The only thing anyone can reliably tell you about middle age is that it’s in the middle of life. What’s the middle? Well, it’s after the beginning, and before the end. Okay, we can do a little better than that: Middle age comes after young adulthood, and before what we used to call “old age” but now might more decorously refer to as “older age” or “late life.” But to get more specific, to figure out when precisely middle age begins and ends, is a daunting challenge.
The average life expectancy in the United States is 79. So if you cut that in half, 39.5 is the precise statistical midpoint of the average American life. But that doesn’t reveal much - middle age isn’t just a point in time but a phase of life. How long does that phase last? When does it start? When does it end? How can you tell when you’re in it? These, it turns out, are very fraught questions.
I am 35. Is a 35-year-old middle-aged? If you ask my friends, they’d be quick to say I’m “still young,” but the word still carries a note of reassurance that I find troubling. Is a 66-year-old retiree middle-aged? Maybe, maybe not - but they sure don’t want to be called “old.” Is a 29-year-old middle aged? Surely not, yet The Wall Street Journal ran a story a couple of years ago about 20-somethings who claimed they felt middle-aged.
When pollsters ask the populace about when middle age begins and ends, they get a variety of answers. In one survey, the median response put middle age as lasting from 40 to 60. In another, the average British person said that middle age begins at 35 (hello!) and ends at 58. Meanwhile, 55 percent of Americans think 65 is still middle-aged. And according to that Journal story, 20 percent of people ages 25 to 34 say they feel middle-aged.
If anyone could authoritatively answer the question “When is middle age?” I figured it would be Margie Lachman. She is a psychologist studying midlife at Brandeis University and the author of the recent book Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife; she’s also worked on the massive longitudinal Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study for all of the 30-plus years it’s been running. Yet even she cannot decide on a firm definition for when middle age begins and ends. Her official definition, in her book and her research, is 40 to 60, “plus or minus 10 years.” Even among scholars, the boundaries of middle age are fuzzy.
One reason for that fuzziness, Lachman told me, is that how you think about middle age depends on what age you currently are. The older people are, the later they tend to think middle age starts and ends. According to data Lachman shared from MIDUS, people in their 20s define middle age as starting around 39 or 40 and ending around 53, 54, or 55. Those numbers inch up with each successive decade of life. The oldest group in the study, people in their 70s, say middle age begins around 48 or 49 and ends from 62 to 65.
Ageism is likely to blame for a lot of this. In a youth-obsessed culture, it makes sense that people want to consider themselves young for as long as possible. In Primetime, Lachman writes that she’s found that many people in their early 40s “actively resist the idea that they are middle-aged,” and many in their late 60s or 70s “insist that they are still middle-aged.” Indeed, research shows that the older someone is, the later they think old age begins, too. And middle age has its own branding problem: “The No. 1 word attached to midlife is crisis,” Chip Conley - the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, an organization that offers workshops for making the most of midlife, and the author of Learning to Love Midlife - told me. (This association persists despite evidence showing the midlife crisis is mostly a myth.)
On top of that, the appearance of aging itself is changing. Celebrities get plastic surgery, Botox, and fillers to retain or restore youthful faces - and are more open about it than they once were - further confounding how we perceive the phases of life. (Saying the 70-year-old Kris Jenner is “old” feels odd when, after her much-publicized facelift, her facial skin is stretched so taut you can scarcely detect a single wrinkle.) Even the faces of ordinary people who don’t get work done are generally aging more slowly, The Cut reported, because overall, people smoke less than they used to and use more sunscreen. Wrinkle-reducing retinol is widely available in creams, gels, and serums at any old drug store. Anti-aging is now such a normal part of beauty routines that even some children are using products to prevent wrinkles they’re nowhere near having.
This isn’t the only factor shifting back our aging goalposts. Many milestones that people once used to define adulthood (marriage, home ownership, having kids) are happening later in life, if they happen at all. Given the association of middle age with responsibility, perhaps people don’t feel middle-aged unless they’re tied down in some way. Indeed, some of the 20-somethings who said they felt middle-aged attributed it to becoming parents or taking on major work responsibilities at a young age.
Also complicating the definition of middle age is the fact that people are living longer. And as they do so, their quality of life in their later years will vary depending on their physical and cognitive limitations. Because American culture has such a negative view of what it means to be “old” - all aches and pains and forgetting where you put the car keys - if someone is aging and feeling good, they may think I can’t possibly be old, because I can do everything I want to do, Lachman said. And if they don’t feel old, they may continue to identify as middle-aged well into their 60s and beyond.
Read: The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are
Increasing longevity is one of the reasons that Conley sees middle age as a very long stage of life. He believes it lasts from 35 to 75, in three stages: “early midlife,” from 35 to 50; the “core of midlife,” from 50 to 60; and “later midlife,” from 60 to 75. Although 75 might seem to be pushing it, given that Americans’ average lifespan is 79, Conley pointed out that “for math reasons,” the longer someone has lived, the longer they are likely to live. That is to say: 79 is an average that takes into account all deaths from people of all ages. And if you make it to 65, you’ve dodged many of the things that might have killed you when you were younger. According to the Social Security Administration, the life expectancy of a 65-year-old American is actually 83 for men and 86 for women. And I haven’t seen anyone try to claim that an 80-something is still middle-aged.
Lachman played along gamely as I fixated on the numbers, but really, that’s not how she likes to define middle age. “Chronological age does not tell you much about anybody, except how long they’ve lived,” she told me. She prefers to think of middle age in terms of the roles people take on in their life and in their community. Being middle-aged, to her, means truly being in the middle - having people both younger and older than you looking to you for help and guidance. That might mean you’re in the sandwich generation: caring for children and starting to support aging parents. Or it might mean you’re a leader in your workplace, mentoring younger colleagues and relied on by older ones. “In midlife, you’re giving more than you’re getting in general,” Lachman said.
This definition of midlife also has ambiguous boundaries, which Lachman readily admits. But despite the vagueness around when middle age actually is, both she and Conley believe it’s a useful term. “Being in the middle of anything, I think, is a really meaningful point,” Lachman said. “It’s a great opportunity to look back and look ahead.”
At this point in my quest to define middle age, I started losing my grip a little. If you want to be precise about it, a life really only has one beginning and one end, and the rest is all middle. So a 2-year-old could be middle-aged. A 90-year-old could be middle-aged. We’re all born middle-aged, and then we die.
Just kidding. Ultimately, middle age might be better understood as a feeling that creeps up on you than as a clear turning point. No one thing brings it on, though parenthood, caregiving, or other responsibilities could fuel it. It’s a time of life that is often both exhausting and fulfilling: when you’ve lived enough life to have learned some lessons, and also plenty of time ahead of you to make changes. That might be accurate, but it’s still not satisfying. I want the numbers! So I asked Lachman: If you have to choose, when does middle age start and end? “45 to 65,” she said. So there you have it. I’m officially “still young” for 10 more years, if anyone’s asking.