Why do we have midlife crises?

Listening to The Atlantic’s ‘How to Talk to People’ podcast, the episode from May 30, 2022 titled ‘Starting Over When You Think It’s Too Late’

This podcast episode blew my mind on a few fronts.

First, Angie Kim was a lawyer, a consultant, and I think a few other things before trying her hand at writing. She directly addressed both the economic situation that gave her the freedom to try different things, as well as the fears that she was failing family that had supported her through school. She also didn’t start writing, or even consider it, until she was in her forties. This so directly addresses my concerns about not being able to support our life here financially from writing, and my fears that as an older writer, I’ve missed the boat. It was super powerful to listen to her just peeling away those worries, talk about her own impostor syndrome around teaching writing, in just a very relatable way.

Second, the discussion with Hannes Schwandt talked about the U-shaped human happiness curve. Across many demographics, in multiple countries, happiness dips in middle age. Hannes interpreted this to say that we need to rebrand the midlife crisis, that it may just be a normal developmental stage like puberty, and calling it a crisis isn’t helping anyone.

What I’m curious about, is what the biological/survival underpinning for this might be. As discussed in the podcast, this is the age when we’re beginning to build expertise, and it seems foolish and/or wasteful to throw away that effort and embark on a completely different career. So the recommendation they made was that we should look for slight tweaks or shifts in what we do, to see if we can enjoy ourselves more. Hannes would definitely not have recommended that Angie Kim give up her lawyer gig in favor of novel writing!

But why would humans have evolved so that this middle aged dissatisfaction was so prevalent? Is there some real value being added there? Could it be that the urge to shake things up, to do something new is crucial? Perhaps this urge evolved so that we didn’t coast in complacency all the way to our death— after becoming good at things in our 20s and 30s, we want to keep trying to one-up ourselves, find new ways to grow, learn, and conquer the world around us.

At least for me, it seems like a compelling argument/interpretation. It would certainly explain my need to explore and expand beyond my current career scope.