The midlife crisis provides such a powerful narrative that people shoehorn their experience into that story line even when it is not true—labeling all significant crises as “midlife” no matter when they happened. People rewrite the past to fit their current understanding.
Not Your Average Middle Age
The MacArthur study constructed a portrait of the typical middle-aged American. That “average” creature, however, is only one character in midlife’s story. America is vast and complex, and its inhabitants don’t progress in lockstep. Thinking of the 1960s only in terms of radical youths without any reference to conservatives, for example, presents a distorted picture of that decade. Ultimately, “people,” “Americans,” “adults,” “men,” and “women” are always generalized stand-ins for a collection of quirky, distinct individuals whose experience of the middle decades varies widely.
In 2004, the Annual Review of Psychology asked Margie Lachman, a psychologist at Brandeis and a MacArthur veteran, to write a status report about the emerging field of midlife development, a kind of State of the Union address for the discipline. One of the biggest challenges facing researchers, she noted, is that adults in midlife have such diverse and varied experiences. Compared with previous generations, this group of middle-aged men and women is at the center of a much more intricate and sprawling web of social roles and responsibilities. The variety is compounded by differences in backgrounds, income, and geography. Divorce, aging parents, gay marriage, adoptions, and fertility drugs are contributing to the construction of novel family arrangements that are both stressful and enriching. “For investigators trying to sort their way through the growing stacks of new information, discerning patterns can be frustrating,” Lachman concluded.
MacArthur researchers found responses often varied with location. When it came to describing the ingredients that contribute to a sense of well-being in middle age, New Englanders emphasized control, having no constraints on their ability to do what they want. Inhabitants of the West South Central region (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana) reported feeling less nervous and restless, and more cheerful and happy. Residents of the West North Central region (Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri) weren’t as cheery but felt calm, peaceful, and satisfied, a level of contentment that researchers thought might explain the region’s marked unconcern with personal growth. And in the East South Central region (Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky), saddled with the lowest levels of personal income and education, participants were in worse physical and emotional health, and felt less in control of their lives. The one area that Southerners reported feeling good about was their contribution to other people’s welfare.
The network also underscored the stark gaps in health and well-being that class, wealth, and schooling produced. The poor aged much faster than their middle-class contemporaries. Like a coastal town punished by salt water and rain, impoverished people in midlife were battered by the cumulative effect of mediocre or curtailed education, joblessness, single-parent families, ill health, and poor care.
Educational divisions revealed other unexpected differences, as in definitions of “the good life.” Everyone between 40 and 59 agreed that relations with others was the most important element of well-being, followed by feeling healthy, being able to enjoy oneself, and experiencing a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. Financial security and having a positive outlook on life were also common responses. But college grads in their middle years emphasized being “able to make choices” and having a goal and purpose. High school graduates in the midsection of life tended to talk instead of doing the right thing and not giving up. It’s about “endurance,” said one respondent. “If things get bad, I just feel God is testing me to see what I am capable of . . . just hang in there, hang tough.”
A similar class divide showed up in the MacArthur data on the topic of responsibility. Meeting obligations and attending to the needs of others were elements that nearly everyone mentioned. But middle-aged high school graduates frequently added “being dependable to others” and “adjusting to circumstances” on their short list. By contrast, those who attended college emphasized balancing numerous responsibilities and taking the initiative. “I am good at juggling multiple tasks. I have a family life that demands that, I have a personal life that demands that, and I have a professional life that demands that,” said one mother. A man put it this way: “Life should be a balance, you know, of work, of fun, of commitments.”
“Doing what I don’t want to do” and “taking care of myself” showed up much more frequently on the list of social responsibilities cited by college graduates. “I take on the responsibility and I complete it, which is the reason, for instance, why I have stuck with being treasurer at church,” said one college-educated respondent.
These definitions of social responsibility reveal a sense of self-entitlement among the college-educated group, who groused about interferences with their own happiness and their ability to control what happens in their lives. Underneath many of the answers lay the assumption that taking care of others depended on taking care of oneself first. “Typically what gets lost for me is . . . a sense of responsibility to myself, which would be, you know, just take a weekend off and go sit under a tree,” said one overworked woman. Responsibility includes being “good to myself, responsible to myself,” said one man. Without the gym and down time, “[I] build up a lot of passive-aggressive resentment.” Compared with high school graduates, the college graduates were much more likely to draw a link between responsibility and self-improvement—twenty-nine to two percent.
Differences between men and women were evident in many corners of midlife, including the experience and effects of marriage. From their early 30s through their mid-80s, three out of four men had a ring on their finger; between the ages of 55 and 64, that figure rose to eighty percent, peaking among 65- to 74-year-olds, when eighty-two percent of men were married.
