Five years ago, soon after he turned 29, Adam Alter, a South African-born, Australian-raised academic living in New York, was struck by a sudden realisation: in less than a year, barring calamities, he’d be 30. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so surprised, given that his job, as a professor of marketing and psychology, meant that he knew more mathematics than most, but it came as a shock. “I had a fire lit under me,” recalls Alter, author of Drunk Tank Pink, a book about the subconscious forces that shape how we act. “I thought, I need to make sure I’m living the right kind of life! I needed to do something that felt like it was a big enough goal, so it felt like there was meaning in my life.” That year, he signed up for his first marathon. It wasn’t necessarily “the most meaningful possible thing” he could have done, he concedes – by 29, Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone; the Buddha, according to legend, set out on the spiritual quest that led to a major world religion – but still, it was a meaty personal challenge, the kind of thing that demands serious, sustained willpower, and can easily disrupt the rest of your life. What Alter couldn’t stop dwelling on in hindsight, though, was how obviously he’d been motivated to do it by an arbitrary date on the calendar.
Milestone birthdays are such a staple of our culture – the spur for big celebrations, cheesy cards about being over the hill, moments of reflection on how life’s going – that it’s easy to lose sight of how bizarre this all is. Time, after all, unfolds uniformly: the day you turn 40, you’re precisely one day older than the day before; the year you turn 60, you’ve only got one more year under your belt, just as you did when you turned 57 or 58. The physical symptoms of ageing don’t suddenly escalate when the clock strikes midnight on your birthday. And there’s no objective reason it should feel so much worse to reach a goal – to still be single against your will, say, or not to have bought a flat – the moment your age flips from 29 to 30.
Yet frequently it does. And for the first time, thanks to new research by Alter and Hal Hershfield, an expert on the psychology of time at the University of California’s Anderson School of Management, we have a glimpse of just how profoundly we’re affected when we sense these milestones approaching and experience a “crisis of meaning”. On one hand, it turns out, people are significantly more likely to seek extramarital affairs when their ages end with a nine. On the other, we’re also more likely to sign up for our first marathon, and to run marathons faster than when we’re slightly older or younger. And for a few, it appears, the crisis to which an impending round-number birthday can draw attention is overwhelming: suicide, too, is somewhat more common among those whose ages end in a nine.
In the Alter and Hershfield study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers obtained marathon times from athlinks.com, a website that compiles race times; suicide data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the ages of more than 8 million male users of ashleymadison.com, a dating website explicitly targeting unfaithful spouses. (Its slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair”, and it boasts that “thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands sign up every day”. Alter emphasies that it handed over no identifying data.) Their findings are striking: among men aged 25-64, they found 18% more “9-enders” on Ashley Madison than had ages been distributed randomly. (Actually, the single most common age for a man to join the site is 33, presumably because many other factors influence the urge to cheat. But the point is that 9-enders are far more prevalent than chance would suggest.) Alter and Hershfield focused on male users, they explain, because an affair “is one of the canonical indicators that a man (but not a woman) has experienced a so-called midlife crisis” – though they found a similar, if less pronounced pattern, among women.
Meanwhile, of 500 randomly picked first-time marathoners between 25 and 64, 74 were 9-enders, an over-representation of 48%; those who ran a marathon at 29 or 39, and at another nearby age, meanwhile, did better when their age ended in nine. And more people killed themselves in the US at ages ending in nine than at ages ending in any other digit.
I should declare an interest: I recently turned 39. And while I have no plans to engage in any of the actions Alter and Hershfield studied (run a marathon? Are you serious?), I’ve certainly felt the pressure of next year’s milestone. There are things I probably ought to have done by now but haven’t (such as have children); things I can still do, but fear I won’t be capable of on the other side of my next birthday (such as run without my knees hurting); and things I’ll definitely never be able to do (such as legitimately think of myself as young, unless perhaps I switch careers to politics). Nor is it any good simply to remind myself that the milestone is arbitrary, and can thus be ignored, because it’s rigorously socially enforced, too. Anyone more than about two years older or younger than me seems to think it’s the funniest thing in the world to make jokes about it, which seems a bit unfair, given that they’re hurtling towards their deathbeds at precisely the same rate.
