As they talked to each other,” Susan Collins recounted, when she told me their story, “they realized they couldn’t be the only two women in New York facing this giant stretch of time and saying, ‘Who the heck wants to retire?’”
Collins, who was in her early sixties when we met, is the executive director of The Transition Network. What began as a few small local gatherings has grown into a nonprofit with 2,200 members and chapters in 13 cities. That is small, as nonprofits go; but it is large enough to have proved its concept. For $100 a year, women in midlife and beyond can join a network of others who are in a reinvention stage or have passed through one. “You meet other people in the same type of situation and you realize you’re not alone,” Collins said.
Though the organization provides workshops and seminars and networking opportunities, the heart of its model is what it calls transition peer groups. Those are monthly gatherings of eight to twelve women who explore preselected topics of their choice, topics like how to deal with adult children, and how to cope with stiffening bodies, and what brings contentment, and how to forgive. The gathering is not group therapy or counseling. “It’s not here to resolve your psychological challenges,” Collins told me. Nor is it group coaching. Nor is a place to solicit clients, hunt for a job, or pitch to investors. Rather, it is a conversation between peers about who they are and where they might be going and how to get there. The meetings are like book groups, except what’s being read and discussed is the members’ lives, and the mission is to plot the next chapter.
In Philadelphia one late summer morning, I sat in on a transition peer group. Eight women attended, most in their sixties, though one was eighty. In a small apartment living room decorated in warm beiges and tans, the women, all wearing business casual, sat on soft chairs arranged in a circle. Refreshments lay on a table nearby, but the group chose to launch straight into its two-hour session. The morning’s topic, chosen by the host, was what to do about “baggage”: physical clutter and emotional burdens. “What does it mean, what does it feel like,” she asked the group, “when you let go of something that feels like a heavy weight on your shoulders?”
Gretchen, sitting on the sofa to my right, mentioned that she has trouble off-loading material things, such as her deceased husband’s treasured necktie collection. Next to her, Heidi differed. “I found the Dumpster easy. Physical things, I’m not attached to.” Heidi’s struggle was to get clear of emotional and personal attachments, and to figure out how to deal with the “overwhelming freedom” of retirement. Her husband had already planned out three years of travel and activities, but Heidi wasn’t on board with all of that busyness. She noticed herself becoming more choosy about her investments of time and energy. “I feel there’s only a finite amount of time left, and I’m very aware of that.”
Time emerged as a theme, which bounced from woman to woman like a beach ball. “I used to be friends with, my god, all these people,” said Frances. “Now I’d rather be by myself than with some of them. I pick and choose where I spend my time.”
Deb, across from me, agreed. “I do find now I don’t spend time with people I find downers. That’s been a new thing for me. I always did what I was supposed to do. If someone called to get together, I would not say no.”
Several women remarked upon feeling less pressured even as they grew choosier. “I’m finding I don’t have to fill things up,” said Alice, immediately to my left. “You can have empty space around you. You can have free time. I’m finding that the less I do, the better I like it. To not feel the need to fill holes and spaces is the wisdom that’s coming with my age.”
Gretchen chimed in: “I don’t know what’s going to come. I don’t care. I think it’s because I’ve done everything I want to do, and everything else is a bonus.”
From Elizabeth, a discordant note. She was eighty, not sixty-five, and she wanted to say that time was not as short as the others assumed. “You all sound like you think sixty-five is old because the world tells you sixty-five is old,” she admonished. “As a few years go by, you’ll realize sixty-five is pretty young.”
The conversation flowed on, bending toward practical suggestions about volunteering and helping pack rats relinquish clutter. It was not an agenda-driven, goal-oriented discussion. “It’s about being part of a community of women who are interested in the same things you are and who are building a life,” Collins told me.
The Transition Network is interesting, and promising, partly because it is entirely a grassroots project. With the exception of director Collins and a couple of staff people, everyone is a volunteer. Membership is inexpensive. The group depends on local initiative to seed new chapters. Its communitarian model of mutual self-help is right out of the playbook of Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century Frenchman who famously documented Americans’ genius for forming voluntary groups and associations. But broader, more systematic adoption will require the involvement of bigger institutions that can move the social and cultural needle in a bigger way.