The marriage curve for women had a radically different shape, in part because men typically marry younger women. Roughly seven out of ten women between 32 and 44 were married. That proportion dipped slightly for women between 45 and 54 before sliding down a steeper incline. Sixty-four percent of women between the ages of 55 and 64 were married; for women between 65 and 74, the figure dropped to fifty-eight percent. By the time women reached the 75- to 84-year-old interval, only forty percent were married compared with seventy-four percent of men that age.
The glaring marriage gap between elderly men and women was primarily due to health. Men die earlier than women, leaving many more widows than widowers, although the gap is closing. Perhaps reinforcing this differential was women’s ability to weather the death of a spouse better than men: about half of women over 55 who lost a husband reported being in good health compared with thirty percent of men whose wives had died. And while women over 55 who never walked down the aisle were somewhat more likely to be in good health than their married counterparts, the opposite was true for men.
Women and men with college degrees had a better chance not only of getting married but of having a happy relationship. Researchers also found a link between marriage and health, but they have not yet sorted out whether marriage causes people to be healthier or whether healthier people are more likely to get married. Either way, miserable couples lost out on any possible health benefits; they were no healthier than adults who never married.
Life Without a Middle Age
The MacArthur project attempted to probe more deeply into what life was like for racial and ethnic minorities, so in addition to the general pool of survey respondents, the investigators collected information from nearly fourteen hundred Mexican-Americans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans who lived in either Chicago or New York City. Data about minority groups was still sketchy, but the information illustrated the unpredictable variety of midlife experiences.
Minorities tended to be in worse physical health than their white
counterparts. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure visited middle-aged African Americans much more often than whites, for instance. They smoked more, slept less, ate badly. Death also knocked more frequently and earlier for blacks than for whites over 45. When it came to the psychological side of the equation, however, racial and ethnic minorities tended to be in better shape than whites. Confounding expectations, minorities enjoyed a greater sense of well-being, personal growth, and contentment with the way life turned out after the negative effects of discrimination or lower education and income were taken into account. Latinos who embraced their ethnic identity were similarly in better physical and mental health than those who did not. Trying to explain this apparent paradox, some researchers have suggested that the challenges minorities face sharpen their confidence and abilities—as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Racial and ethnic pride, embedded in tales of overcoming persecution, apparently offered a protective veil against life’s knocks. Interpreting suffering as building resilience and offering redemption infused it with meaning.
Blacks over 40 who were surveyed also greeted the prospect of their middle decades with a sense of accomplishment. For poor black men, the pressure to prove oneself on the street eased and there was satisfaction in having made it this far without getting killed. “When you get to be 40,” said Geoffrey Powers, a black man from Harlem, “life changes for the better. No more hotdogging. No more running around. I think it’s time to settle down and just look after family.” Katherine Newman, a sociologist at Princeton University, oversaw a pilot study in the mid-1990s funded by the MacArthur network that included extended interviews with working-poor African Americans in their 40s and 50s in Harlem. She found that residents of troubled and dangerous neighborhoods “look upon success as the absence of major failure. A middle-aged parent is to be congratulated if she or he has managed to raise a family where the children are not in trouble.”
In Harlem, stable middle-aged men were in great demand but in short supply. A black woman in her middle decades who managed to maintain a job and save for retirement might discover that her relative security was accompanied by unexpected stresses. She was besieged by her children and an extended network of friends and family for help in paying for a doctor, a broken carburetor, or a new winter coat. A refusal to assist was often met with anger and disappointment. Being poor and single in late middle age frequently brought loneliness, guilt, and worry. In addition to their personal travails, African Americans in midlife felt as if they had to account for the social problems of their community in a way their white counterparts never did.
Many of the Harlem women found their strongest bonds at midlife not with a partner but with a daughter (rather than a son) and grandchildren. Some had their first child as teenagers, an event that rippled through the family—an example of Glen Elder’s injunction that one generation’s decisions can have a fateful impact on others. That mother often found herself a grandmother in her 30s or early 40s; a great-grandmother before she hit 60. If their children were swallowed by addiction and joblessness, women in middle age had to raise their grandchildren. Many of the people Newman interviewed had migrated from the Jim Crow South and had opportunities their parents never dreamed of, yet they also saw fragile economic and social gains crumble when inner-city black communities were slammed in the 1980s by the crack epidemic and a recession. In this respect, these women were thrust back into the circumstances of early nineteenth-century farmers’ wives whose burdens of childcare did not cease until they died.
