the meaning of mid-life
 
I had a couple of conversations over the last few months with Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the award winning journalist whom many of you will know from her work on NPR. She has recently finished a book on the twists and turns of mid-life. Set against the backdrop of her decision to leave behind a career that had for 30 years defined the very core of her identity, she deftly blends deep and powerful research with her own experiences of aging to deliver a thesis and story that I find myself referencing almost on a daily basis. A fluffy self-help book this is not.

Oh, and I also found out that she is also a total badass bike racer who, unless you are in the top 5 US competitors, is going to beat your ass.  We love Barb.

An interview with Barbara Bradley Hagerty

David Harry Stewart for AGEIST: So one of the fascinating things you talk about is the midlife crisis and how it essentially doesn’t exist — that it was just some strange marketing thing that was made up in the 70s. Which rings so true. In all the AGEIST interviews I have done, I have yet to speak to someone who bought the red Ferrari and after 15 years of married life, runs off with a yoga teacher. I mean, who does that?

Barbara Bradley Hagerty: Right. I mean, it’s just incredible when you look back at the research and see how few people were interviewed to come up with this kinda cultural phenomenon. I mean, it’s shocking. In the early research on the topic, Daniel Levinson interviewed, I believe it was, 40 people. 40 men for up to 20 hours each. Under those circumstances, who wouldn’t finally confess to a midlife crisis?

AGEIST: 20 hours. My God. Sounds like Dick Cheney ran the program.

BBH: “Alright, I am having a midlife crisis. That’s right.” He concluded from this 40 people that 80% of men have a midlife crisis. Like, really Dan? Really? 80%? But when psychologists went out and actually interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, they found that maybe 10% of people have this existential angst about dying before you fulfill your dreams. Which is kinda like a middle-life something; a fear of aging and unmet ambitions and dreams. But I’m not sure it’s a crisis.

My understanding is that everyone has a dip in happiness in their 40s and 50s. It’s universal. Economists have done these studies for 20 years and of people in 75 countries, so it doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, or if you are from a war zone or from Sweden; everyone follows the same U-curve of happiness. You are happy in your 20s and you get a little less happy in your 30s and in your 40s you hit the nadir. Around 45 you are really pretty unhappy. And then you start getting happier and then by your mid-50s you are happier and happier and by 70.. so, what is going on here?

I think it boils down to the fact that people have really a lot of responsibilities when they are 45. Mortgage and kids, college and my parents are aging, probably heavy responsibilities at work. A little dip in happiness is probably inevitable. But is your life meaningful? Absolutely. And if you just kinda wait, some of these responsibilities begin to leave. Your brain naturally becomes happier. I mean, there is a brain mechanism where actually we begin to focus on good news and not bad news the older we get. So the brain becomes happier.

AGEIST: The other thing I think plays some factor is the understanding or acceptance of what you have going for you. Something you talk about in your book is when you realized you are never gonna be at genius level. That the next rung on a ladder is just not gonna happen. I find this an extraordinary idea. How did that make you personally feel when you came to this realization?

BBH: Well, it was kinda distressing. It was kinda depressing a little bit to know that I wasn’t gonna be Christopher Hitchens or David Brooks or David Remnick or some of these beautiful writers and deep thinkers. But what I realized is, either I could try to pedal a little harder and work a little harder and incrementally get maybe a few more stories per year on the air at NPR, or I could basically look at myself and say, “Wait a minute, there are some things that I do really well and some things I don’t do as well. And I am right now spending my life doing a lot of stuff I don’t do well, like deadline news. So what can I do to maximize the things that I am good at and that I love doing? And try to kind of pivot it away from those things that I am not as good at?”  

And I was really lucky because my husband supported me in this. I was really supportive of him early on in his career and he wanted to pay back the favor. And so you know, in some ways it was liberating.

AGEIST: That must have been a brave moment for you.

BBH: Yeah. I mean it’s hard to believe that you are not at the far, far, far end of the bell curve. But you realize a lot of that stuff is out of your control. “I can’t control my IQ, I can’t control whether I win a Peabody Award. I can’t control that stuff.” So what I begin to do is think about not just, “How do I go change my career so that I am doing what I am better at?” but also,  “How do I change my life so that I am putting more effort into those things I can control, but also really matter, like my family and friends?”

Read the rest of our conversation here 


Here is a short 2 minute audio of Barbara Bradley Hagerty speaking on why she loves finding stories.

What is happening now that is causing this generation of people to behave so differently from their parents generation? What are the factors driving people to become pioneers? Where is this going? Why is most media missing this critical leading edge group?  If you are a brand or a company and are curious, please contact us and we can offer insights and research.