No large organization has yet stepped up on a large scale, but we have an early-stage prototype to look at. AARP is one of the largest membership organizations in the world, and one of the strongest lobbying organizations in the United States. In Washington, D.C., it is renowned for its clout on issues of interest to seniors. In recent years, however, it has faced the challenge of establishing its relevance to baby boomers who reject the Leisure World model of late adulthood and who are turned off by monikers like “American Association of Retired Persons” and “Modern Maturity,” as AARP and its signature magazine were known until a rebranding a few years ago. In the early 2010s, searching for ventures that could introduce the organization to people in their forties and fifties, AARP kept encountering the phenomenon of midlife and post-midlife transitions. And so, in 2012, AARP launched a program it called Life Reimagined.
Life Reimagined took inspiration from a book of that name by the life coach Richard Leider and the journalist Alan M. Webber. Leider and Webber stress that big transitions aren’t DIY projects and that, as Webber told me, isolation kills. “It’s pretty lonesome inside your own head,” Webber said, when I spoke with him about the project. “Everybody’s life is an experiment of one, but nobody should have to go it alone.” But change, never easy, is often especially threatening or scary or unsettling in midlife—not just to ourselves, but to our families and associates—and it requires a lot of information which few of us possess. Life Reimagined set out to provide a starting point. “It really is a personal guidance system for people who are in life transitions,” AARP’s John F. Wilson told me.
Unlike The Transition Network, Life Reimagined was not founded as a face-to-face community (though, as of this writing, it was laying plans to offer meetups). The concept was to provide online information and services. The website offered ebooks, quizzes, meditation guides, life-planning exercises and workbooks, and streaming courses about subjects like brain health, relationships, and finding purpose. Also, the site experimented with an online platform allowing users to shop for and schedule life coaching, at prices steeply discounted below prevailing market rates. AARP’s Anne Marie Kilgallon told me the project’s details were in flux as the organization sought to learn what midlife consumers want, but she said, “This commitment to transitions will not go away. I look at Life Reimagined as that best friend you can call to help you navigate whatever it is that you’re dealing with. Our goal is to help everyone who’s fifty-plus, not just our members.”
And how might educational support look, if it comported with the U shape of reality? Here, too, we have early prototypes to look at.
In 2010, when Philip Pizzo, a pediatrician by training, was planning his own transition from being dean of Stanford University’s medical school, he began pondering ways in which higher education could help mature people rethink their lives. “I’ve talked to hundreds of people, probably thousands, across the world,” he told me. “It’s amazing to see how many individuals are frustrated and disappointed by the time they hit their late forties and fifties. That seems to be much more normative than I would have predicted. Then the question becomes, what do people do? How do they realign themselves, and how can they do that?” He began to imagine university programs where midlifers could learn from and support each other, “and where they can utilize higher education to do what they did in the early phase of their life: re-explore, rethink, reconnect with people, and plan that next phase of their life. What takes place during adolescence is something that can take place again at midlife.”
In January 2015, Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute was born, under Pizzo’s leadership. From applicants with several decades of life experience and a desire to recalibrate, the program chose about two dozen participants (called fellows). For a year, they would attend university courses, hear prominent guest speakers, and share their hopes and plans and know-how. “They’re all in transition and often they don’t have anybody to talk to about it,” Pizzo told me. Fellows are high achievers, the kind of people who may be hesitant to share vulnerability; but by the second or third week, Pizzo said, participants often relate stories they may never have told anyone else.
As the institute’s name implies (and as its mid-five-figure tuition affirms), the Distinguished Careers Institute was not for everyone. Pizzo compared it to the first Tesla roadster, a $100,000 electric car that used the purchasing power of early adopters to put electricity on the road and (Tesla hoped) seed a market for more affordable, utilitarian electric vehicles. “We started out with lots of bells and whistles to demonstrate proof of principle,” Pizzo said. “I have no expectation or desire that the kind of program we’ve put together becomes the model. My hope is that there will be lots of seeds sown that will accomplish similar ends in a much more democratized way.” Pizzo talks frequently with community colleges and universities about ways to build their own versions of programs supporting people who seek to reboot. Some, such as Portland Community College and Pace University, already offer programs for encore careerists.
“There aren’t really off-the-shelf solutions,” Pizzo said, when I asked if there was any existing model for his efforts. With so little by way of precedent, pioneering efforts such as the Distinguished Careers Institute or Life Reimagined or The Transition Network tend to be small-scaled and wobbly. Still, prototypes have a lot to teach, so I went looking for another kind of prototype. How would a workplace look if it set out to abolish the midlife closet, creating a truly U-friendly environment? Somewhat to my surprise, one beautiful spring day I found myself in an advertising agency in downtown Chicago.