It’s not just “9-ending” ages that distort our sense of time, of course. We impose all sorts of other psychological boundaries on our months and years, investing certain markers with more value than the rest. For example, there’s no obvious reason the new year should be an especially good time to launch self-improvement projects. Indeed, it’s easy to make the case that it’s a terrible time: the weather in the northern hemisphere isn’t conducive to exercise; rebounding off the overindulgence of the holiday season is a poor way to start a diet, etcetera. But the calendar induces a powerfully seductive sense of a fresh start. Rightly or wrongly, it feels as though it ought to be easier to let go of the old self – the one that never exercised, or that too often ended up at McDonald’s after a night in the pub – simply because it belongs to a past phase of history now, the one before New Year’s Eve.
The University of Pennsylvania researcher Katherine Milkman and her colleagues have demonstrated that this effect isn’t confined to the new year: people are also significantly more likely to search the internet for information about diets, for example, at the start of a week or month than in the middle. And the momentousness we attach to birthdays with a zero at the end is part of a broader “round-number bias”. For instance, one study suggests you’re more likely to retake a test when your score falls just short of a round number than when it doesn’t – even if that number doesn’t signify the difference between one grade and the next. We are, it seems, at the mercy of mathematical prejudices of which we’re barely aware.
So does knowing about something such as the 9-ending effect make it easier not to get caught in its web? To realise, when you’re tempted to seek an affair, say, that it might be partly caused by the boundaries you’re imposing on your time? (Self-help authors sometimes exploit the pressure those boundaries create: one recent bestseller, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter And How To Make The Most of Them Now, is seemingly designed to panic twentysomethings into buying it for fear of missing the deadline and ruining their lives.) Alter suspects that staying conscious of the effect might help a bit, but that we’ll never entirely escape the tug of decade markers; that such deeply-rooted emotional attachments defy our efforts to reason ourselves out of them.
The more important consequences may be on a policy level: should we be paying special attention to someone’s mental health if their age ends in 9, or exploiting their sense of an impending milestone to nudge them to adopt better habits? “Is everyone, every 10 years, part of a population we should be extra-concerned about?” Alter wonders. “Is it a good time to encourage them to save more for their retirement, or to change the way they eat?”
In any case, just because a boundary is arbitrary, that doesn’t automatically make it bad. Being prompted to reflect on the meaningfulness of one’s life is surely a beneficial thing, all else being equal – and once every 10 years seems a sensible frequency at which to make sure you do it, deeply.
Or that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway, as I approach my own milestone. The wry remarks and jokes about bus passes – not to mention the small but detectible sense of dread – may be irritating. But if that’s the price I have to pay for being prompted to assess whether my life’s on track, it’s not such a bad deal.
Abigail Radnor
Twenty-nine feels like an age that can be worn very differently. I know 29-year-olds on Tinder and 29-years-olds raising toddlers. I know 29-year-old students and others running their own companies. But if there is one common theme among my peers over the past year, it is change: new jobs, careers, partners, flatmates, countries of residence, births, marriages and deaths. Could that be said of any age? Surely not so sweepingly.
As I come to the closing chapter of my third decade, I find myself in a reflective mood. This is less a peer over my shoulder, more an elated jump, after running up a hill, gleefully sticking two fingers up at the incline behind me. In the last six months of my 20s, my overwhelming feeling towards them is: jog on, pal. We’re done.
It is not that the last decade was not fun, in parts, but the thing about your 20s is that they are actually quite hard. A lot of time is spent fumbling around hungover and underpaid, wondering why you can’t recreate the glory of your student years. It probably doesn’t help that you spend most of it gazing so intently at your own navel, trying to figure out which Girls character best represents you, that you fail to look up occasionally and see the bigger picture.
I always assumed turning 30 would be terrifying. It was the ultimate essay deadline, the definitive judgment on my success in life. But that notion has dissipated in the last year and I’ve noticed a feeling of calm descend. Any “by the age of 30 I must have…” plans have been scrapped because, it turns out, real life doesn’t work like that. Most twentysomethings I know have resigned ourselves to the fact that everything we think we know could be gone tomorrow. We came of age at the tail end of a howling recession and a tech boom tornado. I know A* students who have been made redundant from their law firms, while one of the most “meh” people I met growing up now lives in the mortgage-free mansion his app built. If there’s one thing our 20s have taught us, it’s that we know a little about a lot.
I haven’t figured everything out, not by a long way, but things are certainly different. I recently caught myself making a fancy salad dressing in the flat I now share with my boyfriend, while waiting for Grand Designs to come on. Where did my three-minute ravioli and Jersey Shore days go? Still, I am pretty sure being an adult involves more than owning red-wine vinegar.
I guess I’ll find out soon enough exactly what it involves. The next decade may well bring an even steeper hill to climb. This time, though, I won’t be in such a hurry to get up it.
