I always feel a bit sorry for the models who get hired to pose for those agency photos invoking the vicissitudes of middle age. They’re selected for looking photogenically raddled – their age, essentially – and then coaxed into various postures of dejection, presumably by a photographer shouting, “What have you got to look forward to, your upcoming appointment at the colorectal clinic? More despondency! Think about remortgaging! Brood on your erectile dysfunction!” Even if you’re just doing it for the money, the feeling must rub off on you.
Some of those pictures will be deployed to illustrate the news that Britons between 40 and 59 have the lowest levels of wellbeing of any age bracket going. According to a report from the Office for National Statistics, life satisfaction troughs during that period, before rising again to a new peak at around 75. But even the over-90s feel life is more worthwhile than most middle-aged people do.
In of terms of self-reported happiness, you can’t get lower than the 50-54-year-olds, and I currently find myself right in the middle of that particularly demographic – the bottom of the trough.
At 52, however, I don’t feel this way at all, even if I wouldn’t have much trouble putting on the appropriate expression for the illustrative photo. I suppose that in my highly anxious 20s I developed a knack for viewing my future with the lowest possible expectations of happiness. I’m constantly surprised that everything turned out as well as it has.
As the ONS points out, there could be a number of reasons for this statistical dip in wellbeing. The middle-aged folk of today might be an especially unhappy cohort, either because of their particular relationship to the economic cycle, or because they’re living through an era when everything actually is going to hell in a handcart.
It’s more likely that middle age itself comes with its own peculiar worries: parents age, friends die, children grow up and leave, careers stall, your once secure financial footing shifts unexpectedly beneath your feet. This time of life is traditionally considered a bit of a sniper’s alley, although 40-59 is more a valley than an alley. That’s a good thing: the trials of mid-life are pretty spread out these days.
The goalposts for middle age have shifted over the decades – people in their late 30s were once included, and today’s most generous definitions stretch to 65 – but the U-shaped curve is as good a way of finding its centre as any: I must be in mid-life, because I’m so damn unhappy.
Perhaps I remain, as I always was, a late starter – my trough is probably yet to come. I hope it doesn’t coincide with my appointment at the colorectal clinic.