* * *
I was sitting with Danielle, an account executive, in a conference room in an office tower. The setting was very corporate. The conversation was not.
Danielle had been with Leo Burnett Worldwide for more than a decade. Leo Burnett is one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies. Its clients had names like Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, and GM. The clients, the projects, and the deadlines were demanding, sometimes relentless. That was stressful for Danielle, plus she was a wife and mother of two, the elder of whom was entering his teens. As if that were not enough, at about the time when she turned forty, four years earlier, she had begun feeling malaise about her work. “I felt lack of inspiration. What is it at the end I was trying to achieve? Is it a promotion? Is it validation? Is it a great piece of work on TV? It kind of lost its meaning.”
Advertising is not a career with an inherently high life-satisfaction quotient. If someone gets through an entire career devising thirty-second TV commercials without asking questions about meaning and purpose, there is probably something wrong with that person. (Not coincidentally, Kevin Spacey’s depressed character in American Beauty is a middle-aged advertising executive.) The questions had caught up with Danielle. “Is life getting ahead of me? Am I getting left behind?”
One day, Danielle recalled, she encountered a senior executive who recommended Leo Burnett’s in-house coaching program. He told her that coaching is a good way to improve leadership skills and locate blind spots. Around the same time, a friend in account planning also recommended the program. Danielle emailed a coach. The subject line: “Towards hope.”
A lot of companies nowadays offer coaching, especially for top executives. Once viewed as a form of remediation, coaching has come to be seen in the business world as a way to bring out the best in high-potential employees. That was true of Leo Burnett. When I visited in 2015, Leo Burnett’s stable of more than a dozen on-staff coaches had worked with hundreds of employees, and not just people at the top.
Nowadays, a lot of companies also claim that their employees are their most important asset. That, too, was true of Leo Burnett. “In our case,” said Renetta McCann, the company’s chief U.S. talent officer, “employees are our only asset. The ideas we have, the commercials that go on the air, the engagement with consumers, those all come directly out of our employees. The raw materials for what we produce come from within our employees. If today two thousand people left and a different two thousand people came in, we’d have a different product.”
McCann is a short African American woman with a not at all diminutive personality. Bighearted and warm, with a worldly wise, empathetic manner that strikes me as more rabbinical than corporate, she likens midlife in the advertising business to the compactor scene from the 1977 Star Wars movie. “The floors are moving, the walls are moving, the ceiling is moving. What we’ve come to understand is that the people in the middle of the organization are the ones under the most pressure. At some time in that age zone, you wind up in the crunch. Getting the work out the door falls on you, and you’ve got to negotiate all these relationships. And God forbid you should have a life of your own: a spouse, partner, kids, whatever. Heaven help you.”
Coaching, she said, was available for employees of all ages at Leo Burnett. “If you raise your hand, the company will find you a coach, it will find you the time to do the coaching, it will respect the confidentiality of that relationship, and the company will support you.” The user base, though, was heavy on people in their late thirties and their forties: people wrestling with the values questions that Danielle found herself asking. McCann said, “Where in society are people given people to ask these questions to? At thirty-five and forty-five, that’s when your values are probably most under pressure. You’re still trying to fit in. You’re still trying to be the kid your parents wanted. You’re dealing with your spouse or partner. There’s this incredible pressure to have The Answer. A lot of times, when you are pressed to have The Answer, people either stop asking questions or they don’t ask high-quality questions.”
McCann knew whereof she spoke, having traveled the happiness curve herself. Earlier in her career, she was global CEO of one of the company’s business units. At fifty-two, she burned out, retired, went back to school, got a master’s, then returned to the agency in a new role, now working with people. Along the way, she found answers to some of her questions. “One of the things I did was take a hard look at my own values. I found I had two different value sets, one set of values attached to my heart and one to my mind. One is about grace; the other is about curiosity.” But she made the transition largely on her own. “It was a real internal struggle,” she said. “I don’t know if people knew I was struggling or not. If somebody else had asked those questions with me, I probably could have traveled the U faster. I might have had a very different shaped U.”
In a business where burnout is common and costly, raising and confronting values questions before they reach the American Beauty point can be a profitable proposition. McCann said, “My hypothesis is that what prevents you from traveling the U is having your values more front and center.” And so the agency encourages its employees to align their lives and their values, which is what coaching seeks to do.