Sali Hughes
I can think of only one birthday that has sent me into existential crisis: my 19th. I felt, absurdly, that I was embarking on the decline, that things would never again be as exciting as in my teens. It kickstarted a terror of ageing that sent me into panicky denial for the next five years. Now, at 39 (40 in February), I couldn’t feel more differently. I’m no longer scared of ageing because, frankly, it represents the best-case scenario – we’re lucky if we age.
There are creeping neuroses, of course. For the first time, I think about my health, and fret at night about becoming ill, staying in hospital (my only phobia) and not being able to work to support my children. I feel not only guilty for how little respect I’ve shown my body in the past (moaning about its shape, eating crap, taking God knows what at raves), but also a new-found admiration for how nobly it has served me (safely carrying and delivering two babies, typing millions of words to earn me a living, opening practically any jar handed to me).
The fact that I write about beauty means people assume that I must be terrified of entering my 40s. In fact, I’m entirely relaxed about it. I take good care of my skin and teeth, I am perfectly fine about the things I can’t prevent, and I am open-minded about more proactive measures – though I know I could never have plastic surgery.
I would be lying, though, if I said I felt as confident about how the wider world will see me. I wonder whether my employers, readers and colleagues will regard me as less of an authority, because of the huge and baffling significance placed on the number 40. There’s a jokey face people pull when you tell them you’re on the cusp of it. And it marks the beginning of an era in which women in all walks of life are broadly ignored by the media, and by society generally.
I hope my generation can change that in some way. Because, personally, I’m proud of approaching 40, of getting this far, via childhood, postnatal depression, bereavement, redundancy, divorce and many more of the traumas so many of us face. And for emerging with wonderful friends, happy children, new opportunities, somewhere to call home, and only some wear and tear. Well done us, I think.
Sam Wollaston
Fuck, I’m 50 (nearly). How did this happen? Well, the usual way, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Apologies for my language, but when you’ve made it through half a century, you can say what you like. The F-word – not fifty, the other one – really is the only word for it.
This research rings horribly true. Self-reflection has never been far away for me, but it has definitely hit new highs (or lows) leading up to the biggies, each more serious than the previous one: 29-30, I wondered what the hell I was going to do with my life, had a crisis, changed profession; 39-40, single after another failed relationship, I had a crisis, wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. Now I’m having a crisis and wondering where it all went wrong, past tense.
That’s something that happens around this one; you find yourself looking more in the rear-view mirror than at the road in front, because ahead is too downhill and scary. I also lie to myself. I’m younger than others my age, at heart. In the car, I listen to Radio 1 (even if it annoys me).
I’ve done some of the traditional crisis things: motorbikes, kitesurfing (recently). Pathetic, isn’t it? Which only leaves the affair and suicide. The former might be tricky to arrange, after half a century of physical wear and tear. I’ve not reached the stage of the Jack Nicholson character in The Bucket List (“Never pass up a bathroom, never waste a hard-on and never trust a fart”), but I’m aware that I’m now invisible to women.
If I’m honest, though, I don’t feel the need for an affair. Nor – though naturally I contemplate death more – am I on the road to Beachy Head. So what else is there?
Oh, there’s parenting: something else I’ve taken up recently. I know, no less inappropriate at this age than kitesurfing. And children have brought their own anxieties and regrets. Am I too old (it often feels like it)? Why didn’t I do it earlier? Will I be around for them later? Will I ever know their children? Look at these other dads at the nursery, children themselves, they probably actually like Radio 1. Jack’s being picked up by grandad today, is that what they’re saying?
My new children have certainly brought new challenges. But new interest, too (for me, I mean; they’ve probably made me more boring to others, kids do that). I don’t think children are the only route to existential meaningfulness – I’m not calling off the search quite yet. But I have got some of that from mine.
Maybe it really is just the numbers that are the problem, that big round zero after the five, waiting, like a hole, to swallow me up. If I could think beyond – and bigger – than that, perhaps I’d realise it isn’t so bad. Yeah! Fifty? Bring it the fuck on.
Val McDermid
I’ve always enjoyed the sensation of staring down the barrel of a new decade. It’s a pretty arbitrary division, but I rather like the idea of seeing certain points in my life as staging posts where I can press pause on living in the moment, and look both forward and back with a considering eye.
Nineteen to 20, I was gearing up to my finals at Oxford University; moving into a new world of work; taking seriously my ambition to be a writer.
Twenty-nine to 30, I’d had my first novel accepted by The Women’s Press; I was in the thick of union negotiations whose outcome affected people’s livelihoods; I was on the cusp of taking relationships seriously, instead of playing games with other people’s emotions.
