The “midlife crisis” is a very simple story, scientists say

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

The idea that happiness in the Western world declines rapidly around middle age before rebounding has been around since the mid-1960s. In the late 1980s, after compiling data from well-being surveys around the globe, social scientists called the phenomenon both measurable and global.

But a growing body of evidence now supports the theory’s demise. Recently, researchers found some variation in how happiness unfolds among nonindustrialized communities in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—places often neglected in the scientific literature.SN: 19.3.24).

In addition to the classic story, the team reports October 23 at Advances in sciencethey identified examples of midlife declines appearing years earlier than previously reported, happiness peaking in middle age (the unknown secret sauce), and, most commonly, a steady decline in happiness beginning around aged 45 years.

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

But critical studies of the U-curve have been circulating for years. They gained little traction until earlier this year when David Blanchflower, the theory’s co-founder and promoter, published working papers and a blog post killing it himself. Growing despondency among teens and twenties, especially girls and women, has changed the course of a lifetime of happiness, says Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth College. “The U-shaped curve is now completely gone.”

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

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

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

Blanchflower and economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England confirmed the long-held belief that happiness declines sharply in middle age with their 2008 publication showing that populations in over 70 countries followed similar U-shaped happiness trends.

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

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

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

A similar cluster effect now seems plausible for those whose teenage years coincided with the advent of smartphones and social media, Lachman says. The pandemic reinforced that group’s shift to an online social world.

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

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

Desperation among teenagers is deeply troubling, Lachman says, but switching from a midlife crisis narrative to a teenage narrative doesn’t make sense. People in middle age are not doing better than before, she says, teenagers are just doing worse. “The young people who are suffering now … depend on people in middle age. It is their parents and teachers. Those young people need people in middle age to have good mental health.”