Coaching does not assume you are broken and need to be fixed. Rather, it assumes you are well and whole, and it seeks to clarify your values and then help align your life with them. Coaching also is not the same as mentoring or consulting, because the coach’s job is not to pass down advice or expertise. Instead, life coaches often refer to themselves as allies. They are trained to listen closely, to notice things, and to surface core questions about who we are and what we want and how to get there. “A lot of training for coaching is getting our own stuff out of the way so we can ask clear, powerful, often very basic questions,” said Christopher McAuliffe, the founder of Accomplishment Coaching in San Diego. Unlike many forms of therapy, coaching looks forward, not backward, focusing on identifying and meeting life goals rather than diagnosing and solving emotional problems.
In some ways, though, coaching does resemble therapy. The conversation is strictly confidential. Coaching sessions typically last an hour. They might start with one session a week and then back off to one every few weeks. Also, life coaching is not just about career, even for professionals who are coached at work. As coaches often reminded me, the professional and personal sides of life are interwoven and cannot be separated. At Leo Burnett, a coaching intake form started this way: “Coaching addresses you as a whole person—your physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual self. In our coaching relationship we’ll focus on both who you are ‘being’ and what you are doing in your life, and together (co-actively) we’ll design the best way I can support you.” The form continued with questions like: “What are your top five values?”; “If you had all the time and resources you wanted, what would you do?”; “How will I know when you’re ‘stuck’?”
In all of those respects, Leo Burnett’s program, far from being unique, was characteristic of coaching’s best practices. But here is what was unusual about it, and what attracted my attention. At Leo Burnett, coaching was normal. Coaches were fellow workers embedded within the company. They knew the players in the agency and the stresses of the job. Executives used and recommended the program as a matter of course. (“I want all my people to do it, and I’ve told them that,” one boss said.) Coaching was part of everyday life in the company; people heard about it from colleagues in the elevator or coffee room, as Danielle did.
Leo Burnett had thus inverted the usual assumption that values questions belong in the closet, especially at work. “We’ve tried to take the stigma out of it,” said Peter Diamond, a coach and former Leo Burnett executive who still practiced inside the company. “In three years, coaching went from something where I was very cautious to make sure that people weren’t coming in and out at the same time, to being part of the fabric of the agency.” People told me they would mention coaching in meetings, sometimes even with clients—a handily indirect way to express that no one is expected to be perfect or have all the answers.
I can’t tell you, in a scientific way, the specific results of Leo Burnett’s coaching program and, more important, of its coaching culture. When I asked if the company measured outcomes, a senior executive said, “We’re intentionally not doing that.” I can tell you that the program was popular, and many employees swore by it. “It keeps me sane,” Sheri, a thirty-eight-year-old creative team manager, told me. “I rely on these meetings to help keep me grounded. It’s easy to lose sight of your own goals when the universe’s goals can be so demanding.” Molly, a thirty-eight-year-old account director told me: “I think there must be more to life than answering emails at midnight and five in the morning. When you’re able to talk out loud, it’s amazing. It’s just helpful for somebody to ask the right questions to get you thinking about things.”
As for forty-four-year-old Danielle, she had uncovered the questions, but not yet the answers. “It hasn’t resolved yet,” she replied, when I ask about her efforts to find, in her words, “a goal, a path.” So, I wondered, what did her coaching sessions accomplish? The words came pouring out. “With my coach, I don’t always have to keep pretending that nothing fazes me. When I tell him all the bad stuff that’s happening to me, he makes me feel I’m not the only one. He also gives me confidence. He has my back when he talks to me. He’s not bullshitting me. He makes me think differently. He connects dots in a different manner than I do. And the objective evaluation he provides is just invaluable to me. He makes me more resilient, and he makes me more of a problem solver.
“It makes me at least feel that I’m normal.”
* * *
Normal. That word again.
Society, not science, determines what is normal in the lives we lead, and that, right now, is the problem. The standard social templates for adult development and life satisfaction turn the happiness curve upside down, describing something more like a hill-shaped arc. In their book Life Reimagined: Discovering Your New Life Possibilities, Leider and Webber describe the conventional view this way:
Each of us starts off fresh and new, ready to learn and grow and discover our individual potential. We arc upward as we go through our early years, and we continue to grow until about the time we hit middle age. At that point we’ve reached the apex of our lives, the top of the parabola. After that, as we pass middle age, we begin the process of decline that takes us into retirement, then old age, and eventually, death.
