That Midlife Happiness Curve? It's More Like a Line

You’ve undoubtedly heard of the midlife crisis as well as its counterpart in large cross-national studies of happiness across the years of adulthood. Psychologists who study personality in middle and later adulthood draw different conclusions than do economists about the so-called U-shaped curve, in which happiness drops and unhappiness peaks in the middle period of life. In much of this debate, the arguments center around apples vs. oranges, with economists looking at the “apple” of single-item happiness ratings and psychologists at more in-depth measures of adaptation and personality to discover whether the bottom falls out of well-being when adults suddenly reach the magic age of 40 (or 45, or 50, depending on the study). Further criticisms examine the midlife researchers themselves who, as Jonathan Raush (“The Happiness Curve”) admits, find that the existence of a crisis helped him “find an explanation for his gloom.” It’s nice to prove that your unhappiness is a “thing,” and not just something unique to you and your life.

Without rehashing the debates, which have been covered elsewhere, it’s time to look at the new view of well-being in adulthood. At a conference entitled “Midlife Conversations” sponsored by the Wellcome Centre Cultures and Environments of Health (University of Exeter), I was asked to speak about the myth of the midlife crisis, and I decided to dig into the critical literature of the past few years on the U-shaped happiness curve. In one very relevant study, University of Helsinki’s Seppo Laaksonen (2016) presented a blistering critique of the U-shape curve concept that covers the relevant bases. Laaksonen notes that other researchers fail to replicate the curve, and that further problems arise when certain controls are built into the analyses, controls that may or may not be appropriate. To put these questions to the test, the Finnish researcher examined large-scale surveys carried out in the US and UK with statistical tests that either included or did not include controls that might influence the age-happiness relationship.

There is good reason to argue that there should be no controls built into the age-happiness relationship. By building controls into the relationship, you suppress the real effect that conditions associated with growing older would have on the lived experiences of older adults. Taking away health or marital status as factors influencing happiness doesn’t change the fact that being over 65 and having poor health or living without a spouse or partner can put a damper on your happiness. Similarly, controlling for income means that you’re ignoring the fact that older people who have less money for paying the bills will be, if not unhappier, more stressed than those with money.

Laakenen concludes that there may be a curve descending downward from age 10 and then hanging steady till the 50s or so, but that’s with two provisos: (1) controlling for the factors that would reduce happiness, and (2) the age of the “dip” can vary from below 40 or well above 50. Hardly the type of precision we would want to see if indeed the midlife crisis is supposed to be tied to a specific age, or even age range.

For some reason, despite the evidence from Laakenen and a number of others who have taken on the happiness curve, the idea still persists and in fact is almost taken for granted. A quick Google search of the happiness curve leads to a plethora of midlife crisis-based cartoons and ads for products aimed at those miserable midlifers. There’s a checklist for a midlife crisis with such items as “Are you thinking of doing a bungee jump?” and “Are you seriously thinking of getting a tattoo?” Another image is a take on the “Keep Calm” theme, and suggests to “Keep Calm, It’s Only a Midlife Crisis.” There is the cookbook for the midlife kitchen and a blog devoted to surviving a “Beer Midlife Crisis.” The list goes on and on, and since it’s impossible to include them all, this might be an amusing enterprise for you to try on your own.

Going back to the literature, older studies than the Laakenen one reinforce the problems in the U-shape curve. One, in fact, was sent to me by one of the U-curve authors, University of Warwick (UK), in which he provided data from an unpublished manuscript asking the question, “Do Modern Humans Suffer a Psychological Low in Midlife?” This is one more in the series of large-scale survey analysis based on the answers people give to the question, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” scored from 0 to 10. The curve indeed shows a dip but here’s the catch: The scale represents a truncated section of the entire range. The “dip” involves a difference between 7.2 and 7.8. No statistical analyses are provided in the paper, because, as the authors claim, the large sample size would ensure this finding would achieve statistical significance. However, if you redraw the graph, which I was able to do from the format in which I received it, the curve turns into a wobbly line in which a dip is just barely discernible.

Other critiques that look at cross-national data shed further doubt on the universality of the U-Shaped phenomenon. A 2015 Lancet article by University College of London’s Andrew Steptoe and colleagues examined the overall happiness ratings by age in several very different regions of the world. The U, such as it was, could only be observed in high-income English speaking countries. This supports the idea, long held among midlife crisis critics, that only the wealthy can afford to indulge themselves in midlife malaise. However, it’s also possible that this midlife dip holds in the high income countries because income disparities lead the stressed and struggling lower wage earners to make negative comparisons between themselves and the very wealthy. Also, as a previous longitudinal study has shown (Harvey et al., 2018) people with low job control and high job strain are the ones most likely to suffer ill effects at midlife.

A final point to consider pertains to who is able to answer the survey questions in the later adult decades. Clearly, not the people who are either no longer alive, or are in a life situation where they cannot answer questions. It’s the survivors whom researchers can test. They may have been happy and nondepressed for their entire lives. If the data analyses were based only on survivors, the picture that emerges might be completely different. Instead of a dip, you would see a straight line or even an increase. This point is almost never considered in the world of happiness researchers who tend to come from a different tradition than lifespan developmentalists who have to confront this problem of selective attrition (survival of the fittest) all the time.

To sum up, there’s a very small chance that the critics of the midlife crisis, or even the U-shaped curve, will have their way and that these concepts we've fought so hard to debunk will fall by the wayside. If we must accept this myth as a fact, it might be wise to move on to help individuals who are struggling with all the stressful conditions that can harm people with multiple demands due to their multiple roles. It might also make sense to take that self-fulfilling prophecy angle away from the media. Once the U-shape curve becomes normalized, people will admit to being at the U's low point just to go along with society’s expectations. An N of one million, as is the case in some of the large-scale studies, are impressive, but it’s the N of one, yourself, who you need to focus on to achieve fulfillment as you traverse the decades of your life.