Thirty-nine to 40, I started to feel I was really growing into my talent as a writer. A long, long way to go, but my confidence was building; I’d begun to understand that, with enough work and nerve, I could write whatever story I wanted to tell.
Forty-nine to 50, I suspect, I was becoming a little complacent. Thankfully, I had editors who kicked me out of that dangerous state. Being forced to challenge myself in terms of work made me do the same thing in life.
And now here I am at 59, taken aback by the notion that this time next year I’ll be travelling round Edinburgh’s excellent public transport system with a bus pass. How absurd is that? In my head, I’m still somewhere around 32. I’m shocked when my contemporaries tell me they’re retiring. How can that be? How can they have finished what they started?
Fifty-nine to 60 feels somehow more portentous than any cusp since I left my education behind, partly because of that retirement thing going on all around me, but mostly because, at an age when a lot of people are thinking about taking it easy – and for my lucky generation, that often means indulging themselves – I’ve never felt more energised, more alive to possibilities. I still love what I do. This year, as well as a crime novel, I’ve published a reimagining of Northanger Abbey and a non-fiction book about forensic science. I’ve written a radio drama and begun adapting another writer’s novel for radio. I’ve opened new doors that have revealed exciting vistas.
The cliche is that happiness writes white. But if you’re feeling sorry for me on that basis, don’t. I have never been happier. In the last year, I’ve also moved countries, returning to my native Scotland in time to campaign for independence. I’ve become the home shirt sponsor for my beloved Raith Rovers. My life is rich in love, in family, in friends, in laughter, in everyday beauty and delight.
I’m not smug, though. Not a bit. Because there’s still so much more to be done. Hills to climb. Books to write. Debates to argue. Looking back is instructive; looking forward is exciting. But living it is bloody marvellous. Roll on the next 10 years.
Michael White
In Albert Camus’s novel The First Man, the hero goes to visit the grave of his father, killed in the first world war, and contemplates the fact that, at 40, he is now much older than his parent. Playing such mind games with age can be unsettling, but we all do it. As in, “Sixty is the new 45.” Someone recently explained, “There are only three ages: young, middle-aged and ‘you’re looking well’.”
Just 69, my luck is holding out, though I am experiencing some jolts. No disasters such as the cancer that killed my friend Simon Hoggart, six months younger than me. No debilitating sports injuries, and pills keep my inherited high-blood pressure in check. All that could change tomorrow, as I have known since I found my mother dead on the floor, felled by a brain haemorrhage. She was 42, I was 11 and the shadow still falls on family who never met her. For myself, I tend to stoicism, to prizing stability (same wife, newspaper, house for 40 years) and being prone to melancholy. A touch of Shakespeare’s Jacques, people say.
So no end-of-decade traumas for me. No audit of successes and failures, no thoughts of suicide or marathons, definitely no red sports car: I just keep going, fortified by the idea I embraced in my teens, that we all have a natural age and that mine is 35. It was no comfort at 18, but is fine at 69. I still work and ride my bike, even wear a helmet since our friend Mary’s accident. I swim in the sea out of season and bought some natty green shorts for my collection this summer. And why not? My wife’s globetrotting aunt is 92. Vague but delightful, she has a toy boy (81) who is very keen. At 87, the Guardian’s Ian Aitken still outdrinks me. That’s the attitude!
Being semi-retired helps. Stepping down from the Guardian’s political editorship at 60, I envisaged a gentle glide earthwards: it has proved bumpier. Most things don’t matter the way they did, a few things much more. Our children now support us more than we do them, we had a third grandchild this month (“Spoil them and give them back”) and are grateful. Will I see her graduate? Probably not.
Keep active, use the stairs, not the lift; most of the cliches are true. Whatever you do, intimations of mortality barge in. Friends suffer or die, faculties falter (“Do speak up!”), stamina atrophies. I am happy to fall asleep at 10pm (how shaming is that?) and do my best reading before dawn. Not for the faint-hearted, then, and much tougher. A little older, and much braver, my wife had a minor heart attack at 69, a wake-up call to tackle unsatisfactory aspects of her life. Chief among them turned out to be work-focused me, so we have both had to struggle hard to mend bad habits, albeit with no certainty of success.
The other day I caught her reading Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of the light. “Let’s go out with a bang,” she said. Er, OK. So we’re poised to downsize into something more wonderful than wise (lots of sunlight; 60 stairs, no lift). If I make it to 2024, I’ll report back.