Within that outdated but still prevalent paradigm, the happiness curve is not normal. It is more like the opposite of normal. Sure, midlife crisis is a familiar phenomenon. But, as the very word crisis implies, it is extreme and extraordinary and bad. We avoid it if we can, and if we cannot avoid it, we hide it.
By telling a social story about normalcy that is at odds with reality, we manufacture dismay and shame about a perfectly normal transition. By expecting people to exhibit maximum mastery in midlife, we leave them to their own devices if they feel adrift and vulnerable. By leaving them to their own devices, we increase their isolation and therefore their unhappiness. By telling them that their best years are behind them at age fifty, we make them gloomy about the future. In all of those ways, by telling the wrong story about adult development, we bait and set the midlife trap.
The trap may never go away entirely. Some aspects of it appear to be hardwired. (Ask a chimp or a Barbary macaque.) Others, though, are products of social misalignment. I believe that the expectations gap—the difference between how satisfied we feel at age forty-five or fifty and how satisfied we believe we should feel—can and will narrow as word gets out about the happiness curve. Social support will come online as more people and institutions begin to understand the midlife transition for what it is: a healthy emotional reboot with a rich upside for individuals and also for society. Communities and companies and colleges, and eventually even the lethargic government, will provide resources and support for people making the midlife transition. Most important, the story we tell about aging and life satisfaction will comport with the lives we live. The happiness curve will be just as normal, just as thoroughly taken for granted and institutionalized, as adolescence. People will wonder why anyone was ever embarrassed about it. Maybe—we can hope—even the sports-car meme will be put to rest.
The prototypes and start-ups I have described in this book are, so far, trickles of change. But they are already carving new social channels. Improvisations like Leo Burnett’s and Stanford’s and AARP’s and The Transition Network are emerging because people and organizations need them and are not waiting around. Already, it is possible to see how the essential pieces of a new support infrastructure can work together to ease us through our transitions. Researching The Transition Network, I interviewed Claire, a member of a chapter in New Jersey. In her forties, she felt growing discontent with her job as a corporate lawyer. In her fifties, “stressed, tired, needing change,” she began doing research on nonprofit careers, only to encounter confusion. She was confident of her skills, but “How would I take them and make the transition to the not-for-profit sector? What’s even out there? How do I get a foot in the door? There’s no clear path here.”
So far, so typical. But then she got lucky. An email led her to The Transition Network. “I saw that and I said, ‘Wow, this sounds like a great kind of thing for me professionally and socially.’ I didn’t feel I was out on an island trying to do something without a map.” Meanwhile, she received an email about Pace University’s then-new program for life transitions, a class that armed her with information on how to repurpose skills and organize a relaunch. In the Pace class, she learned about Encore.org fellowships, which place career changers in yearlong positions with social-purpose organizations. Her fellowship introduced her to a nonprofit that assisted former inmates and their families with readjustment after incarceration. Her legal and administrative skills proved to be a good fit, and after the yearlong fellowship she accepted a part-time position as the organization’s chief counsel.
More through serendipity than intent, Claire demonstrated how much more smoothly a transition can go, and how much less isolating it can be, when multiple social supports click into place. The Transition Network provided companions on the journey, Pace University provided a map, and Encore.org opened a pathway. When I asked her how she would have fared had she remained out there on her own, fishing for information online and trying to figure out where to begin, she replied that she might eventually have made a successful transition, but the process would have been difficult and demoralizing. “It would have been a much longer period of hit-and-miss.”
When I asked how she felt about her transition, now that she had passed through it, she replied with a chuckle. “Both of my daughters say, ‘Mom, you totally failed at retirement.’ But I’m so much happier doing what I’m doing.”
* * *
Such is the importance of social channels. Institutions and norms and precedents light our way through life and save us from always having to start from scratch. That is what I meant when I said that what Karl needs, even more than self-help, is help from ashore. Coping with the happiness curve requires the aid of voyagers omitted from Thomas Cole’s paintings: the voyagers who have gone before. They can provide signs to mark the currents, beacons to indicate hazards, landings for respite amid rapids, and provisions for nourishment.
