Midlife

“If I can meet triumph and disaster and treat these two imposters just the same...” Rudyard Kipling I chuckled when I saw the recent headline that 47.2 is the age when misery peaks in midlife. I was that age a dozen years ago and I can vouch for the researchers’ findings.

Societies have historically celebrated the movement of an individual from one part of life to another by creating festivities or formalities that mark that rite of passage. This rite of passage could be birth, puberty, marriage, having children, or death.

In Australian Aboriginal society, a “walkabout” is a rite of passage during which male adolescents undergo life in the wilderness for a period as long as six months. The journey marks the spiritual and traditional transition into manhood. Nowadays, Australians have co-opted the word to describe their journeys around the globe.

What if our primary operating system for life is meant to change in midlife and beyond? Psychologist Carl Jung suggested, “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego; the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”

Life is b-u-s-y. And that doesn’t change just because we become Middlescents—that stage of life when we question who we want to be when we are grown-ups—even though we are supposed to be all grown up!

Adolescence, as we know it, didn’t exist as a word until psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term for a book he wrote in 1904. Today, we recognize adolescence as that time when we experience a major transition (puberty) in who we are and how we see the world.

Our language defines our reality. As we enter a new decade, here are a few words or phrases that carry too much 20th century cultural baggage. It might be time to let them go!

“Wholly unprepared, [we] embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life?

If we’re running a marathon, we better not be carrying extra baggage. Of course, this is easier said than done. The first half of our life is often about adding and accumulating, and not just possessions, or friends, or romantic relationships. Or even the size of our families.

The Oxford Dictionary defines middle age as 45-65, so that was initially our age requirement at the Modern Elder Academy. But those linguistic scholars don’t live in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or Madison Avenue, where people begin feeling old in their mid-30s, a fact that is compounded by a corporate culture that is obsessed with DQ (digital intelligence) over EQ (emotional intelligence).