Perhaps this is one reason that in this neighborhood black men and women in their 40s and 50s “never mentioned ‘middle-age’ as a period in the life cycle, preferring instead a long period of undifferentiated adulthood,” as Newman observed. They had not adopted the “cultural fiction” of middle age, because it was not a useful benchmark. Much more important to them were history, place, and race—three elements that had been neglected before the advent of life course theory. This middle-aged generation was bound to look very different from the one that followed because their histories were so different.
The decade-long MacArthur project filled in many of the gaps and corrected long-held misconceptions about middle age in America. But absent from this still photograph was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end—an unfolding narrative. That required following the same people over a number of years, as was done in the Oakland and Berkeley studies. More biological and neurological information from the survey participants and comparisons over time were also needed to answer puzzling questions about why some people remained healthy and engaged as they grew older and others did not. Did behavior in the decades between 40 and 60 mean the difference between a long, healthy life and a short, afflicted one? And if so, was there anything one could do about it? With middle age finally established as a legitimate field of social scientific research, in 2002 the National Institute on Aging took over from the MacArthur Foundation, rechristened the project Midlife in the United States, or MIDUS, and gave $26 million to turn it into a long-term study.
In this second phase, the reconstituted research team could take advantage of sophisticated cutting-edge tools to track the neurological mysteries of the brain that were sparking a flood of new research by scientists like Richard Davidson in Madison, Wisconsin. MIDUS II was in a position to expand the already impressive database by exploring the effects of aging on the brain and the intricate neural links between emotional and physical health.
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The Middle-Aged Brain
The Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard gets his brain scanned by Richard Davidson.
“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”
—J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
In 2004, ten years after Bert Brim’s team had started telephoning and mailing questionnaires for the MacArthur-funded study, now renamed MIDUS I, researchers began to reconnect with the more than seven thousand people who participated to ask if they were willing to continue with the second wave. Brim had retired and Carol Ryff, the head of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute on Aging, sat in the director’s chair. For the next five years, through 2009, MIDUS II researchers gathered information, building on the storehouse of data already collected. Five thousand of the original participants—now between the ages of 35 and 86—agreed to cooperate, while researchers recruited a few hundred more to replace those who had quit. Once again the volunteers fielded intensive and detailed questions. Researchers returned to the group that kept exhaustive daily stress diaries during phase one to see how their load had changed and what toll the previous ten years had taken on their mental and physical health.
The MIDUS II team also added a new series of assessments in order to more closely examine the traces of wear and tear that experience leaves on the body. Three times a year, 1,255 of the survey group journeyed to one of three testing laboratories at the University of Wisconsin, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., or University of California–Los Angeles to be measured and monitored so that a full series of physiological assessments could be added to the database. Immune and cardiovascular systems; nerves and hormones; blood, urine, and saliva were all tested. The volunteers were also asked to keep daily sleep diaries. Others wore what is known as an activity watch, or Actiwatch, to record sleep patterns during their visit to the lab. In addition to the hundred-page survey that all the MIDUS participants completed, this troupe answered a detailed, twenty-six-page-long questionnaire about how they had felt over the previous week or month. Were you happy, depressed, crying? Did you have diarrhea, a dry mouth? Were you able to control irritations in your life, or were you upset because something happened unexpectedly? Do you generally fly off the handle, say nasty things when you get mad, consider people who think they are always right irritating?
MIDUS II also launched two new studies focused on the brain that explored the links between cognitive ability and aging, and between emotional and physical
health. By learning more about the brain’s functioning, investigators hoped to uncover clues about keeping the mental gears smoothly turning and the body spry and diseaseless in later years.
One brain study was led by Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. His research was the reason that I had traveled to Madison and lay inside an fMRI machine on that sweltering summer day discussed in chapter two. Davidson was interested in exploring the mind’s inner workings to discover the links between emotional resilience and health. What he refers to as “affective style”—the various ways in which people respond to significant emotional events—is something that has been studied at every age, from babbling infants to the elderly. He had not intended to focus specifically on the affective style of middle-aged adults, but when the MIDUS headquarters relocated to Madison he saw an opportunity. The more he thought about it, the more midlife appeared to be the ideal age to study the connection between emotion and health. Despite claims that emerged in the 1990s that the critical window of brain wiring closed after age three, the brain continues giving birth to neurons, padding its insulation, and enlarging the maze of undulating pathways into adulthood. And the prefrontal cortex—located right behind the forehead; the place where judgment, personality, impulse control, conscience, and critical self-appraisal reside—is the last part of the brain to mature, sometimes not until a person’s 30s.
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