Social support is on the way. Its eventual arrival is assured by the clout of the baby boomer generation, required by the disintegration of endless-vacation retirement, and presaged by the eruptions of groups and programs and ideas of the kind I have discussed here. But creating adolescence—creating the social channels and stories that carved out a place between childhood and adulthood—was the work of several generations. Creating encore adulthood and a new normal for midlife could take as long. My friend Karl doesn’t have a generation to wait. He needs relief now.
So here is something you and I can do for Karl. Right now.
Homosexuality stopped being abnormal in large part because little by little, one by one, gay people’s relatives and friends and employers and colleagues became better informed and more supportive. Instead of laughing at us or telling us to get psychiatric treatment, the people in our lives accepted us and connected with us.
I have seen again and again, while researching this book, the relief people feel when they can have a nonjudgmental, fact-based conversation about midlife malaise. I see the surprise and smiles when they hear that the happiness curve is normal and seen around the world, even among apes. In fact, quite literally while I was working on this chapter I received an email from a stranger, a Canadian named Derek:
I will make this short and sweet. I want to thank you very very much for your article on the U curve.
I am a divorced forty-five-year-old with teenage kids and from the outside my life should be just peachy. Have a career etc. and things are generally good.
I certainly don’t feel that things are great and I feel like I am in the toughest part of my life. Was not sure why and was getting increasingly concerned about my mental wellbeing.
Thank you so much for your insight, work, and articles!!! Happy to have come across you. You are making a difference for people.
Of course, by you, the correspondent means not me, personally, but the message that the happiness curve is normal and nonpathological and even, in its own perverse way, constructive. Knowing this helps. What can help even more is if Derek’s family and friends and neighbors and colleagues also knew it, and if they rallied around. As Terry, in the last chapter, attests, a “bunch of guys” can prevent each other from capsizing.
We can all be a bunch of guys to somebody. Wholesale social reform may require action by giant institutions, but retail reform requires only that each of us create a safe space for the people in our own lives. By retiring our clichés about midlife crisis and listening and empathizing and sharing our stories, every one of us can make someone’s midlife transition less of a DIY project.
Each time we connect nonjudgmentally and positively with Karl or someone like him, we provide companionship to a voyager in turbulent waters. Indirectly, we help other voyagers, too. We make it safer for others to come out. We add our voice to a new social conversation. We realign normalcy just a bit. We place a marker on the shore.
* * *
The previous paragraph was where this chapter originally ended. As I was putting the finishing touches on it, however, an email arrived from Karl. By then, he and I had had a number of conversations about his life and the happiness curve, and I had given him the manuscript of the book to read. I had placed him under no obligation to give me a reaction and I wasn’t expecting one; but his email, when it came, expressed, better than I could, what a difference social normalcy and personal connections can make. Karl launched this book’s journey, so to let him conclude it seems only fitting.
He began by saying he was doing better. He wrote:
For one thing, it was a huge relief to know that I was not alone, and that this is probably something that is a hardwired part of life, almost like puberty. We should not hate ourselves for being awkward and pimply as teens; nor should we berate ourselves for being lost in midlife.
For another, I have always sorta understood that professional success does not make for personal bliss, but it was an insight that I had not fully accepted. Going through the midlife slump and learning that others who have achieved far bigger things have gotten trapped on the hedonic treadmill was the wake-up call I needed. Yes, I will keep trying to achieve more—I enjoy the challenge—but I now feel less emotionally invested in it, and now really get that I can’t be happy by just producing more professional wins.
Which means I have begun looking for sources of joy elsewhere, and dialing back my career’s presence in my mind. It is a small thing, but I now make a point of checking my work email less often, and have turned off many of the notifications that rattle my cell phone and distract me from being wherever it is that I am. I am trying to be more attentive to the moment and appreciative of where I am at. That’s part of wisdom, right? Additionally, this past autumn I made time to phone family and friends more than I had before, and to develop an outdoor leisurely pursuit that was purely for my own edification. I’m not doing it to impress anyone—I just enjoy it and in the course of doing it I’ve made acquaintances with other folks who share this passion.
Finally, the evidence showing that emotionally things will turn up buoys me. So, too, does the idea of planning for a post-midlife second sailing, where I can find new work (if I so choose) and devote what time I have in life to the people and things that strike me as most worth doing.
Do I still need help from ashore? Sure. I’m still in the trough of the U curve.
But I no longer feel lost at sea, which is an immense relief.